New Piano Albums

Juho Pohjonen:2024-07-03

Rameau, Scriabin – Visionaries of the Keyboard

Rameau and Scriabin may appear as distant stars in the firmament. Yet Juho Pohjonen sees striking affinities: "Rameau’s harpsichord compositions, while precise and ordered, are never mechanical, bringing an emotive fluidity to the elegance of the Baroque. Scriabin approached the piano with a similar blend of precision yet freedom."
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Jennifer Fichet:2024-07-01

Amy Beach – Une prodige empêchée (A Prodigy Held Back)

A child prodigy pianist and yet, as a woman, deprived of a high-level musical education, Amy Beach nevertheless became the first woman composer to be acknowledged in the United States. Snubbed by publishers after her death despite a brilliant and esteemed carreer, her very rich catalogue for solo piano deserves to be rediscovered.
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Pierre Solot:2024-06-29

Ernesto Lecuona – Piano Music

"Lecuona’s music is a blend of romantic virtuosity, Cuban dances, passionate outpourings, evocations of travel, and a few decadent relics of 19th-century Vienna… It is the music of a crooner on the piano who gives all of himself, his excesses and his miracles, in total sincerity; by cultivating a wildly imperfect humanity, his music is an injunction to joy!" – Pierre Solot
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Emmanuel Despax:2024-06-27

Liszt – Dante Sonata, Sonata in B Minor, etc

Emmanuel Despax has always been captivated by the drama, scope, and artistry of Liszt's music – his remarkable ability to make the piano emulate a whole orchestra, and the fact that he foresaw many stylistic shifts of the early 20th century. The repertoire selected for this album embodies a duality of light and darkness, heaven and hell, pivotal themes in Liszt’s artistic expression.
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Bertrand Chamayou:2024-06-26

Cage²

John Cage invented the "prepared" piano at the beginning of the 1940s – by placing a variety of felt, metal, and rubber objects between the strings, he created a wholly new soundworld, sometimes bright and metallic, sometimes muffled and mysterious. This album takes its title from a stage show featuring Bertrand Chamayou and dancer Élodie Sicard, where four differently prepared pianos were used, each in a corner of the stage (“Cage squared”).
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Guoda Gedvilaite:2024-06-24

Bach – Echoes of Eternity

Featuring works by Johann Sebastian Bach at its core, this recording interlaces Bach's original compositions, his arrangements of other Baroque pieces, and romantic transcriptions by famous pianists such as Wilhelm Kempff and Egon Petri. "These musical and personal reminiscences create a temporal bridge between past and present, which I traverse through my thoughts and musical interpretations."
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Aurélien Pontier:2024-06-20

Vienna - Joyful Apocalypse

This album is dedicated to the last years of Imperial Vienna, and is dominated by waltzes such as virtuoso Strauss transcriptions and Ravel's La Valse. “A veritable musical metaphor for the suicide of Europe that was the Great War, both apotheosis and apocalypse. We also hear evocations of Schubert, Liszt, Mahler and Kreisler, all imbued with a kind of nostalgia that belongs only to this mythical city.”
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Kun-Woo Paik:2024-06-17

Mozart – Piano Works 1

Pianist Kun-woo Paik has released his first-ever Mozart album, the first part of a planned trilogy. Featuring Sonatas 12 & 16 and several other works, it marks a significant departure from Paik's usual repertoire, as he has never recorded Mozart before despite a 68-year-long career, and an extensive discography of more than 30 albums.
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Reed Tetzloff:2024-06-15

Beethoven – Piano Concertos 4 & 5

"The impossibly tender solo piano opening of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto has haunted me from my childhood. I immediately knew that G major chord was different: within its introspection lay a power that could calm the whole world... I came to the Fifth Concerto later in life, but it occupies an equally special place in my heart… Here is a vast drama, where the valiant soloist singularly leads the orchestra into battle." (Reed Tetzloff)
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Vardan Mamikonian:2024-06-12

Invitation à la Danse

Vardan Mamikonian devotes this album to pieces linked to the art of dance from different eras and cultures. "Dance has always been a source of entertainment and joy, but it can also represent more sombre occasions, with pomp and grandeur. The Chaconne, for example, has become both tragic and sublime over time... Chopin's Mazurkas can be rustic and folkloric, haunting or lyrical, even dramatic. In short, dance can express diametric opposites and unite those opposites at the same time."
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Genny Basso:2024-06-10

Neapology

When Genny Basso listened to his mother playing Neapolitan songs on the piano, a musical passion began that he has continued to cultivate along with his classical training. At some point, however, he realized that the Neapolitan tradition deserved a larger and more exclusive space in his artistic production. "It’s my personal way to thank a unique land, whose everlasting creativity is an unlimited source of inspiration."
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Peter Donohoe:2024-06-07

Granados – Goyescas, Book 1
Albéniz – Iberia, Books 1 & 2

Peter Donohoe discovered Albéniz when working closely with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in the late 70s. Messiaen's admiration for Albéniz seemed as great as it was for Liszt, Franck, Wagner, Mozart, and Bach. "This inspired a determination on my part to immerse myself for a while in the works of Albéniz … although the immense technical difficulties of his largest-scale work – Iberia – persuaded me to wait for a very long time before performing any of it."
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William Howard:2024-06-06

