伊沃·波哥雷里奇，克羅埃西亞鋼琴家。

Grigory Lipmanovich Sokolov born April 18, 1950, is a Russian concert pianist. He is among the most esteemed of living pianists, his repertoire spanning composers from the Baroque period such as Bach, Couperin or Rameau up to Schoenberg and Arapov. He regularly tours Europe, and resides in Italy.

Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin is one of the most fascinating and rewarding artists working today. It's fashionable in classical music circles to complain about the fact that all of the great artists are dead, and that no one matches the achievements of generations past. This is nonsense, and Hamelin offers convincing proof. He is without a doubt one of the two or three most technically accomplished players alive. But more than that, he's so thoroughly musical that more often than not you aren't even conscious of his frequently insane virtuosity. Every single one of his records is worth owning, and this complete set of Scriabin sonatas in no exception. If you're a piano fan, you must hear it. --David Hurwitz

If you want to hear music suited to the millennial frenzy, a prime place to start is with Russian maverick composer Alexander Scriabin. In the final years of his unfortunately brief life, he dreamed up transcendent musical projects that make Wagner seem like parlor entertainment. Among the relatively few orchestral works Scriabin did complete are some stunners that blaze a uniquely visionary, idiosyncratic path beyond the impasse of ripe fin-de-siècle romanticism. The three starkly contrasting pieces gathered here offer a splendid entrée into his music. Henry Miller once described the Poem of Ecstasy as "a bath of cocaine, ice, and rainbows." Boulez conjures oceanic heavings and flickering, perfumed washes of color from his players, leading to a mighty orgasm of sound. The composer was also a dynamic virtuoso pianist (a classmate of Rachmaninoff's), and his early concerto shows its debt to Chopin while pursuing an original and tightly integrated blend of soloist and orchestra. Pianist Anatol Ugorski's unflapping conviction reveals the piece for the gem it is--the slow movement's melody is particularly indelible--leaving you wondering why this concerto is programmed so rarely. The piano also adds an important color in Scriabin's 1910 symphonic poem Prometheus, where he ventures even beyond the Poem of Ecstasy into progressive musical territory. From this amalgam of occult mysticism and pioneering harmony, Boulez fashions a majestically textured, multidimensional account that sounds opulent but unclotted. If this whets your appetite for a truly unique composer, try the Scriabin twofer on Chandos that includes his bizarrely brilliant Divine Poem Symphony. --Thomas May