OK - you menton Arcadi Volodos, so what about Fredrik Ullén, Marc-André Hamelin, Jonathan Powell, Donna Amato, Carlo Grante, Francesco Libetta for starters - some pretty extraordinary talents there, methinks; what does anyone else think?
I've only had the chance to hear about 3 of the above in live performances. Powell and Hamelin stand out as the hardest-working, it seems to me? In the sense that they are constantly adding new material to their repertoire, rather than just gigging the same stuff all over Europe (
pace Stephen Hough).
Well, Stephen Hough is now writing some of his own - and has, to my mind, come on by leaps and bounds over the years, at least in part as a result of a conscious influence of the late great Shura Cherkassky. Ullén worries me; his facility is beyond astonishing, as his Ligeti Études and, far more, his Sorabji Studies CDs demonstrate, but he has a second life as a research neuroscientist and the absence of his name on recital programmes around places of late must presumably be down to his concentrating more on that discipline of late. Jonathan Powell's appetite for work is indeed extraordinary; in the past decade and a bit the additions to his repertoire include Concerto and Symphonie of Alkan, Granados's
Goyescas, Albéniz's
Iberia, Messiaen's
Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus and no less that 24 hours' worth of Sorabji's immensely challenging piano writing, to say nothing of having given performances of the complete Scriabin sonatas as a single programme; Hameln's repertoire is probably better known to you, especially as much of it is now recorded.