SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce a major new release by Leon McCawley focusing on the piano music of Franz Schubert. The new recording is the latest offering from a highly acclaimed partnership between SOMM and McCawley that has seen earlier albums devoted to Haydn, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninov and Samuel Barber. Leon McCawley has been one Britain’s foremost pianists since winning the International Beethoven Piano Competition in 1993, when he also took second prize in the Leeds International Piano Competition. Perhaps “the most enigmatic of all musical geniuses”, as Bryce Morrison describes him, Schubert himself famously declared “I came into this world for nothing else but to compose”. Two masterpieces are heard here. The Drei Klavierstücke saw Schubert reaching out in a radical new direction to deliver, says Morrison, something “wild, feverish, disjointed and intimate... visionary music with a vengeance”. The Wanderer Fantasy is a luxurious display of virtuoso opulence – music the like of w