Josef Hofmann was arguably the 20th Century’s greatest pianist. Hofmann combined unparalleled virtuosity with emotion, understanding, and spontaneity to create some of the finest piano playing ever recorded. This two-CD set, the seventh edition of the Complete Josef Hofmann series, contains long-awaited and legendary performances: a Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulous, a Beethoven “Emperor” concerto conducted by Hans Lange, and other concerto-movement excerpts from the Ford and Bell Telephone broadcasts. This set is a necessary addition to any piano-lover’s CD collection, and demonstrates the genius that is Hofmann.

Josef Hofmann combined unparalleled virtuosity with emotion, understanding, and spontaneity to create some of the finest piano playing ever recorded. This set contains Hofmann's first extant broadcast of Beethoven's 4th conducted by Eugene Ormandy, and Anton Rubinstein's 3rd and 4th Concerti with Artur Rodzinski and Karl Krueger conducting. This two-CD set is the penultimate release of the complete Josef Hofmann.

Josef Hofmann is considered by many of his peers to be the greatest pianist of his time. This 2-disc set, with notes by Harold Schonberg, chronicles Hofmann's career later in life containing material never before heard on CD.

The culmination of over a decade of releases, Marston is issuing the final volume of the complete Josef Hofmann recordings. Hofmann combined unparalleled virtuosity with emotion, understanding, and spontaneity to create some of the finest piano playing ever recorded. This set begins with newly mastered transfers of the three wax cylinders from 1896, originally released on our three-CD set The Dawn of Recording. Using new pitch stabilization technology, we have been able to improve, albeit slightly, the sonic reproduction of the cylinders recorded in Russia by the twenty year-old Hofmann, shortly following the death of his teacher, Anton Rubinstein. Included on this final volume are several alternative takes of Columbia and Brunswick recordings not offered on earlier volumes, the soundtrack of the film produced by the Bell Telephone Company that was shown in movie theaters to promote their radio program, “The Telephone Hour”, as well as a recently discovered, superior-sounding, source for the Cadillac Hour program from 1936, in which Hofmann gives a spectacular performance of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”. We issued this broadcast on volume six, but we want to make sure that Hofmann enthusiasts have the opportunity to own this better-sounding source. We have waited several years to produce this set, hoping to be able to discover further broadcast recordings of Hofmann in the interim (notes for the set will include a listing of Hofmann broadcasts which we know were recorded). As none of the eagerly-sought recordings have appeared, we are going ahead with some non-musical recordings concerning Hofmann. Half of the set will feature a collection of recorded interviews, conducted mostly by Gregor Benko. In these, which date back to the 1970s, we hear fascinating commentary by Rudolph Ganz, Jorge Bolet, Charles Rosen, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Glenn Gould, Constance Keene, Nella Rubinstein, Ruth Steinway, and Hofmann’s son, Anton, speaking candidly about  Hofmann the pianist and Hofmann the man. One interview, with a minor pianist whose name will be unfamiliar to most, Thadeus Sadlowski, is both fascinating and funny (while most of them are anything but funny.) Choosing these interviews from the large number that Gregor Benko collected and recorded, then editing them for content, has taken hundreds of hours of intense work, and we feel that they make a fitting finale to the complete Josef Hofmann CD series. We will never cease our search for additional Hofmann recordings, which if discovered, we will make every effort to publish.

Starting in 1889, what is now recognized as one of the earliest dates to record music, Julius Block recorded some of the most important artists and personalities of his time on cylinder. His cylinders range in date from 1889 to 1927, and were recorded in Russia, Germany, and Switzerland. Our three-CD set includes artists who have previously remained “silent” and will change the conception of many artists whose discography up until now were thought to be complete. These are the only known recordings of Anton Arensky, Paul Pabst, Sergei Taneyev, Leo Conus, Jules Conus, Anna Essipova, Jan Hrimaly, Anatoly Brandukov, Elizaveta Lavrovskaya, and Paul Juon. These are also the earliest surviving recordings of Josef Hofmann, Nikolai Figner, Eddy Brown, and Egon Petri. There are also recordings of the 11-year-old Heifetz one week after his sensational debut with Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic, which adds four pieces to Heifetz's discography. And, they include the first recorded performances of Bach, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Donizetti, Verdi, Bizet, and Arensky.

Arthur Rubinstein, during a visit to the Curtis Institute of Music in 1938, singled out just one young artist who was likely to achieve a major career, the twenty-four-year-old Cuban pianist Jorge Bolet, who already (like Rubinstein) had an inimitably beautiful piano tone. The confirmation of Rubinstein’s prediction, however, was to be many decades in coming. Bolet (arguably similar to Rubinstein) had a narrative power and visceral excitement when playing before an audience that he seldom achieved in the recording studio. To celebrate Bolet’s centennial, Marston presents this six-CD collection of concert performances, many of which are all new to the Bolet discography. Jorge Bolet was not the only pianist to have been called “the last romantic,” but he was the only one to have worn the appellation “an old-fashioned Romantic pianist” as a proud badge of honor. He frequently invoked the memories of the pantheon of pianists who were his inspiration—Hofmann, Rachmaninoff, Friedman, Rosenthal, Moiseiwitsch, Cortot, Gieseking, and Paderewski. He said simply, “I wanted to be one of them.”

Here is a collection to prove he achieved just that. Although more than seven hours of Bolet playing, the recordings contained on this set are carefully-selected to highlight Jorge Bolet at his spontaneous best. Included are a number of Godowsky compositions that Jorge never recorded commercially; two selections from the 1970 International Piano Library benefit concert; and several pieces that are unique to the Bolet discography such as the Bach Toccata, the Mozart Rondo, the Chasins Schwanda Fantasy, and the Vořišek Impromptu in E.

A Century of Romantic Chopin is a four-CD compilation commemorating the Chopin bicentennial year. The set includes some 65 pianists, going back to Francis Planté and Vladimir de Pachmann who were born when Chopin was still alive. Other pianists in the set include Josef Hofmann, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ferruccio Busoni, Moritz Rosenthal, Ignace Jan Paderewski, Ignaz Friedman, Alfred Cortot, Jan Smeterlin, Rosita Renard, Claudio Arrau, Guiomar Novaes, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Solomon, Arthur Rubinstein, Emil Gilels, Earl Wild, Jorge Bolet, and others. All of Chopin’s etudes are represented, as well as a selection of preludes, mazurkas, waltzes, nocturnes, ballades, and scherzi, each performance conveying a personal approach to the music. Some of the recordings will already be familiar to pianophiles because of their legendary status, while many others will be delightful surprises, as they are taken from concert performances and out-of-print recordings.