New Piano Albums

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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)
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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".
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

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.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

András Schiff:2023-02-14

J. S. Bach – Clavichord

András Schiff's first encounter with the clavichord goes back to 1965, when he was a young student. It would take 40 years before he purchased his own two specimens, both by the Belgian maker Joris Potvlieghe. "They have enriched and altered my life. When I'm at home, my day always begins with Bach. It used to be on the piano, now it's on the clavichord, even before breakfast."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Yevgeni Sudbin:2023-02-12

Romeo and Juliet – Tchaikovsky on the Piano

Some of Tchaikovsky’s most magical scores were written for the ballet. Yevgeny Sudbin decided to arrange a couple of real gems for himself and his 12-year-old daughter to play during the first lockdown of the pandemic. "Playing them provided a ray of sunshine (and some hope) during a grim time that felt like it was never going to end." They are included here as bookends to a selection of shorter original compositions.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Nikolai Lugansky:2023-02-11

Rachmaninov – Ètudes-tableaux

Nikolay Lugansky adds to his already rich Rachmaninoff discography with another two major cycles. "Rachmaninoff’s pianistic language is extraordinarily complex; it seems as if no one knew better than he what the piano was capable of. Yet in this work, the images are incredibly bright and diverse, and Rachmaninoff seems to draw inspiration from those images, not from pianistic techniques."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Dora Deliyska:2023-02-09

Études and Préludes

Arranging piano pieces in cycles consisting of 24 pieces offers a clear structure that has often and willingly been used by composers. In this programme Dora Deliyska creates her own structure, adopting the scheme of 24 pieces and placing twelve etudes and twelve preludes by Chopin, Debussy, Ligeti and Kapustin within this framework, thereby allowing the musical significance of each piece to be reinterpreted.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Vincenzo Maltempo:2023-02-08

Dukas – Complete Piano Music

Paul Dukas’s talent suffered throughout his career at the hands of his perfectionism: His rigorous self-criticism allowed only 13 compositions to be published in his lifetime, and many of his scores ended up in the fire. His complete output for the piano includes just five works, dominated by the Sonata and the Variations, each of them a homage to a past master, to Beethoven and to Rameau.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Nicolas Costantinou:2023-02-05

Metavasis – Stylianou, 12 Préludes

In an album of world-premiere recordings, Nicolas Costantinou performs 12 Preludes for solo piano by Constantinos Y. Stylianou, each connected to a different work of art. The inspirations cover a wide range of painting and sculpture from Classical antiquity to the 20th century, and the choice of form was influenced by Debussy's two Books of Preludes.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Jacob Greenberg:2023-02-02

Living Language

Jacob Greenberg, a longtime member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, explores how composers build on their cultural heritage with a creative vocabulary, giving thoughtful tribute while also seeking renewal. The album features music by Bartók, Chopin, Janácek, Wang Lu, and George Lewis,
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Tamara Stefanovich:2023-01-31

Vassos Nicolaou – Etudes & Frames

Tamara Stefanovich first met Vassos Nicolaou when they were both students. Years later, when she was invited to commission a new work from any composer, Vassos was first on her list. "Today his 15 Etudes has become a testament to an immeasurably innovative freedom…even while playing them, I am struck by the quality of illusions, which gives me the feeling of owning not just countless pairs of hands, but several pairs of ears as well."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Peter Donohoe:2023-01-29

Mozart – Piano Sonatas Vol. 6

After four years, Peter Donohoe reaches the end of his survey of Mozart's 18 piano sonatas, recordings that have been very well received: "It was high time someone blew the interpretive cobwebs off this still under-appreciated repertoire" (BBC Music Magazine) "...he plays these pieces with a personal involvement that is as touching as it is fascinating and finely considered." (Gramophone)
Audio & Booklet in NML >>