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"Even Brahms loved Strauss, so one can hardly blame the elite of the Romantic pianist-composers if they simply couldn't resist transforming the Waltz King's bonbons into wild solo piano fantasias. Funny, though, even super-virtuosic distortion can't diminish the fascination of these danceable tunes. But not just any pianist could survive this repertoire. It requires the utmost musicality, wit, and superhuman technique - absolute suicide for a debut recording. But here is a pianistic lion with such a roar that ladies will swoon, other pianists will curse, and labels will clamor to sign him. Thomas Labé is not yet a household name but he quite soon could be. It's difficult to explain the relative anonymity of this young artist who navigates these pianistic minefields without a scratch and makes the whole of this collective monument to bombast sound remarkably like music...an auspicious debut for both artist and label." ~ H&B Recordings Direct (December 1992)
"Thomas Labé has made one of the greatest piano recordings I've ever experienced. I'm in a state of shock combined with great joy after hearing The Virtuoso [Johann Strauss] recording." ~ Dave Brubeck
"Romantic pianists like Rosenthal, Cherkassky, Bolet, Glazer and Lewenthal find a natural acolyte in Labé, whose own capacities for legato and intricately contrapuntal filigree receive full measure in these eight transcriptions...Tausig's darkly chromatic Valse-Caprices after the Strauss Wahlstimmen seem to evince a Lisztian fervor in Labé, a thoroughly shimmering surface touched by harmonic pools of subtle melancholy...[and] with an especial digital prowess and rhythmic articulation worthy of Jorge Bolet." ~ Classical Digest
"Labé begins with a Rosenthal transcription, and immediately it settles his credentials with the right juxtaposition of gushing expansiveness, mock-bashfulness...sparky insinuations and tumbling octaves. The plan is always the same - an obtuse introduction, and contrasting sections which are then whipped into a delirium of spun sugar - and I could only wonder at the technique with which Labé has mastered both their
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