New Piano Albums

Martina Frezzotti:2022-05-06

Fanny Mendelssohn - Piano Music

Martina Frezzoti’s debut album focuses on Fanny Mendelssohn (Felix's sister) who produced dozens of piano pieces and Lieder, as well as a string quartet – one of the first women to do so –, concert arias, and choral works. The album’s major work is a cycle of character pieces based on the months of the year, ingeniously unified by leitmotifs which run through the 13 pieces, including a final chorale.
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Reinis Zarinš:2022-05-04

Peteris Vasks – Piano Works

The love for the Latvian landscape is audible in the piano works of Latvia’s greatest living composer, Peteris Vasks, especially in his Seasons, the composer’s most frequently performed piano work. Two other piano works receive premier recordings here: Zyklus, from the 1970s, and a new piano work, Cuckoo’s Voice (Spring Elegy), written by the composer for Reinis Zarinš during the pandemic.
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Kristian Bezuidenhout:2022-05-02

Beethoven – Piano Concertos 1 & 3

Kristian Bezuidenhout and the musicians of the Freiburger Barockorchester recorded all five Beethoven concertos during an intense ten-day session in 2020. The two albums released before have attracted high praise – Gramophone wrote of the first instalment: “I doubt that Beethoven, at least recently, has sounded quite so original or so much fun.”
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Tobias Haunhorst:2022-04-29

Transformation – Schubert, Liszt, Heucke

Tobias Haunhorst's new album features Liszt's B minor Sonata, Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, and Stefan Heucke's Sonata, inspired by these two Romantic masterpieces. "It is striking that all three pieces are based on very simple themes. Just a couple of bars, really. What I find fascinating is how these themes unfold into so many different facets and characters, and how they form a dramatic development."
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Leif Ove Andsnes:2022-04-25

Mozart Momentum - 1786

Since 2019, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Leif Ove Andsnes have joined forces to explore two especially remarkable years in the history of classical music, when Mozart was at his most productive. Mozart Momentum 1785/1786 is a performing and recording project spanning four years, of which this is the second CD release.
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David Kadouch:2022-04-23

Les musiques de Madame Bovary

Just like Kadouch's previous recording Revolution, this new recital explores the two worlds of music and literature. Here he invents a soundtrack to the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – imagining the music that Emma Bovary might have listened to during her short life, and evoking the often-forgotten women composers of Flaubert’s time.
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Grigory Sokolov:2022-04-21

Grigory Sokolov at Esterházy Palace - Haydn, Schubert

Few locations for a concert could be more inspiring than the Haydnsaal at Esterházy Palace in Eisenstadt. Here, Joseph Haydn spent over three decades serving as Kapellmeister to the Esterházy princes. Not long before his own death, in 1828, Franz Schubert went on a three-day walking tour – some 35 miles each way – to Eisenstadt, with his brother Ferdinand, to visit Haydn's grave.
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Anna Kislitsyna:2022-04-20

Piano Spectrums

This is Anna Kislitsyna's first solo album, after eight contemporary chamber music CD's as the pianist of Trio Casals. Ten contemporary composers share their works on this album with an eclectic program, both in terms of styles and subject matters – ranging from concert etudes to tango to variations on a Beethoven theme.
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Julius Asal:2022-04-19

Prokofiev - Romeo & Juliet

At the heart of this recording is Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, the music of which reappeared in a total of three orchestral suites, and a suite for piano containing ten selected transcriptions. This version, for the first time, includes six other pieces from Romeo and Juliet, which Julius Asal has arranged for piano.
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Martin Helmchen:2022-04-17

Robert & Clara Schumann - Noveletten, Gesänge der Frühe, Soirées musicales

Martin Helmchen's new Schumann album is almost a biographical programme, featuring the composer's budding emergence as an artist, his spousal devotion and inspiration, and the meditative mood of his final happy phase – not yet overshadowed by illness and sorrow. Helmchen performs on a Bechstein fortepiano of 1860 from Chris Maene's collection.
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François Dumont:2022-04-14

Chopin - Ballades & Impromptus

François Dumont's 2018 recording of Chopin's nocturnes won widespread acclaim. This is how he describes his new Chopin album: "Where the Ballades are expansive and dense, with their dramatic power rooted in epic and legend and their bright or sombre hues, the Impromptus are light and concise, elusive and ephemeral, airy, fragile and volatile in texture, and with delicate touches of colour that spread joy, effervescent or serene, on the fleet wings of their melodies."
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Jean-Efflam Bavouzet:2022-04-12

Mozart - Concertos 22 & 23

The acclaimed Mozart Concertos series with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Manchester Camerata reaches Vol. 6. The two concertos presented here were composed 1785–86, at a time when Mozart was working on Le nozze di Figaro, and was at the height of his fame as a composer and virtuoso pianist.
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Anastasia Safonova:2022-04-10

