New Piano Albums

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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Yuki Negishi:2024-05-13

Preludes – Arensky, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Gershwin

Yuki Negishi plays a selection of early 20th-century Preludes on her second solo album. Arensky's 12 Preludes Op. 63 are juxtaposed with the much more famous 10 Preludes Op. 23 by his student Rachmaninoff – both collections were published in 1903. They are followed by Ravel's beautiful single Prelude (1913) and Gershwin's jazzy collection of Three Preludes (1926).
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Jonathan Biss:2024-05-11

Beethoven 'Emperor' Concerto,
Brett Dean 'A Winter's Journey'

Starting in 2015, Jonathan Biss and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra have commissioned five composers to write a piano concerto in response to one of Beethoven's. In Brett Dean's A Winter's Journey, the piano soloist begins the piece from within the orchestra, seated at an upright piano with super sordino (or practice pedal). This muffled, indistinct sound may be seen as a metaphor for Beethoven’s worsening deafness.
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Andrea Molteni:2024-05-09

Beethoven – Piano Sonatas op. 106 & 110, Grosse Fuge (piano solo version)

25-year-old Italian pianist Andrea Molteni combines classical repertoire with exciting forays into 20th-century Italian composers like Petrassi and Dallapiccola. The most unique feature of his new Beethoven album is the inclusion of Louis Winkler's rarely played arrangement for solo piano of the monumental Grosse Fuge for string quartet, one of Beethoven’s last compositions.
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Erik Bertsch:2024-05-08

George Benjamin – Complete Piano Works

Sir George Benjamin studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and piano with Yvonne Loriod. His works for the piano were written during two distinct periods, between 1978 and 1985, and between 2001 and 2004. The most recent work, Piano Figures, not technically demanding and therefore well suited to young pianists, was premiered by students of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, to whom the collection is dedicated.
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Célia Oneto Bensaid:2024-05-06

Jaëll, Liszt – Piano Concertos No. 1, Mephisto Waltz No. 3

Marie Jaëll (1846–1925) was a remarkable pianist; the first in France to perform Liszt's complete works, and the complete Beethoven sonatas. As a composer, she earned acclaim from Brahms, Fauré, Saint-Saëns... But her most profound connection was with Liszt – for Célia Oneto Bensaid, these two "serve as wellsprings of inspiration; as composers and virtuosos, they embody freedom, self-transcendence, and an avant-garde spirit!"
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Sergei Babayan & Daniil Trifonov :2024-05-04

Rachmaninoff for Two – Suites 1 & 2, Symphonic Dances

Sergei Babayan’s first album for Deutsche Grammophon was Prokofiev for Two (2018), in partnership with the legendary Martha Argerich – an album critics said took “the piano duo to a new level”. During the Rachmaninoff year 2023 he teamed up with Daniil Trifonov – another formidable virtuoso – for this Rachmaninoff program, recorded live in Vienna.
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Mikhail Pletnev:2024-05-02

Brahms, Shor, Chopin

Pianist, conductor, composer, and leading cultural figure – all are significant facets of Mikhail Pletnev’s remarkable life and career, ever since his First Prize in the 1978 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition. In this live recording from the Berliner Philharmonie, he offers personal interpretations of Brahms and Chopin, and presents his adapted version of Alexey Shor's Piano Sonata, rewritten in close collaboration with the composer.
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David Potvin:2024-04-30

Catharsis – Coulthard, Devaux, Derksen

'Catharsis' is an emotional experience in which difficult, often repressed feelings are released and transformed; tension is heightened until the perspective shifts and one enters a state of peace and tranquility. According to David Potvin, "all the works on this album contain elements of the cathartic experience." When Potvin recently toured with an all-Canadian program, these works by Cris Derksen, Jean Coulthard, and Keiko Devaux quickly became audience favorites.
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Anna Vinnitskaya:2024-04-27

Piano Dances – Ravel, Shostakovich, Widmann

Anna Vinnitskaya's new album consists mostly of 'Viennese' Waltzes – not the works by Johan Strauss that have defined the genre, but waltzes that are reflected, parodied, or thoughtfully reinterpreted by composers from later eras: Ravel, Shostakovich and Jörg Widmann. A further aspect of the program fascinates Vinnitskaya: ‘All these pieces make one feel as if returned to one’s childhood, for these three composers seem to be thinking about their own childhoods."
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Duo Bax-Chung:2024-04-26

Debussy and Ravel for Two

After meeting at the 1997 Hamamatsu Competition, Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung carried on a courtship by telephone and email while on separate tours, eventually marrying in 2004. They still have busy performance schedules both as solo artists and as a piano duo. The latest album features music by Debussy and Ravel, original works as well as transcriptions – such as Dutilleux’s two-piano version of the perennial favorite, Clair de lune.
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Yunchan Lim:2024-04-25

Chopin Études

Van Cliburn competition winner Yunchan Lim's previous releases include a Billboard-charting live performance of Liszt’s Transcendental Études. The video of his Cliburn performance of Rach 3 has become the most-watched version of that piece on the platform (14 million views). An exclusive Decca Classics artist, he now makes a studio debut as audacious as it is impressive: the 24 Chopin Études Opp. 10 & 25.
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Salih Can Gevrek:2024-04-24

Schumann, Bach, Rachmaninov – Concertos Without Orchestra

How can a pianist alone imitate the fullness of an orchestral ensemble, and even reproduce the dialogue between a soloist and an orchestra that takes place in a concerto? Salih Can Gevrek here attempts to offer a concrete answer to this with three works that exemplify the piano’s assimilation to the orchestra.
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Xiaowen Shang:2024-04-23

Music of Silence

Xiaowen Shang is a versatile pianist and harpsichordist with a repertoire from the Renaissance to contemporary music. Her all-Spanish debut album combines Antonio Soler’s eighteenth-century flamboyant sonatas with piano transcriptions of the sixteenth-century sacred composer Antonio de Cabézon, and Federico Mompou’s 20th-century masterpiece Música callada.
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Guillaume Bellom:2024-04-21

Richard Strauss – Piano Works

Guillaume Bellom was first struck by the musical language of the young Richard Strauss in the two sonatas for violin and cello – the orchestral dimension of the writing, the shimmering timbres, and his art of the extended phrase. "It occurred to me that his early work, and more particularly his piano works, had been all too rarely recorded".
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Yundi:2024-04-19

Mozart – The Sonata Project (Salzburg)

Although often associated with Chopin (he was the first Chinese and the youngest pianist in history to win the International Chopin Piano Competition), Yundi returns to his musical roots with the Mozart Sonata Project. He was captivated by Mozart already at the age of 7, and aims for his audience to experience a similar infatuation with the “singing, colorful, human tone of the most ingenious composer”.
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Valentin Magyar:2024-04-17

Rachmaninov – Sentimental Moments

Valentin Magyar plays a selection of Rachmaninoff's Preludes and Études-tableaux on his debut album. The young Hungarian pianist won gold medal at the Vienna International Music Competition and received the György Cziffra Talent Award in 2023. He is now doing his masters in Budapest with Gábor Farkas and Dénes Várjon, and simultaneously in Berlin with Kirill Gerstein.
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