Philip Martin's survey of the piano music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) has been one of Hyperion's less celebrated projects over the last few years but, with its completion, another neglected area of the 19th-century repertoire has been thoroughly explored and superbly championed by Martin. In many ways Gottschalk's career as an itinerant virtuoso (he was born in New Orleans and died in Rio de Janeiro) was more interesting than the music he composed to show off his own prodigious talents, but he was a wonderfully able musician.
There's real deftness and wit in the pieces brought together in this final collection, whether it's the arrangement of Home, Sweet Home, his Variations on the Portuguese national anthem, or the operatic fantasy on themes from Verdi's Jerusalem, which is as flamboyant as anything by Liszt.
