"A cycle of 24 movements for piano. Two character pieces (one major, one minor) in every key of the chromatic scale.

Péter Wolf writes what he hears and feels, and this fundamental attitude determines all of his pieces, regardless of what genre he happens to be composing in. His music makes intensive use of almost everything that can be used in a given context, be it from the classical tradition, jazz, or pop music. Péter Wolf firmly believes that music is to be heard, and expresses feelings, and as he is a sincere artist not prepared to comply with external expectations, he follows only his own nose (or ears, or heart); his music too, with untrammelled homeliness, wallows in the musical styles of past centuries and current times.

The model for the Wolf-temperiertes Klavier, as the title might suggest, is Bach's keyboard cycle. In line with this, Péter Wolf's collection of 24 piano pieces uses each of the twelve notes of the octave from C to B as home keys (both major and minor) for the movements. It differs from the Bach work in having no fugues, only freely composed praeludia, or as Chopin would have called them, preludes. Péter Wolf is more strongly linked to Chopin and the Romantic and twentieth-century prelude tradition he engendered than directly to Bach, insofar as etude-like virtuoso movements are interspersed with meditative, sentimental pieces in a series that takes us through the world of 24 keys, and the piano technique required is closer to the age of Romanticism than to the Baroque.

Péter Wolf's deft hand not only guides us steadily through a kaleidoscopic cascade of styles, but also vouches for the extraordinarily colourful pianism, and at times dazzling virtuosity, which is at least as important a feature of the Wolf-temperiertes Klavier as the musical ideas themselves. József Balog, who premiered Péter Wolf's piano concerto in 2013, now with breathtaking technique and musicality raises the Wolf-temperiertes pieces into the rich centuries-long tradition of preludes for which Johann Sebastian Bach served as the starting-point."