Howard Hanson, the masterful conductor who championed American music, was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, an accomplished pianist and pedagogue who directed the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York for forty years. Today, Hanson is best known for his Second Symphony (“Romantic”), but it was piano music which launched his career. The music on this disc, meticulously researched and reconstructed, mostly from manuscripts, provides recorded premières of the youthful Slumber Song, a set of Études, three erotic “Poèmes”, an ambitious single movement Sonata, and For the First Time, an orchestral suite that, in Hanson’s own arrangement, was his last work for the solo piano.