CELEBRATING A LANDMARK HYPERION PROJECT
33 YEARS · 185 PIANO CONCERTOS · 1M+ ALBUMS SOLD
A pair of 50CD boxed sets bring together the most courageous enterprise in Hyperion’s 45-year history
“All the most wildly romantic concertos you can think of rolled into one huge pianistic feat”
Gramophone
Volume 1 released on 10 April 2026.
Hyperion Records announces two boxed sets bringing together a project that reshaped our understanding of the vast gamut of 19th- and 20th-century piano concertos.
With over 1 million album sales globally over its 33-year life, the project’s modest initial aim had been only to restore to the public a few glories of the Romantic concerto repertoire. By its close it covered 235 works, 185 of them piano concertos.
Many of the concertos had survived only in abridged editions or lacked the orchestral parts that would make performance possible. Frequently Hyperion commissioned new orchestral parts to be written to facilitate first modern performances. Across the project as a whole, 121 works received their first recordings. Several performers selflessly learned demanding works for their recording, without the benefit of an established performance tradition.
The complete series is issued across two 50CD collections. The first release, The Romantic Piano Concerto 1991–2007 Edition, lands on 10 April 2026, with a second set following on 16 October 2026. One of the series’ champions, Sir Stephen Hough, reflects on the symbiotic expansion in the size and power of the instrument and the music composed for it in the Romantic era: “Hyperion’s celebrated series of recordings highlighted this phenomenon with enormous enthusiasm and zest over the past decades, with scores of scores unearthed, revealing some astonishing yet unknown works. As they are gathered together in a box it gives us another opportunity to marvel at the sheer variety and fecundity of the form.”
This renewal has helped works to return to global concert programmes after long absences and for the narrowed canon of concerto works to be widened, enabling the public to appreciate, for example, all five of the Saint-Saëns Piano Concertos rather than just the 2nd and occasionally the 5th, or for Busoni’s vast Piano Concerto to be successfully programmed at the London Proms.
Bearing this out, the pianist Piers Lane, whose Moszkowski and Paderewski Piano Concerti formed the very first album in the series, recalls that he has since regularly played the Moszkowski in concert. He comments: “This epic series of recordings is a glorious testament to Hyperion’s curatorial and archaeological approach to less-known repertoire, and also to Mike Spring’s boundless enthusiasm, instinct, knowledge and curiosity about all things piano.”
The 1991–2007 Edition brings together Volumes 1 to 43 of the series, alongside a handful of bonus concerto recordings from the same period. Artists featured include Sir Stephen Hough, Marc-André Hamelin, Piers Lane, Steven Osborne, Howard Shelley and Martin Roscoe, performing with orchestras including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
Each boxed set is presented as a 50CD original-jackets collection with a newly compiled booklet. Alongside introductory texts by Stephen Hough and Piers Lane, new essays by producer Andrew Keener and series founder Mike Spring reflect on the project’s origins, its practical challenges, and the painstaking research involved in manually locating and preparing rare orchestral materials.
In general, it is great news that, as reported in Gramophone, the series will be rounded up to 100 by adding a dozen or so concertos already in existence elsewhere in Hyperion’s catalogue (e.g. Hough’s Rachmaninoff cycle). However, many of us have loyally collected the whole series so far as individual discs. It would be good to think that such loyalty might be rewarded by re-releasing any “new” additions to the existing series as individual discs in the standard Romantic Piano Concerto design so that those of us who won’t be buying the boxes can also have a “complete” collection on our shelves.
This is an excellent idea. I won’t be buying the boxes–I have too many of the entries already, individually!
Please do this, Hyperion. I’m very sad to hear that the Romantic Piano Concerto series has ended–surely you could have found some more that needed to be rescued, performed, and recorded? This was perhaps the best classical music series ever designed….
I have to say that a good portion of these concertos are definitely of secondary interest and many of them are noodlefests, that lose interest in the middle. It’s good to have single recordings of some of these for historical interests but in terms of interest itself some of these works are not all that interesting.