Brief description: This recording is a tapestry of solo and 2 piano arrangements that leaves you longing for more.
Linda was 12 when she astonished her piano teacher by playing an additional bass line with her left foot. At 16, she played the virtuosic piece Brandenburg Concerto #5 (with both feet on the floor) and then went on to double major in music and psychology at Bowdoin College.
Linda left music behind when she went to Medical School and trained in the US Navy, becoming the Senior Medical Officer at NAS Dallas. Linda's only public performance in the 25 years between her senior recital and this album was at her own wedding in 1993. When not practicing medicine or piano, Linda home schools her 3 prodigious children, all with the unfailing support of her husband, Phil.

Brief description: Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples on October 26, 1685, the sixth of ten children of Alessandro Scarlatti. He shares his birth year with Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel. His first teachers were probably members of the large Scarlatti family, and his musical talents deverloped so quickly that at the age of fifteen he was emplyed as an organist at the Royal Chapel in Naples, with a special additional payment for the post of clevicembalista di camera. In the summer of 1702 his father was asked to compose an opera for the Medici court. He took Domenico with him to Florence. There Domenico certainly became acquainted with Bartolomeo Cristoforo, the ingenious inventor of the first piano with a reliable action, and evidently learned to play this new cimbalo con piano e forte, whose idiomatic touch - as Maffei pionted out in 1711 - was not easy for an organist and harpsichordist. He is likely to have himself supervised the copying out of his sonatas, which may have been done by his former pupil, Antonio Soler. He died in Madrid on July 23, 1757.
Recording all the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti on the piano is an undertaking of great moment and fascination: a journey through shared cultural experience, as well as one that explores the subtle thought processes of a musical genius, with his Italianate approach to art.
Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, and are almost all intended for the harpsichord (there are four for organ, and a few where Scarlatti suggests a small instrumental group). Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys. Other distinctive attributes of Scarlatti's style are the following: The influence of Iberian (Portuguese and Spanish) folk music. An example is Scarlatti's use of the Phrygian mode and other tonal inflections more or less alien to European art music. Also some of Scarlatti's figurations and dissonances are guitar-like.
A formal device in which each half of a sonata leads to a pivotal point, which the Scarlatti scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick termed "the crux", and which is sometimes underlined by a pause or fermata. Before the crux, Scarlatti sonatas often contain their main thematic variety, and after the crux the music makes more use of repetitive figurations as it modulates away from the home key (in the first half) or back to the home key (in the second half).
Carlo Grante is one of the most active and accomplished performing and recording artists of his generation. He was recently featured in the successful monograph "Roberta Piana incontra Carlo Grante," first of a series devoted to major musical figures of Italy.

Brief description: Song writing is what drew me into music. The craft and the process of putting together a good song seemed both exciting and magical. I have also wanted to record some of my favourite songs for a long time.
Rather than make a traditional covers record, I thought it would be much more fun to create a new type of project in which artists communicated with each other and swapped a song for a song, i.e. you do one of mine and I'll do one of yours, hence the titles - Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours. Although, at first, I hoped to have the companion record out at the same time, it became clear it would take a while longer pulling in the second record with all the other artists. This will come later.
In September 2008 I started listening to a great deal of songs and our neighbourhood friend, David Bates, was a great help in terms of assembling a jungle of material for me to explore, but as with many journeys, I returned to the place from which I had started, with one or two great new additions. I also had some suggestions from my daughters, Anna and Melanie, and Dickie (Chappell), which I adopted, and later in the day, Bob Ezrin encouraged me to switch from Randy Newman's 'Baltimore' to 'I Think its Going to Rain Today'. The list was pruned several times, and nearly all of the writers I ended up choosing for this first Scratch, wanted to get involved. Sometimes we'd have an exchange about which song to chose and how to do it, and sometimes it would be hands off. The intention was that we would each do the songs in our own idiosyncratic ways.

