WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART  Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 533 / K. 494

Mozart devoted much of the last decade of his life to composing piano music, including the majority of his 27 concertos. This brilliantly inventive sonata, by turns playful and profound, was cobbled together from three movements composed at different times, hence the two numbers assigned to it in the Köchel catalog of Mozart’s works.

FRANZ LISZT  Tre sonetti del Petrarca, from Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie, S. 161

A musical visionary, Liszt prefigured many of the major compositional developments of the 20th century. His vast catalog includes some thousand works in many genres, but he is best known for his dazzlingly virtuosic and often richly poetic piano music. The Tre sonetti del Petrarca (Three Petrarch Sonnets) appear in a musical album inspired by Liszt’s travels in Italy.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH  Partita No. 5 in G Major, BWV 829

The six suite-like harpsichord partitas that Bach published in 1731 were an instant commercial and artistic success. His early biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel described them as “brilliant, well-sounding, expressive, and always new.” Bach himself probably introduced the partitas at the public concerts he presented at Café Zimmermann in Leipzig in the 1730s and ’40s.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN  Andante in F Major, WoO 57, “Andante favori”; Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, “Waldstein”

The “Waldstein” Sonata, named for one of Beethoven’s noble patrons, followed hard on the heels of the “Eroica” Symphony; both works exemplify the boldly heroic style of the composer’s so-called middle period. Heeding a friend’s advice, Beethoven published the sonata’s original slow movement separately as the “Andante favori” and replaced it with a brief Adagio molto that ties the fast movements together in a decidedly unconventional fashion.