Remembered as the first of the great piano virtuosos, Muzio Clementi condensed his years of composition and performance into the monumental, three-volume Gradus ad Parnassum, a repository of stylistically diverse pieces designed to demonstrate utmost technical mastery of the instrument. Praised for his recordings of Rossini’s piano music for Naxos (8.570590-91, 8.570766 & 8.572315), the award-winning Italian pianist Alessandro Marangoni scales the heights of Clementi’s piano studies with an ease that belies their extraordinary demands, bringing to life their unfailingly engaging qualities. This is the first in a series of four Naxos albums.