Brief description: Emil Gilels was born on October 19 (old style 6-th) 1916 in Odessa. His parents had nothing to do with music, his father was a clerk at the sugar refinery, mother was a housewife having many children. Both his father and his mother had children from previous marriages. However, due to inexplicable reason the meeting of Esfir and Grigory Gilels produced straight away two outstanding musicians into the world: three years after Emil a daughter Elizabeth was born into the family, who became an outstanding violinist afterwards.
In Odessa, in spite of the hard times, public enjoyed music very much. All attention was given to musically gifted children. In a modest Gilels’s flat in a poor and famous district of Odessa called Moldavanka there was a grand piano and already at the age of two little Emil showed interest in it touching keys and listening to them. He was also interested in other sounds: performance of brass bands, singing, tolling of bells.
Gradually it was found out that the boy had an absolute ear of rare accuracy: he could correctly determine even the pitch of unmusical sounds.
Aged five and a half Emil was taken to a well-known pianist teacher in Odessa Jakob Tkatch. Extraordinarily quickly and with ease Emil finished the first period of studies: there was no need to train his hands, they seemed to go along keys themselves; amazing musical ear and memory helped master all intricacies of musical ABC and in a few months he was able to play all three Leshgorn’s etude parts and soon Klementi’s and Mozart’s sonatinas.
Both pianists performed on Bösendorfer model 290 Imperial. The recording also includes the Konzert für "Zwei Klaviere und Orchester Es-Dur KV 365 (316a)".

Brief description: Le carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) is a musical suite of fourteen movements by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns. The orchestral work has a duration between 22 and 30 minutes. Le carnaval was composed in February 1886 while Saint-Saëns was vacationing in a small Austrian village. It was originally scored for a chamber group of flute/piccolo, clarinet (B flat and C), two pianos, glass armonica, xylophone, two violins, viola, cello and double bass, but is usually performed today with a full orchestra of strings, and with a glockenspiel substituting for the rare glass harmonica. Saint-Saëns, apparently concerned that the piece was too frivolous and likely to harm his reputation as a serious composer, suppressed performances of it and only allowed one movement, Le cygne, to be published in his lifetime. Only small private performances were given for close friends like Franz Liszt. Saint-Saëns did, however, include a provision which allowed the suite to be published after his death, and it has since become one of his most popular works. It is a favorite of music teachers and young children, along with Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. In fact, it is very common to see any combination of these three works together on modern CD recordings - a handy tool for class work.
Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky are German duo-pianist brothers who have been associated with a number of important world premieres of contemporary works. They have an international reputation for performing modern music for two pianists, although they also perform the standard repertoire and they sometimes play separately. They have occasionally been joined by their younger brother Bernhard in performances of pieces for three pianos.
On that recording both pianists played on a Bösendorfer model 290 Imperial.

Brief description: "Ana-Marija Markovina impresses through her crystal-clear articulation . . . With powerful brilliance and pearly runs, the young Croatian pulled out all the stops and effectively allowed the work to sparkle and shine in all of its varied shadings (Kölnische Rundschau). Paul Badura-Skoda referred to her as “one of the most significant artists of her generation.”
Ana-Marija Markovina began her musical career with early successes in national and international competitions, leading consequently to an active schedule of concert engagements. After studying at the Detmold and Weimar Conservatories, she graduated as a concert pianist from the Hanns Eisler Hochschule in Berlin. Her most influential teachers were Professors Paul Badura-Skoda, Vitaly Margulis and Rolf-Dieter Arens.
Recent concert performances have included appearances with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Kiel, the New Philharmonic of Westphalia, the State Theater Orchestra in Darmstadt, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Baden-Baden, the Symphony Orchestra in Munster, the Folkwang Chamber Orchestra, the Romanian state Philharmonic Orchestra Iasi, the Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Saxony, the Chamber Orchestra of Berlin-Brandenburg, the Classical Philharmonic in Bonn, The Oulu Symphony Orchestra, Finland, the Romanian Radio Chamber Orchestra, the Sofia Soloists, the University of Milan Orchestra and the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra in Tokyo. She performs at all the major German concert venues such as the Berlin Philharmonie, the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Musikhalle Hamburg and many more.