The eight piano concertos of Beethoven’s friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries stand alongside those of Hummel as the most important works of their kind from the early 19th Century. Intensely lyrical and yet displaying at times a rugged Beethovenian power, Ries’s concertos are works of impressive musical stature. This world première recording features the Concerto in C major composed in 1806 shortly after Ries completed his studies in Vienna with Beethoven, and the majestic Concerto in A flat ‘Gruss an den Rhein’, written twenty years later on his return to the Rhineland, which looks forward to the piano writing of Chopin.