This is not quite the Complete Edition claimed, but the two discs do contain as nearly all Cherubini's piano music as makes no difference, and include a major work of which next to nothing was known for many years. This is the piece innocently entitled Capriccio ou Etude pour le fortepiano, and entered in Grove's worklist as a lost work of 1789. Lost, indeed, it more or less was, according to Pietro Spada, in that the manuscript lay in the collection of Alfred Cortot until it was eventually published by Ricordi in 1983. It turns out to be an extraordinary work lasting, in this performance, 37 minutes, and encompassing a range astonishing even by Cherubini's standards.
This was the composer who, as the harmless little harpsichord sonatas proclaim, had as his background nothing more advanced in idiom than Haydn (whose own infinitely more imaginative sonatas these superficially reflect). He was also the composer who influenced the whole course of French opera, and won the admiration of Beethoven (whose Fidelio would not have been the same without him) and of a generation of romantics, including Schumann, Wagner and the reluctant Berlioz (who satirized him in the Memoirs but was the beneficiary of his pioneering spirit).
The admirers might well have numbered among them Liszt, had not Cherubini turned the boy away from the Conservatoire on the grounds that only Frenchmen could study there. And here is one of history's ironies, for it is Liszt as much as anyone whom this Capriccio anticipates. It is a vast compendium of ideas, a capriccio in that it allows its fancy to play at will across music of many kinds, an etude in that it studies to explore their nature. The opening suggests baroque flourishes, and there are passages of Bachian counterpoint; there are also suggestions of Beethoven, even of the melodic elegance which the scarcely-born Schubert was to achieve, harmonic originalities that are almost Berlioz before his time, finally a massive fugue. This does not serve to draw all the threads together, for the work seems more open-ended than that, as if representing some kind of Annees de pelerinage into the future. But the enterprise is Lisztian (though Liszt cannot have known the work) in its solitary, heroic adventuring, in its prodigality of invention, in its uncanny ability to adumbrate later musical styles, also—it must be said—in its unevenness and its prolixity. There is the comparable sense of a musician alone with his craft, not greatly caring whether or not history will one day catch up with him.
The Capriccio is unlikely ever to be heard very often, and Cortot must have been baffled about what on earth to do with it; but for the curious, here is a remarkable musical document. Even if his performance is at times somewhat rough and ready, Pietro Spada deserves our gratitude, and his enthusiasm for the work is strongly communicated.'