The Russian and Scandinavian composers, especially Balakireff and Rachmaninoff, and Edvard Grieg, have been the most successful in introducing some freshness and youth into pianoforte music by means of national idioms of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Among the Poles, Ignace Paderewski has shown himself, on the whole, too cosmopolitan in manner, though many of his works, especially the brilliant concerto in A minor, contain Polish matter. Dvořák was too little a pianist to enrich the literature of pianoforte music with more than a few slight dances and Humoresques of Bohemian character. Recently Ernst von Dohnányi, a most brilliant pianist, has done more. Two concertos in splendidly brilliant style and two sonatas are among the most significant of his publications. The Italian Giovanni Sgambati (b. 1843) has shown himself wholly classical in his interests and natural tendencies, drawing his technique, however, considerably from Chopin. From Spain, however, a breath of freshness has come into pianoforte music. The works of Isaac Albéniz are among the most brilliant and most effective of all compositions for the instrument. The most considerable are the four sets of pieces called _Iberia_, and of these the second and third contain the best. All are so thoroughly saturated with Spanish harmonies, rhythms and melodies that taken as a whole this brilliant collection suffers from too much sameness. Yet there is some variety of mood. There is melancholy in the lovely melodies of the _Almeria_, a certain fineness in both the _Triana_ and the _El Albaicin_, an incredible coarseness in _Lavapies_. Albéniz’s treatment of the piano is astonishing, considering the directness with which his music appeals to the senses. One would not believe, to hear the music played, into what desperate intricacies the pianist has had to cut his way. And all to hang a garland on a tune, but a tune that heats with the very heart of Spain, and a garland that is a cloak of all the colors ever seen at a bull-fight. Grieg is an expatriate beside Albéniz. Never has such intensity of national life, joy, passion, pride, and melancholy threatened to burst the very limits of sound. Composers in England have not written a great deal for the pianoforte. Sir A. C. Mackenzie’s Scottish Concerto is an outstanding work, and recently Cyril Scott and Percy Grainger have added works to piano literature which have charm and interest. Scott experiments with modern systems of harmony, but Grainger has chosen to make use of the uniquely beautiful songs and dances of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His arrangements of many of these are effective; and as music they have the perennial freshness of the melodies about which they are woven.