Sixteen Nocturnes and a Lantern

William Howard is passionate about the classical piano repertoire, especially from the 19th century, but has also been very active in commissioning new works. This album of Nocturnes by 16 composers – male and female, from Clara Schumann to Francis Poulenc – is closed off with a premiere recording of Howard Skempton's Lantern.
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Inna Faliks:2024-06-03

Manuscripts Don't Burn

"Manuscripts don’t burn" is a famous line in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a novel that weaves through Inna Faliks' newly published memoir, Weight in the Fingertips - A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage. This album, something of a mirror image to the memoir, includes five premiere recordings, some of which are written for "speaking pianist", illustrating Faliks' love of dialogue between music and words.
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Fazil Say:2024-05-31

Evening

Fazil Say has just released two albums conceived as a pair, featuring pieces associated with either morning or evening – embodying "the unique joy and melancholy of these times of day". The Evening album features classics from the Romantic period, including Chopin’s Nocturnes, some Impressionist works, like Debussy's Clair de lune, and works by Janacek, and Satie.
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Andrey Gugnin:2024-05-29

Grieg – Holberg Suite, Ballade, & Lyric Pieces

Since winning the Sydney International Piano Competition in 2016, Andrey Gugnin has been steadily building his reputation as a concert and recording artist – his albums of Liszt, Scriabin, Godowsky, and Shostakovich have received great praise. This is his portrait of Grieg, with a selection of Lyric Pieces, the Holberg Suite, and the majestic Ballade.
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Alexandre Tharaud:2024-05-26

& Friends – Four Hands

"This was something I’d had in mind for a long time – to put together an album for the sheer pleasure of it, in collaboration with dear friends and paying tribute to the wonders of the piano duet repertoire.” Tharaud's list of friends is a roll call of household piano names, as well as some surprise appearances, including cellist Gautier Capuçon, countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, and singer-songwriter Juliette.
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Christina Petrowska Quilico:2024-05-25

Games of the Night Wind

Games of the Night Wind is a dreamy musical landscape featuring twelve of David Jaeger’s Nocturnes, and 20th-century works by Takemitsu, Tansman, and Górecki. The Nocturnes, written between 2020 and 2023, are all based on poetry Jaeger compiled from several authors he collaborated with: David Cameron, Seán Haldane, Bruce Whiteman, and his pianist collaborator, Christina Petrowska Quilico.
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Martin Helmchen:2024-05-23

Bach – Six Partitas

"One of the most thrilling moments of my life as a pianist was when I encountered the original, intact tangent piano built by Spät & Schmahl in 1790... Such colours... such a symbiosis of the characteristics of the harpsichord, clavichord and early piano..." Martin Helmchen saw possibilities opening up that weren't available anywhere else, and has now recorded Bach's 6 Partitas on this unique instrument.
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Evgenia Rubinova:2024-05-21

Tchaikovsky's Testament –
18 Morceaux Op. 72

Tchaikovsky’s last piano cycle, written just a year before his death, could be described as a light-hearted but sophisticated musical diary, with several dedications and nods to various other composers. Consisting mainly of dance movements, this collection has been unfairly overshadowed by the global fame of works like the "Pathétique" and the "Nutcracker", both of which emerged during the same period.
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Julius Asal:2024-05-19

Scriabin – Scarlatti

Julius Asal chose two different Steinways for this recording, one for its sumptuous dark sonorities, the other for its clear, crisp sound. Two composers rarely mentioned in the same breath are put side by side – Scriabin's First Piano Sonata and a selection of his etudes and preludes are interspersed with six sonatas by Scarlatti. “These miniatures by Scriabin and Scarlatti are like mythical creatures from another dimension.”
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Steven Masi:2024-05-18

Ballades & Other Musings

Steven Masi's previous albums have focused on Germanic repertoire – a 10-disc recording of the complete Beethoven Sonatas and recordings of late works by Schubert and Brahms. With this album he shifts focus, exploring Chopin and Debussy and contemporary pieces by Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose stirring musical language blends quite seamlessly with the Romantic and Impressionist repertoire.
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Yuja Wang:2024-05-15

The Vienna Recital

Yuja Wang proves her wide-ranging musical imagination on this eclectic and unpredictably programmed album, recorded live in Vienna in 2022. She displays fiery virtuosity in jazzy preludes by Nikolai Kapustin and complex etudes by György Ligeti, as well as mature musicality in masterpieces by Beethoven, Scriabin, and Albéniz. The several encores span the history of music from Gluck to Glass.
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Irene Russo:2024-05-14

Liszt – Transcendental Etudes

"Whether or not Liszt may have conceived the 12 Transcendental Etudes to be performed as a cycle, their programmatic elements…could give one almost the sense of an entire opera's being performed at the piano!" writes Sandro Russo. He undertook this epic project with some doubt; according to Russo the etudes often work better live – feeding from the energy of the audience and the performers’ adrenaline.
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