For several years now, Hiroaki Takenouchi had been keen to champion the music of a major Romantic composer, William Sterndale Bennett – an English virtuoso pianist, born in 1816, and considered one of the most captivating virtuosos in his time because of his flamboyance and mastery of the keyboard. Here, Takenouchi chooses one of what are indisputably Sterndale Bennett’s most accomplished scores, the Piano Sonata in F minor Op. 13, dedicated to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: the work unveils a romantic ballad tone, which is both exciting and genuinely exhilarating, like the great scores of Mendelssohn or Schumann. To complete his programme Takenouchi offers one of the latter’s masterpieces for piano, Symphonic Etudes (1834) and dedicated… to William Sterndale Bennett. Indeed, Hiroaki Takenouchi’s new album released on the Artalinna label offers us interplay of reciprocal dedications to these three great names of European Romanticism – Mendelssohn, Schumann and Sterndale Bennett. His first volume of a double anthology dedicated to Haydn had been honoured by an ffff from the French magazine French magazine Télérama (highest award).