New Piano Albums

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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Rebeca Omordia:2024-08-04

African Pianism Vol. 2

Omordia's first album of African piano music was warmly received by critics. Hailed as a "classical music game changer", she is artistic director and founder of the world’s first-ever African Concert Series, resident series at Wigmore Hall, London. The term African Pianism comes from the composer J.H. Kwabena Nketia and refers to a style of piano music influenced by African percussion music.
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George Li:2024-08-01

Movements – Schumann, Ravel, Stravinsky

For his third Warner Classics release since his silver medal win at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2015, George Li has assembled a ''dance program", featuring Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze, Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales, and Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka. Gramophone Magazine chose this as one of the Best New Classical Recordings of the month.
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Elizaveta Don:2024-07-30

Préludes: Anticipation

Elizaveta Don's debut album is entirely dedicated to the 'Prelude' – in addition to famous works by Debussy and Shostakovich, she also interprets Frank Martin‘s little-known cycle, which she regards as an absolute masterpiece. She sees these preludes as "a journey through uncertainty and hope, the real and surreal, the irony and tragedies of the twentieth century."
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Aniele Steininger:2024-07-28

Tradizione e libertà – Scarlatti, Katzer, Hensel

The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti's more than 550 single-movement sonatas influenced numerous composers across all eras, from his contemporary Bach, Chopin, and 21st-century artists such as Georg Katzer. The pieces by Fanny Hensel that close this album also have an Italian connection; they were all inspired and composed during her long-awaited and very formative trip to Italy in 1839-1840.
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Mishka Rushdie Momen:2024-07-25

Reformation

Mishka Rushdie Momen makes a surprising, personal, and highly enjoyable Hyperion debut, offering pearls of Renaissance keyboard music very rarely heard on a modern Steinway grand piano, bringing new perspective to the music of Byrd, Sweelinck, Gibbons and Bull. "Musically speaking, exploring this repertoire on the piano gives me a sense of encountering a palace of riches... I would love it if works from this period were to become fully integrated into the modern pianist’s canon."
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Anna Zassimova:2024-07-23

Defying Destiny

Designed as "a journey through the musical landscape of Russian destiny", Anna Zassimova's new album features Shostakovich, Medtner, and neglected works by Catoire, Mosolov, Schnittke, and Zaderatsky, all of whose works seem like parables of implacable destinies against which it seems futile to struggle, but which must be defied.
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Sandrine Erdely-Sayo:2024-07-22

Majestic Liszt

"Franz Liszt’s music has been an inspiration for me from a very young age and Majestic Liszt represents a childhood dream that immerses us in the poetry of Lamartine. It is a recording full of spirituality, love, and poetic thoughts." Sandrine Erdely-Sayo pours every ounce of her being into capturing the contemplative and song-like quality that pervades Liszt’s middle-to-late repertoire.
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Mikael Ayrapetyan:2024-07-20

Khachaturian – Ballet Transcriptions, Masquerade Suite

Mikael Ayrapetyan's recordings of music from his homeland Armenia have been met with admiration. Aram Khachaturian produced two ballet masterpieces – Spartacus and Gayane, symphonic in conception and, in the case of Gayane, marked by the use of leitmotifs. These piano arrangements maintain the texture and clarity of the original orchestral scores, preserving the essence of Khachaturian’s music.
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