New Piano Albums

Joanna Goodale:2022-06-09

Debussy in Resonance

On her new album Joanna Goodale enters into a dialogue with Claude Debussy. Inspired by the French composer's creative freedom, reverence for Nature, and fascination for Indonesian music, she has created tailor-made compositions for piano, gongs and singing bowls that dialogue with his, following a narrative thread along the water, the original source of life.
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Konstantin Lifschitz:2022-06-07

Bach, Seabourne – Toccatas and Fantasies

Konstantin Lifschitz's rich discography includes among other things Bach's Art of Fugue, Goldberg variations, and the complete Well-Tempered Clavier. Here, the seven Toccatas are interleaved with new works by Peter Seabourne, who says of the project: "After the inevitable nervousness of sharing a bed with such a genius, I increasingly warmed to the idea… it was the general concept both of 'toccata', and specifically how it shaped Bach’s miniature tone poems that appealed."
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Oda Voltersvik:2022-06-03

Neo – Scriabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Gubaidulina

After the Romantic period, the trend towards neo-classical forms in both Europe and Russia came from a desire to bring clarity and stability. Within the frame of classical forms, these Russian masters do not only express their common heritage (i.e. works by Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov), but also show their human response to an uncertain and shifting political world.
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Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy:2022-06-01

Scarlatti – Sonatas

Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy is a prolific recording artist with a broad repertoire by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Chopin, Warenberg/Rachmaninoff, Kabalevsky, Tschaikowsky and Gershwin. You might have benefited from his advice without knowing it if you have used Henle's Chopin and Schumann editions, where he often writes the fingerings! This is his selection of Scarlatti Sonatas.
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Zee Zee:2022-05-29

Journey

Zee Zee (or Zuo Zhang) began her musical training in Germany at the age of five, and later continued her studies in China and the United States. She won the coveted Petschek Piano Award at the Juilliard, as well as first prizes at China's International Piano Concerto Competition and the Gina Bachauer Competition. Her first solo album features works associated with travel and pilgrimage by Liszt, Ravel, Poulenc, Schoenberg and Wagner.
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Marianna Shirinyan & Dominik Wizjan:2022-05-27

Rachmaninov – Suites for 2 Pianos

Marianna Shirinyan and Dominik Wizjan have played piano duo and 2-piano repertoire ever since the early days of Dominik’s master studies with Marianna at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. During the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, the idea appeared to make a recording of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Suites for piano duo.
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Federico Colli:2022-05-24

Mozart

This is the first instalment of a new, intensely personal project by Federico Colli, who was inspired to study music by the discovery of Mozart’s music at the age of around six. Later, he won the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg which launched his career. The booklet includes a very heartfelt letter from Colli to Mozart, explaining the ideas that inspire his playing on this album.
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Josep Colom:2022-05-21

Moments Musicaux

This is a live recording of a recital combining works by Schubert with others by composers who either inspired him or inherited the legacy of his music. Josep Colom also revives a once common but now largely forgotten performing tradition: that of using improvisation to create transitions between composed works.
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Tanguy de Williencourt:2022-05-18

Franck - Triptychs & Works for Piano and Orchestra

Tanguy de Williencourt discovered César Franck as a ten-year-old, blown away by the composer's Piano Quintet and Violin Sonata. On this album, he plays the four masterpieces by Franck which give the piano the central place: two concertante pieces, Les Djinns and Symphonic Variations, and the two triptychs for solo piano.
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Anna Górecka:2022-05-17

Górecki - Piano Works

Already as a young boy, Henryk Górecki immersed himself in the pianistic element, and composed numerous mazurkas, preludes and other miniatures. He continued to write for the instrument during his whole career, although he became better known for his orchestral and choral works. The performer here is his daughter Anna Górecka.
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Luisa Imorde:2022-05-15

Polychromie - Messiaen & Couperin

Luisa Imorde's new album juxtaposes Messiaen's eight Preludes with the eight Preludes from Couperin's L'art de toucher le clavecin. Music by two composers, two and a half centuries apart, who at first seem to have very little to do with each other and yet are revealed to have musical similarities.
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Can Çakmur:2022-05-13

Without Borders - Bartók, Mitropoulos, Saygun, Enescu

In the early modern era, folk music opened up possibilities in connection with the dissolution of tonality. Previously, folk music had often been used within a nationalist agenda, or to satisfy the Romantic longing for a rustic life. Can Çakmur's new album explores some Eastern European composers' unsentimental and internationalist responses to folk music.
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Danae Dörken:2022-05-11

Odyssee

The Odyssey has fascinated Danae Dörken from a very young age. Even as a child, the ancient Greek epic poem was read to her as a bedtime story by her grandparents. She knows the various stages of the journey inside out, and considers it a very current story. "I think we're going through a modern odyssey. That's what I want to show with this album."
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Duo Lucas & Arthur Jussen:2022-05-09

Dutch Masters

With their new album. Lucas and Arthur Jussen want to present the rich treasure of Dutch music from the 20th and 21st centuries. They also pay tribute to their mentor and teacher Ton Hartsuiker, who recognized, inspired and encouraged them in their childhood days. One of the pieces is Theo Loevendie's Together, which was composed especially for the brothers and became an instant hit for the two.
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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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