Kenneth Leighton: Piano Works (2010)

While the choral music of Kenneth Leighton has received steady coverage over the years, his keyboard music is a bit harder to find, either in recital or on CD. A three-disc set of the complete works for solo piano was released on Delphian in 2004, but since then Chandos has become the main source for Leighton's piano music, chiefly through recordings by the champion of unjustly neglected piano music, Margaret Fingerhut. This 2010 release is a significant offering, for it presents not only the profoundly serious Sonata, Op. ... Read More

While the choral music of Kenneth Leighton has received steady coverage over the years, his keyboard music is a bit harder to find, either in recital or on CD. A three-disc set of the complete works for solo piano was released on Delphian in 2004, but since then Chandos has become the main source for Leighton's piano music, chiefly through recordings by the champion of unjustly neglected piano music, Margaret Fingerhut. This 2010 release is a significant offering, for it presents not only the profoundly serious Sonata, Op. 64 (1971-1972), and the poetic Preludes (1988), but it offers two premiere recordings of the suite Winter Scenes (1953) and the Sonata No. 3, Op. 27 (1954), early works that considerably round out the composer's portrait. Apparently Leighton was not rigidly doctrinaire about the composition techniques he used, so while his music is tonally centered as often as it is twelve-tone, and even when it seems the music is intensely chromatic and even atonal, it has an approachability that... Read Less