Leopold Koželuch’s music satisfied the ever-changing musical tastes of 18th-century Vienna but he was also a skilled pedagogue, challenging the best of his aristocratic students with the blistering semiquaver climaxes and double octaves of Sonatas Nos. 17 and 18. Koželuch foreshadows Beethoven in his Sonata No. 19, but the Sonata No. 20 represents a musical watershed, anticipating Schubert and others with its adventurous harmonic shifts and the surprising romanticism of its extended slow movement.

This recording was made on period instruments:
Fortepiano by Thomas and Barbara Wolf (USA), after Anton Walter (c. 1795) (Sonatas Nos. 17–19);
Fortepiano by Paul Downie (NZ), after Anton Walter (c. 1795) (Sonata No. 20)