Piano Seasons is a four-CD box devoted to the pianist Grete Sultan (1906-2005), an interpreter of classical and new music and a lifelong friend and collaborator of John Cage. It gathers recordings made in New York between 1969 and 2000, some issued here for the first time, of music from Bach to Cage and Toshi Ichiyanagi. In her playing, the label writes, the line between classical and modern seems to disappear.

Sultan was born in Berlin into a Jewish upper-class family and studied with Leonid Kreutzer and later Edwin Fischer. Banned from her profession and increasingly harassed, she left Germany at the last minute in 1941 and settled in New York, where she became an established pianist and taught at Vassar College, the 92nd Street Y and the Masters' School in Dobbs Ferry. Cage wrote his Etudes Australes (1974-75) for her, thirty-two pieces based on the star charts of the Atlas Australis. All the recordings in the box were produced by Heiner Stadler; the English notes are by Eric Salzman, and Ingo Schmidt-Lucas remastered the tapes for this Wergo edition.

The first disc holds Bach's Goldberg Variations, recorded in 1999 at Finch Junior College. The second and third, from a 1969 Town Hall recital, bring Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and Six Bagatelles op. 126, Schubert's Sonata in A minor D 845 and Schumann's Fantasie op. 17. The fourth disc is given to the twentieth century: Schoenberg's Fünf Klavierstücke op. 23, Copland's Piano Sonata, Ben Weber's Episodes, Stefan Wolpe's Form for Piano and Alan Hovhaness's Yenovk, recorded between 1969 and 1990, then Cage's The Perilous Night for prepared piano and Ichiyanagi's In Memory of John Cage, recorded in February 2000.

According to the Discogs notes, several of these recordings had appeared before, while the Schumann and Ichiyanagi are first releases. The programme follows the range of a career in which the label hears Sultan's warmth in Bach, Beethoven and Schumann carried over into the experimental works of Schoenberg and Cage, giving them a timeless and personal poetry.

4 CDs in slipcase, Wergo WER 4043 2, WERGO Colours series, released in 2013. Notes for CDs 1 and 2 in German, for CDs 3 and 4 in English.