the performances...are all you could hope from a player of such quality, faced with repertoire he might have been born to interpret. This is playing of a very high order, such as...one seldom hears. Hamelin is well-nigh ideal in sensitivity of phrasing, clarity of tone and delineation of voices...A fabulous set, almost beyond praise.

Hamelin here makes a spirited case for the mature solo oeuvre – mostly short, technically demanding pieces...that raid the late-Romantic arsenal of swirling colours and sumptuous textures.

Such strangeness demands rare skill and a special empathy for an idiom which for many will seem recondite and remote. And it is in this sense that Hamelin, playing with unfaltering lucidity and authority, achieves an astonishing triumph even by his exalted standards...although this is essentially an album for specialists, it is one that could never be bettered.

Hamelin handles all of this with great intelligence. There's a swagger when the music demands it, a fabulously refined sense of sonority and transparency when required. The technical challenges are surmounted so effortlessly that you begin to take the confidence of his playing for granted, when in fact it's a remarkable achievement.

The [Christmas] gift I’d choose for myself would be Marc-André Hamelin’s magisterial three-disc survey of Busoni’s later piano music — elusive and haunting material from a pivotal figure of the modern age.