Vol vers l'étoile - Scriabin, Medtner, Pasternak

2022 marks the 150th anniversary of Alexander Scriabin’s birth. Anastasia Safonova pairs his music with that of Medtner and Boris Pasternak, a poet whose house was a meeting point for painters, musicians, writers and poets, where they played music, recited their works, and discussed everything, a manifestation of the great outburst of creativity that occurred in Russia at the turn of the century.
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Alexandre Kantorow:2022-04-07

Saint-Saëns - Piano Concertos 1 & 2

In 2019, Alexandre Kantorow became the first French pianist to win the gold medal at the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition. His disc of Saint-Saëns Concertos 3-5 has recieved many awards and distinctions - here are the first two concertos, as well as a number of shorter works for piano and orchestra by the same composer.
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Martin James Bartlett:2022-04-04

Rachmaninov/Gershwin - Rhapsody

Martin James Bartlett made his BBC Proms debut in 2015 at 19 years of age, performing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He now has recorded the work with the same orchestra, pairing it with another celebrated Rhapsody from the same era: Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
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Daniel Barenboim:2022-04-01

Encores

Deutsche Grammophon is set to honor Daniel Barenboim throughout 2022 as he approaches his 80th birthday. Recorded in the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin - built on the initiative of Barenboim - Encores features miniature masterpieces by Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Chopin, Debussy and Albéniz.
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Costanza Principe:2022-03-30

Schumann - Piano Works

Costanza Principe presents a personal selection of Schumann works, favoring lesser-known pieces - with the exception of the renowned (and much feared) Toccata Op. 7. The album includes pieces from the opposite ends of the composer’s career - the tumultuous Allegro Op.8, a Beethovenian flexing of pianistic muscle from the 21-year-old composer, and his very last work, Gesänge der Frühe.
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Gabriel Stern:2022-03-27

Liszt - Études d'exécution transcendante

Like Chopin, Liszt transfigured the traditional étude for piano, creating piano works that are as relentless in their physical demands as they are in their lyrical and imaginative demands on the pianist. The Twelve Transcendental Studies, "studies of Sturm and Drang for, at the most, ten or twelve players in the world" (Schumann), remind us that Liszt was not only an unequalled virtuoso, but also a visionary poet and bold innovator.
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Mattia Ometto:2022-03-24

Medtner - Forgotten Melodies

Medtner achieved significant fame as a pianist and composer during his own lifetime. His music is one the one hand eminently learned, using a classical framework - he wrote 14 piano sonatas and three concertos. On the other hand there is a poignant lyricism, as in the sketches, arabesques, Skazki (Fables) and other miniatures. The "Forgotten Melodies" are a middle ground between these two categories.
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Lars Vogt:2022-03-21

Mendelssohn - Piano Concertos, Capriccio Brilliant

Lars Vogt has increasingly been working with orchestras as a conductor and is now Music Director of Orchestre de Chambre de Paris. Last year he was diagnosed with cancer, but has continued to play while receiving treatment. "I celebrated it for myself a little, the fact that in my condition I was at all able to play these notes – after twelve chemotherapy sessions, where it was said to me that I possibly would no longer be able to play the piano. That this now still could be done!"
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Anna Petrova:2022-03-19

Slavic Heart (Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Vladigerov)

Through the music of four composers, three Russian and one Bulgarian, Anna Petrova explores some of the essential elements of Slavic music. In her detailed and well-written program notes, she identifies six "cultural tropes" that tie the music on this album "in a beautiful ribbon of interdependence": Nature, Songfulness, Love, Bells, The Tragic, and Wit.
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Catalin Serban:2022-03-17

Resemblances (Chopin, Scriabin)

Scriabin was and remained an outsider, but some of his early works are reminiscent of Chopin, as many of the titles reveal, such as Préludes, Études and Nocturnes “At first I was interested in both composers independently of one another,” explains Catalin Serban. “Then I noticed the closer connections. Now, Scriabin seems to me like a continuation of what Chopin developed.“
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Francois-Frederic Guy:2022-03-14

Révolutions (Debussy, Murail)

François-Frédéric Guy links Debussy with the writing of Tristan Murail, a leading exponent of so-called “spectral” music. According to Guy, Murail’s pieces "have the clarity and elegance that are identified as the hallmarks of French music of the first half of the twentieth century...We are never certain of the harmonic universe surrounding us, but we’re never lost either. For me, this is an almost ideal mode of musical expression in the twenty-first century."
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Sara Aimée Smiseth:2022-03-11

Backer Grøndahl - Piano Works

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as one of the 19th century’s greatest virtuoso pianists, Agathe Backer Grøndahl was also a pioneer among women composers, juggling marriage, motherhood and an extensive career. She was taught by Liszt in Weimar, and as one of Norway’s most respected composer-pianists, created a large body of work that displays colourful stylistic variety and poetic breadth.
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