New Piano Albums

Joanne Polk:2024-09-28

Nostalgia – Piano Music of Cécile Chaminade, Vol. 2

Joanne Polk has spent decades performing and recording music by underrated female composers, such as Amy Beach, Louise Farrenc and Fanny Mendelssohn. In 2014, her CD titled The Flatterer, solo piano music of French Romantic composer Cécile Chaminade, was released on the Steinway & Sons Label. Here comes the long-awaited second volume.
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Mao Fujita:2024-09-25

72 Preludes

Mao Fujita traces the forward line of Preludes that started with Bach, through Chopin, to more recent times and distant territories. Nearly half a century after Chopin, Russian visionary Alexander Scriabin began work on his own set of Preludes. It was important for Fujita to complete his own “cycle” of cycles with a work from Japan, and in the 24 Preludes by Akio Yashiro, he found a perfect third chapter to his album.
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Cathy Krier:2024-09-22

Piano Poems

Throughout the ages, music and literature have always been closely linked. Composers have been inspired by poetry and stories. The program of Cathy Krier's new album explores composers’ relationship with language and how they deal with it, from Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit to Cinderella, continuing into our own time with two world premiere recordings.
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Théo Fouchenneret:2024-09-19

Fauré – Nocturnes

The music of Fauré was the source of Théo Fouchenneret's first musical emotions. He started practicing the Nocturnes at a very early age – the Third was on the program of his very first concert in Paris. Later, he won First Prize in the Gabriel Fauré International Competition in Pamiers, his hometown. "Celebrating the anniversary of his death this year is another opportunity I wouldn’t have missed for the world!"
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Théo Fouchenneret:2024-09-16

søleils blancs

"After living in Finland for a year, then travelling regularly to Sweden to work in the peace and quiet there, the path of chance – if such a thing exists – led me to Denmark, where I married a Danish musician and learned the language... This album pays tribute to the emotion I have felt in discovering a territory that has given me so much, countries so different from one another, and yet all marked by this vibrant glow."
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Grigory Sokolov:2024-09-12

Purcell & Mozart

Sokolov dedicated his entire 2022/23 season to the music of Purcell and Mozart, revealing their shared streaks of charm and melancholy. The album consists of two different live recordings – the first half is from Sokolov’s Purcell recital at the Santander International Festival in August 2023, while the Mozart half was recorded two days earlier in San Sebastián at the Quincena Music festival.
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Rikke Sandbjerg & Kristoffer Hyldig:2024-09-09

Espansiva – Works for 4 Hand Piano

These are all first recordings of Carl Nielsen’s piano duet arrangements of his orchestral works, the recent discoveries of which are a tale of luck and diligent librarianship—told by Rikke Sandberg in the booklet notes. Included are four-hand versions of the "Sinfonia Espansiva," two works from Nielsen’s Opera Saul & David, and the original sketch for the Højby Rifle Club March, composed by Nielsens’ father.
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Alexandra Ivanova:2024-09-07

Haydn – For 2 Hands and 4

Alexandra Ivanova performs Haydn on fortepianos from the composer's era, interspersing his works with short preludes (or "Impulses") of her own. In addition to two Sonatas and the great F Minor Variations, she also plays the rarely heard four-hand piece Il Maestro e lo Scolare, performing both the primo and secondo parts.
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Aline Piboule:2024-09-05

Fauré – Nocturnes and Barcarolles

Aline Piboule’s Fauré/Dutilleux disc (2017) was listed in Classica’s ‘Discographie idéale du piano’. Now she returns to Fauré, playing on a unique piano by Gaveau, built in 1929 and acquired in 1952 by the concert society Les Amis de la Musique de Pau, founded by Gonzalo Tintorer, a pianist and teacher who was a friend of Pablo Picasso, Francis Poulenc and Edgar Varèse.
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Duo Tal & Groethuysen:2024-09-04

Bach – Transcriptions for 2 Pianos

With this album, Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen follow up on their productions of the Goldberg Variations, Art of Fugue, and most recently Yaara's Tracing Bach. Arrangers are mostly from the late 19th century and the originals represent a wide range of Bach's output – organ works, other instrumental works, chorale preludes, arias, and the complete 6th Brandenburg Concerto.
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Máire Carroll:2024-09-02

Philip Glass – Complete Piano Etudes

Philip Glass composed his 20 piano etudes between 1991 and 2012. A decade later, they are the most performed and recorded of his works. In Book 1, Glass explored a variety of piano techniques, partly in order to improve his own playing, while Book 2 follows more adventurous paths in terms of musical ideas, harmony and structure.
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Jonathan Fournel:2024-08-30

Chopin & Szymanowski

Jonathan Fournel came to international attention when he won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth International Grand Prix-Queen Mathilde Prize in 2021 (having already won several international competitions a few years earlier). Here is his interpretation of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, bookended by two early variation works by Karol Szymanowski.
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Somi Kim:2024-08-28

