New Piano Albums

Maurizio Zaccaria:2023-03-31

Rachmaninov – Preludes Op. 23

Maurizio Zaccaria records prolifically for the OnClassical label – he recently finished the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas. Now he goes on to Rachmaninov's 24 Preludes. The C sharp minor Prelude Op. 3 No. 2 was released a few weeks ago, and now it's the Op. 23 set. The last 13 Preludes (Op. 32) will be made available in April.
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Benjamin Grosvenor:2023-03-28

Schumann & Brahms

This album is Benjamin Grosvenor’s seventh for Decca since 2011, when he became the youngest musician ever to sign to the label. He takes Robert Schumann’s haunting Kreisleriana as the starting point and accompanies it with several works written by, or connected to, Robert's beloved wife Clara. The album is rounded off with Brahms’ autumnal Three Intermezzi Op. 117.
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Lukas Huisman:2023-03-27

Takahashi/Nishimura – Piano Music

Lukas Huisman mainly performs contemporary music. In a research project at the Ghent School of Arts, he studies the fusion of eastern and western sound worlds in the works for piano of Japanese composers. Connected to this project, he already recorded the Complete Works for Piano by Takemitsu. His new album features music by Keitaro Takahashi (b. 1986) and Akira Nishimura (b.1953).
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Violina Petrychenko:2023-03-24

Mriya – Ukrainian Hope

Violina Petrychenko has been dedicated to the music of her homeland Ukraine for years – her fourth album with music by Ukrainian composers bears the title "Mriya" which is the Ukrainian word for dream. "This time I'm inviting my listeners to Central and Eastern Ukraine, the part of the country where I was born myself... Many of the pieces find their first recording here and it is my honor to introduce the listener to such interesting pieces."
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Duo Tal & Groethuysen:2023-03-23

Avec esprit – Gouvy, Melan-Gueroult, Saint-Saëns, Ysaÿe

These works for two pianos were written between 1874 and 1910, by four composers that moved in the same circles but pursued very different stylistic paths, and of whom Camille Saint-Saëns is the only household name. Yet this album may still be described as a "meeting between friends: we are guests at a musical salon that provides us with a unique insight into the breadth, variety and wit of these fin-de-siècle composers."
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Severin von Eckardstein:2023-03-22

Schumann – Kreisleriana, Jensen – Eroticon

Continuing his exploration of Schumann, but always keen to present works by lesser-known composers, Severin von Eckardstein has paired Kreisleriana with the complete Erotikon cycle by Adolf Jensen. "Infused as much by Schumann and Mendelssohn as by Liszt and Wagner", Jensen's work, published in Berlin in 1873, offers a comprehensive vision of German romanticism.
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Yuja Wang:2023-03-18

The American Project – Abrams/Tilson Thomas

The starting point for Teddy Abrams' Piano Concerto was talk of Yuja Wang needing a companion piece for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but he soon found himself embracing a broader range of styles, going far beyond that brief. Almost 40 minutes long, it's a celebration of the plurality of American culture and a thrilling testimony to the remarkable abilities of the woman he calls “one of the greatest pianists alive.”
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Jean Muller:2023-03-17

Mozart – Complete Piano Sonatas Vol. 4

Jean Muller has brought Mozart's piano sonatas to international stages like the Shanghai Oriental Art Center in 2016 and Salle Cortot in Paris in 2018/2019. Since then he has released three volumes of the complete set, receiving praise from several critics: "He tempers his modern Steinway with a light and luminous touch" (BBC Music Magazine)
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Rafal Blechacz:2023-03-15

Chopin – Sonatas 2 & 3, Barcarolle, Nocturne 14

Rafal Blechacz shot to fame in 2005 when he became the first Pole in three decades to take first prize at the Warsaw International Chopin Competition “I learned both sonatas while still in my teens. Now I think it was the right moment to record this program... The Funeral March movement of Sonata No. 2 has a special meaning in this difficult time", Blechacz suggests.
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Bobby Mitchell:2023-03-13

Rzewski – Dreams, War Songs, Winter Nights, Saints and Sinners

Frederic Rzewski was one of the most important American composer-pianists of his time. These are pieces that he wrote in his seventies. The intensely contrapuntal Ruins and virtuoso Wake Up are the last pieces in his vast piano cycle Dreams, while the War Songs weave together six war and anti-war songs from the last seven centuries.
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David Rogosin:2023-03-11

Theme: Variation

"Variations are not so much a type of composition as an exploration, following the universal human tendency to fool around with things." On this album, David Rogosin has chosen a chronological survey of keyboard works in variation form from the past four hundred years, culminating in an original work commissioned from his friend and colleague, Kevin Morse.
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Janina Fialkowska:2023-03-08

Chopin Recital, Vol. 4

Janina Fialkowska's career was launched in 1974, when Arthur Rubinstein became her mentor after her prize-winning performance at his inaugural Master Piano Competition. Rubinstein called her a “born Chopin interpreter”, thus laying the foundation for her lifelong identification with this composer. In 2021 she published her autobiography A Note in Time.
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Ismaël Margain:2023-03-06

Fauré/Chopin – Impromptus

Ismaël Margain, newly signed up with naïve, creates a sensitive and meaningful juxtaposition of two major composers of the piano repertoire, Frédéric Chopin and Gabriel Fauré. "On reading Fauré's impromptus, I was immediately struck by their beauty, by a desire to play them, and by how close the first three were to the language of Chopin."
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Pianoduo Mimese:2023-03-04

Attention, Les Apaches!

