Piano Music Of Dinu Lipatti

Luisa Borac (piano), Academy of St Martin in the Fields/ Jaime MartinAvie AV 2271 (2 CDs) ****

When Dinu Lipatti died in 1950 at the age of 33 he was already established as a rare perfectionist among pianists. He was also a spare-time composer – his teachers included Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger and Georges Enescu was his godfather. His earliest piano pieces are the work of a teenager, and its fascinating to see how the influences shift – he moved from romanticism to classicism to a more free-flowing, mid-20th-century voice. There's one work with orchestra, a Concertino in classical style, but the major piece is the five-movement, 30-minute Fantaisie, Op 8, an often ruminative, rhapsodic, folk-infused work from 1940. Luisa Borac's sensitive performances use a Bechstein piano for the solo works, as favoured by Lipatti himself as a performer. url.ie/e8oo