Piano sonatas (Beethoven)
Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his 32 piano sonatas between 1795 and 1822. Although originally not intended to be a meaningful whole, as a set they compose one of the most important collections of works in the history of music. Hans von Bülow called them "The New Testament" of the piano literature (Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier" being "The Old Testament").
Benjamin Dale
Composed between 1902 and 1905 and dedicated to York Bowen, Dale's piano sonata is a large-scale virtuoso work in just two movements, the second of which combines slow movement, scherzo and finale in a set of variations, a form apparently influenced by Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio. Commentators have discerned various other influences and echoes within this eclectic work, including Liszt's Sonata in B Minor, Schumann's Fantasie in C, Balakirev's Islamey, Glazunov's first piano sonata and Wagner's Liebestod. In the opinion of Francis Pott, "the swirling arpeggiation and rich variety of gesture imply an attempted pianistic parallel to Wagnerian and Straussian orchestration, thus carrying the illusion of symphonic transcription to new places". According to Lisa Hardy, author of an extensive survey of British piano sonatas, "Dale's sonata was the first outstanding British piano sonata. Its harmonic language avoided the clichés of the Beethoven-Brahms style and utilized the resources of Straussian and Wagnerian chromaticism to an unprecedented level. In a sense, however, it marked the end of an era, as this was as far as late romantic harmonies could be taken." Despite entering the repertoire of concert pianists like York Bowen, Myra Hess, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Irene Scharrer and Moura Lympany, by the 1920s Dale's sonata had fallen out of fashion. In recent years, however, the work has been championed on CD by Peter Jacobs (on Continuum, 1992), Mark Bebbington (SOMM, 2010) and Danny Driver (Hyperion, 2011), contributing to a current revival of interest in Dale's music. It probably remains the single composition for which Dale is best known today.