Prokofjew was inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (based on Pyramus and Thisbe from ancient Greek mythology), while Tchaikovsky was inspired by The Sleeping Beauty by the French writer Charles Perrault  from 1690, based on the Nordic saga Volsunga. These works are landmarks in the ‘classical’ repertoire's most famous ballets.

This exciting piano recital opens with a selection of Ten Pieces for Piano Op. 75. Prokofjew took selected music from his Romeo and Juliet ballet suite in 1937 and turned them into a ten piece cycle which he premiered himself later that year. Based on the tradition of the piano masters of the “Russian School”, Mikhail Pletnev's piano transcription of The Sleeping Beauty recreates the color and drama of Tchaikovsky's orchestral score, within the context of a virtuoso piano solo.

Liszt's reputation as the supreme pianist of the 19th century often overshadowed his other achievements, including transcribing the works of other composers such as Richard Wagner for the piano. Liszt’s orchestral transcriptions are substantial and important works in their own right.

Elsa's Dream and Isolde’s Love-Death have the air of a religious epiphany. Wagner traced the myth of Zeus and Semele, Eros, and Psyche, Elsa and Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, but all, Wagner insists, stand for the same eternal story; the necessity of love. Wagner declared them to be, "no mere outcome of Christian meditation, but one of man’s earliest poetic ideals."

The titles of Debussy‘s preludes are highly significant, both in terms of their descriptive quality, but also in the way they were placed in the written score, coming  at the end  of each work. This allowed the performer to experience  each individual sound world with fresh ears, without being influenced by the titles beforehand. As Debussy himself stated “Music is a free art gushing forth, an open- air art,boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea.”

La CathédraleEngloutieis based on an ancient Breton myth in which a cathedral, submerged underwater off the coast of the Island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear mornings when the water is transparent. Ondine, a mythological figure of European tradition, is a water nymph who becomes human when she falls in love with a man, but is doomed to die if he is unfaithful to her.

Both La Cathédrale Engloutie and Ondine are examples of works in which there is an even greater distance from direct mythological reference. The composer’s expression is a more tentative allusion to a musical depiction of an mythological image or idea.