Pictures at an Exhibition

Somi Kim's debut solo album features two Suites inspired by visual art - the monumental Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, preceded by Aotearoa Pictures, an 11-part work from New Zealand composer Janet Jennings, responding to artworks by four New Zealanders – Areez Katki, Alberto Garcia Alvarez Hiria Anderson-Mita, and Star Gossage.
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Alexandra Dariescu:2024-08-26

Clara Schumann & Edvard Grieg – Piano Concertos

For three consecutive seasons, Alexandra Dariescu has strived for and achieved gender equality in her concerto programming, shining a light on the often-overlooked brilliance of women composers. “I got to know Clara Schumann’s Concerto and fell in love with this youthful piece, full of dreams, fiendish virtuosity and a testament to what an innovative performer and composer Clara was, even as a teenager".
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Isata Kanneh-Mason:2024-08-23

Mendelssohn

Isata Kanneh-Mason recently featured in The Other Mendelssohn, a film exploring the life of Fanny Mendelssohn and uncovering the fact that the Easter Sonata, a piece lost for 150 years, was in fact written by Fanny, not Felix. This album includes the world premiere recording of the new urtext edition of the Sonata, along with Felix's First Piano Concerto and transcriptions by other composers of Mendelssohn’s most famous music.
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Maria Narodytska:2024-08-21

War Poems

Unfortunately, history is full of wars and consequently, there are many musical works of genius that can be listened to as commentaries on the horrors of war. Maria Narodytska presents a number of such works from the 19th and 20th centuries, alongside new music, composed in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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Alfredo Perl:2024-08-20

Beethoven – Complete Piano Works, Vol. 1

In 1997, Alfredo Perl performed all Beethoven piano sonatas in London, Santiago de Chile, and Moscow. At the same time, his first recording of the 32 sonatas was released. Now he has re-recorded them for this complete Beethoven project. Vol. 1 features works composed in 1791-1800, mainly in two genres central to Beethoven’s entire career, namely the variation and the sonata.
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Silver Garburg Piano Duo:2024-08-18

Schubert – Piano Duets

Silver and Garburg were well on the way to promising solo careers when they paired up first privately and then at the piano. 20 years later, they are firmly established at the top of the international piano duo scene. This album showcases some of Schubert's finest works from his final years – the F minor Fantasy, the C major Grand Duo, "Lebensstürme", and others.
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Junhee Kim:2024-08-16

Apparitions – Junhee Kim Plays Liszt

The obligatory hiatus during the pandemic led Junhee Kim to explore some of Liszt’s lesser-known piano pieces, ending up with a "personal playlist" with works from all periods of the composer's life. “I wanted to approach Liszt’s essential self – a personality that differs from all the images we have of him as a human being.”
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Anna Shelest:2024-08-14

Donna Voce, Vol. 2 – Women of Legend

The 2019 release of Donna Voce, a survey of music by women composers from the last three centuries, became Anna Shelest’s ongoing musical project that includes live performances, lectures, and videos, as well as this sequel album, featuring Fanny Mendelssohn’s monumental piano cycle Das Jahr (The Year), and Mel Bonis' Femmes de Légende (Women of Legend).
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Paul Guinery:2024-08-13

Finger Prints

Following on from two highly praised collections of light-music classics (Dicky Bird Hop and Chasing Moonbeams) for EM Records, Paul Guinery releases a third selection. Honoring the old Viennese adage of "taking serious music lightly and light music seriously", Guinery has once again quarried his extensive music archive for solo piano gems composed simply to entertain.
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Hyewon Chang:2024-08-11

Fantasie Reflections

Hyewon Chang's debut album interestingly juxtaposes fantasias by Mozart and Schumann. Fantasie Reflections ventures through Mozart's Fantasia in C Minor (K. 396), Fantasia in D Minor (K. 397), and Fantasia in C Minor (K. 475) before plunging into Schumann's impassioned Fantasie in C major, originally conceived as a 'Grand Sonata' in honor of Beethoven.
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John Noel Roberts:2024-08-09

Ives – Piano Sonata 1

The programmatic character of the First Piano Sonata by Charles Ives, according to John Kirkpatrick, has “the family together in the 1st and 5th movements; the boy is sowing his oats in the ragtimes (2nd and 4th movements; and there is parental anxiety in the third movement." It is a landmark of American piano literature, although less well known than Ives’ Concord Sonata.
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David Kaplan:2024-08-07

New Dances of the League of David

New Dances of the League of David is a suite that weaves new miniatures by leading American composers into Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6. The fifteen contemporary composers’ pieces, commissioned by David Kaplan between 2013 and 2015, cover a range of styles but are unified by their engagement with the spirit of Schumann.
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