Dohnányi: Complete Solo Piano Music Vol 1, CD review Hyperion CDA67871, £12.99 Erno Dohnányi (1877-1960) was once the preeminent figure in Hungarian music and is generally regarded as the one who laid the foundations for the country's musical life during the 20th century. If he is now slightly out of fashion, he is brought back firmly into the spotlight by Martin Roscoe's splendid first disc of a projected series of the solo piano music. Dohnányi himself was a pianist of immense distinction, lionised internationally as was his great forerunner in Hungarian culture, Liszt. And, like Liszt (although not so prolifically), he drew on his mix of poetic imagination, bravura and inside knowledge of the instrument to compose works for the piano, some of which are the most winning of the late Romantic era. He has been immortalised through the perky sense of humour and puncturing of Romantic portentousness in his Variations on a Nursery Tune for piano and orchestra, but the solo works show him to be very much part of that Romantic milieu, expressing himself with passion and sincerity in the Four Rhapsodies Op 11 of the early 1900s. Indeed, one of the rhapsodies - the third in C major - has always been one of my favourite pieces, combining a scherzo deftness and an exhilarating energy with one of those aspiring melodies that any composer of similar disposition might have given their eye teeth to have written. Roscoe finds the ideal blend of lightness and broad lyrical sweep, characterising the other three contrasting rhapsodies with equal effectiveness, as he does the 10 bagatelles of Winterreigen (1905), Dohnányi's nod of respect to Schumann. The Pastorale (1920), the Three Singular Pieces (1951) and one of Dohnányi's waltz arrangements complete a programme that refreshes some gorgeous, unjustly neglected music.