"SOMM RECORDINGS is pleased to announce the return of pianist Michael Dussek to explore the music of his ancestor Jan Ladislav Dussek and its relationship to one of the piano repertoire’s most illustrious champions, Fryderyk Chopin. This fascinating recital reveals Dussek – a colourful character and favourite of Marie Antoinette whose talents took him throughout Europe and Russia – as “revolutionary in his approach to both composition and pianism” and makes a persuasive argument for Dussek’s influence on Chopin. In his informative booklet notes, Michael Dussek makes the case for his namesake’s music being the product of a composer “very much ahead of his time in the development of a Romantic piano style” (Grove Music). The disc’s centrepiece is the Op.35 Piano Sonatas (Nos.11-13), the B-flat major Sonata a crucible of ideas accommodating the rustic lyricism of his native Bohemia, a contrapuntal sophistication that would find full flowering in his later Messe Solennelle, and an anticipation of what would become a Chopin signature. Completing the disc are two pinnacles of the piano repertoire: Chopin’s exquisite Nocturne, Op.15 No.2, and the lyrical, rapturously intense Ballade No.1 in G minor."