"Peter Donohoe and Martin Roscoe take to Rachmaninov like ducks to water. They luxuriate in his opulent keyboard idiom and even evoke the composer’s own titanic playing by way of thrust-inducing accents and booming bass notes that ring in your ear long after they’re struck. Check out the ravishingly shaded first-movement trills and the finale’s full-throated evocations of bells, and discover for yourself. The players admirably mirror Ax and Bronfman’s sensible, dance-oriented tempos, even if they don’t match the latter duo’s finely honed textural clarity in the Symphonic Dances’ middle movement or the Second Suite’s Romance. By virtue of Donohoe and Roscoe’s immense dynamic range and superbly sprung rhythms, the Second Suite’s Waltz and Tarantella make an impact no less exhilarating and arguably more musically satisfying than the edge-of-seat bravura and breathless speeds Argerich and Rabinowitz favor." (Classics Today)
"Music in Germany in the later 19th century found itself divided into two camps; the modernists, led by Liszt and Wagner, and the traditionalists who took Brahms as their model and who upheld the values of the classical period and Beethoven in particular. Fuchs and Kiel are very much in the later camp and both spent their lives in academic posts, as so often befits such establishment figures. They each wrote only one piano concerto and, as one might expect, these are not vehicles for empty virtuoso display but rather symphonic concertos, both written in the traditional three movements, the first of which is a weighty sonata form allegro. The influence of Beethoven can be heard in each and the later Fuchs piece also shows a debt to Brahms. Interestingly Kiel taught Stanford while he studied in Germany and indeed these composers are very much the German equivalent of Stanford or Parry." (Arkivmusic)