Les Apaches was a group of composers which formed in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century – named after gangs terrorizing the streets of Paris at the time. If Claude Debussy was known as their great inspiration, Maurice Ravel was the association’s passionate driving force. Renowned names such as Igor Stravinsky, Manuel de Falla, Albert Roussel, and Florent Schmitt were regular guests.
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Audrey Vigoureux:2023-03-03

Quasi una fantasia

Audrey Vigoreux explores the forms of fantasy and fugue in Bach and Beethoven, as emblematic figures for constraint and freedom in the art of composition. Two Fantasies and fugues by Bach are bookended by Beethoven sonatas stretched between extreme freedom of inspiration and formal ambition.
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Camille El Bacha:2023-03-01

Lumen

Camille El Bacha's father is the well-known classical pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha, but Camille charts his own path as a pianist, composer and improviser between classical, film and electronic music. Here, styles and periods merge into a single artistic impulse when his own compositions resonate with the preludes of Bach and Chopin.
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William Youn:2023-02-28

Schubert – Piano Sonatas III

Born in Seoul, William Youn moved to the USA to study at the New England Conservatory in Boston at the age of 13, and later continued to Germany and the legendary piano pedagogue Karl-Heinz Kämmerling. The first two parts of his Schubert trilogy have been praised for their “flawless, perfectly realized naturalness” (Fono Forum) and for Youn’s depiction of “Schubert’s sense of existential despair.” (Münchner Merkur)
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Anthony Romaniuk:2023-02-26

Perpetuum

Perpetual motion is both a strong part of today's musical culture (anything with a repetitive beat) but also part of ancient musical traditions: this insight has shaped Anthony Romaniuk's choices of repertoire and medium on this album, where he uses no fewer than six instruments: a Fazioli F 228, a Graf fortepiano, a harpsichord, a virginal, a Yamaha cP80 electro-acoustic piano and a Prophet Rev2 synthesizer.
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Guilhem Fabre:2023-02-24

Bach/Rachmaninov

Combining Bach and Rachmaninov on one album may seem counter-intuitive, but for Guilhem Fabre it was an obvious choice. After immersing himself in Rachmaninov's Second Sonata, he discovered in Bach's Sixth Partita a concentration of emotions that perfectly echoed the Russian composer. In both composers he feels "a similar kind of freedom, a place left to the interpreter."
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Beatrice Rana:2023-02-22

Clara & Robert Schumann – Piano Concertos

Clara Wieck began composing her piano concerto when she was only 14, and it has made Beatrice Rana realize just how visionary this woman was from such a young age. "She wrote this concerto, with its amazing cello solo, and when you understand the timeline you realize she was actually the first to have the idea, and only later would Robert do the same in his concerto and then even later, Brahms, with his second piano concerto".
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Sebastian Stanley:2023-02-21

Albéniz – Suite española Op. 47 & 97, Suite Ancienne No. 3

The first volume of Sebastian Stanley’s Albéniz survey was greeted with enthusiasm for the repertoire and praise for the interpretations. The sequel contains the first and second Suite Española with several of the composer’s most colorful and best-known pieces. In the Suite Ancienne, the neoclassical side of Albéniz comes to the fore.
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Seong-Jin Cho:2023-02-18

The Handel Project

A few years ago, Seong-Jin Cho discovered Handel's Suites and found that they were worthy of much greater attention than they usually receive. He decided to focus on three Suites and to complement them with Brahms’s Handel Variations, directly related to the suites inasmuch as the basis of Brahms’s twenty-five variations and final fugue is a theme from the Suite in B flat major HWV 434.
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Eric Le Sage:2023-02-17

Jardins suspendus

These Jardins suspendus (Hanging Gardens) form a small forgotten poetic anthology, the result of a personal selection of French music from the early 20th century. "Without the blinding beacons of Ravel, Debussy and Fauré, a whole sub-continent of French piano music emerges." Le Sage hopes that his recording "will help bring forth these composers still relegated to purgatory."
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Alexandra Papastefanou:2023-02-15

Tears from Babylon – Bach Transcriptions

Bach’s music has been transcribed, paraphrased, arranged and re-worked ever since he wrote it, and innumerable pianist-composers have adapted Bach’s compositions – Busoni, Kempff, Grainger, Reger, Liszt, Rachmaninov... on this album, Alexandra Papastefanou has recorded her own transcriptions of Bach pieces that she loves, and that have not been arranged for piano before.
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