Reviews: (Original release)

 “Albulescu’s reading is affectionate and caring, as well as dramatic and brilliant. (…) Throughout this varied recital, which is recorded in admirable digital sound, Albulescu manages to retell the secret stories embedded within each piano piece with a particular affinity and eveness.”
— Peter S. Murano, Classical.net

“ Power, infallible fingers of steel. (…)The skips and repeated notes in La Campanella sound like marbles falling on a marble table with metronomic regularity. Nothing anywhere has any terrors for him.”

— Harold Schonberg, American Record Guide

“[Albulescu] keeps the music from congealing by his imaginative handling of articulation: he often, for instance, dries out lyric passages that most pianists blessed with his sonority would smother in honey (listen, for instance, to the Dolce con grazia theme after the first Grandioso section of the Sonata); and he can harden his tone in ways that bring you up short (listen, for instance, to the abrupt arpeggiated left-hand chords that puncture the opening of the Lugubre Gondola II). This is still a far lusher account of the composer than the one presented in Hamelin’s visionary recital reviewed in Fanfare 20:5—but it’s sufficiently imaginative to stand out from the crowd. The Sonata, by the way, was recorded in a single take.

— Peter Rabinowitz, Fanfare