Mr. Pollini's nonpareil physical capacity was on display in the complete Preludes (Op. 28), the shortest and fastest dispatched like glittering aphorisms.
The piece is Schoenberg's homage to Bach's keyboard suites, complete with prelude, gavotte, musette and gigue.
The album is a suite for quintet, complete with prelude, interludes and a short, ponderous, polytonal piano rhapsody at the end, in which Mr. Dingman recites metaphysical poetry: "In silence, we hear the unstruck sound cascading down/but stillness is eternity".
Mr. Orth followed this with Chopin's complete 24 Preludes, another formidable, though not uncommon, undertaking.
Recitals that offer the complete Chopin preludes, or waltzes, scherzos, ballads, nocturnes and such, are fairly common.
Most of all, Bach would have been flabbergasted that Mr. Schiff had played the complete 48 preludes and fugues from memory.
Shostakovich completed his Prelude and Scherzo (Op. 11) for string octet (also sometimes performed by string orchestra) in 1925 at 18.
The concert was partly a release party for Ms. Lin's new two-CD recording of the complete Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues on Hänssler Classic, a German label.
Ilya Itin — a brilliantly insightful pianist who offered a superb recital of the complete Chopin preludes, Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" and a new work by Yehudi Wyner on Saturday — said that before discovering the Taubman technique in 1999, he experienced keyboard fatigue, which he described as "a form of injury".
