Pianist – Michael Csányi Wills

Despite Michael’s career as a composer, he continues to perform and record regularly as a pianist and has recorded the complete violin and piano works of M.Weinberg with violinist Yuri Kalnits for Toccata Classics, the first 2 volumes of which won the prestigious Diapason d’Or for May 2011 September 2014 in France. Future plans to record more unusual music by past masters that have not had the attention that they deserve are underway with his wife, cellist Nunziatina Del Vecchio.

Mieczysław Weinberg: Complete Works for Violin and Piano, Volume Four

‘…Last year, I praised the CPO release of Weinberg’s Violin Sonatas… Well, move over: Toccata Classics has entered the lists with its Vol. 1 of the Complete Violin Sonatas… the Toccata artists (violinist Yuri Kalnits and pianist Michael Csányi-Wills) play with searing intensity… dizzying, breathtaking brilliance, completely at the service of this profound excursion into the cross-section of sound and the human soul. You must hear this.’

Robert Reilly

Michael Csányi-Wills is an ideal accompanist, imaginatively at one with Kalnits and completely in command of Weinberg’s often tricky piano parts: something of his individual quality can be sensed in his handling of the long and deeply expressive solo-piano introduction and desolate little coda of that same Adagio.

Calum MacDonald

The release should provide a most auspicious introduction to Weinberg’s violin music . . . . Strongly recommended for repertoire, performances, and recorded sound.

Robert Maxham

“[Kalnits and Csanyi-Wills] prove uber-sensitive to Weinberg’s harmonic push-pull, and Kalnit’s performance of the Sonata No. 1 for Violin Solo (1964) rolls with the technical punches like a true heavyweight…and I like the way Kalnits resists any temptation to smooth off these structural disjoints, accepting that this material is irreconcilable…Volume 2 soon, please”

Gramophone Magazine