New Piano Albums

Sophia Weidemann:2024-04-16

Fanny Hensel – Das Jahr

Sophia Weidemann has been fascinated by the wealth of harmony and the variety of heart-rendering emotions in Fanny Hensel's das Jahr (The Year) ever since she first heard the work. On this album, letters and diary entries by Fanny (read in German by Tinka Kleffner) are interwoven between the pieces.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Kristjan Randalu:2024-04-13

Schumann/Randalu – Dichterliebe

Kristjan Randalu has one foot in the improvised world of jazz and the other one in the traditional realm of classical music. His recasting in 2020 of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with saxophone legend David Liebman gained him mention in The New York City Jazz Record’s “Best of 2020” list. This is his solo take on Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Sofja Gülbadamova:2024-04-11

Ernst von Dohnányi – Piano Works

Here is a rare chance to hear piano music by the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi, a great pianist but now more famous for his brilliantly orchestrated symphonic works. Sofja Gülbadamova’s recording is particularly intriguing because she uses Dohnányi’s own Bösendorfer with its curved keyboard, kept by the Museum of Music History in Budapest.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Nelson Goerner:2024-04-09

Liszt – B Minor Sonata,
Petrarch Sonnets etc.

Seventeen years after his first and highly praised recording of the Liszt B minor sonata, Nelson Goerner has felt the urge to re-record it, following a series of critically acclaimed concerts. In addition to the Sonata, Goerner treats us to the three beautiful Petrarch Sonnets, the mysterious Valse Oubliée no. 2, the sparkling concert etude La leggierezza, and the dramatic sixth Hungarian Rhapsody.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Ketevan Sharumashvili:2024-04-07

Connected – Piano Transcriptions

The Georgian pianist Ketevan Sharumashvili likes the transformative process behind piano transcriptions. "For me these transformations are linked to the human condition. We ourselves also transform during our lifetime but in essence our emotions stay the same". The music on this cd is connected through times like a string of pearls from Bach and Rachmaninoff to Gershwin who, in turn, inspired Wild and Volodos.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Alexandre Dossin:2024-04-05

George Walker – Complete Piano Works Vol. 1

This is the first of two albums presenting George Walker’s complete piano works, encompassing more than 60 years of his life, from the 1940s into the 21st century. During this period, his style matured to a level that could be easily compared to much more famous composers, such as Barber, Copland, or Bernstein. While the music of these composers have been thoroughly explored, Walker remains a hidden treasure.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Korkmaz Can Saglam:2024-04-03

Solace – Handel, Rachmaninoff,
Ilayda Deniz Oguz

Korkmaz Can Saglam was the Grand Prize winner of the 2022 Vendome Prize, where he was also awarded the Recording Prize. "This album is not a collection of soothing pieces, but rather works which made me confront my thoughts and feelings, and eventually helped me to make peace with them. I hope to inspire, evoke thoughts and feelings through this powerful music which had an enormous impact on my musical and personal journey".
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Lucas Debargue:2024-04-01

Fauré – Complete Piano Music

On 4 CDs, Lucas Debargues commemorates the 100th anniversary of Gabriel Fauré’s death, presenting the composer's complete works for piano in chronological order – a project, reports Debargue, that has ‘transformed my life both as a person and as a musician.’ The music was recorded on the newly designed Paulello Opus 102 piano.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

David Jalbert:2024-03-31

Prokofiev – Piano Sonatas Vol. 2 (Nos 5-7)

The Canadian pianist David Jalbert has an impressive discography of solo and chamber music on the ATMA label – his recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, and of American and French piano music, have garnered international praise. This is the second of three albums with his interpretations of Prokofiev's sonatas.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Yoav Levanon:2024-03-28

Rachmaninoff – Études-tableaux, Op. 39

Three years ago, at the age of 19, Yoav Levanon took part in a filmed project with Daniel Barenboim and performed at the Europa Open Air in Frankfurt in front of an audience of 25,000 at site and almost half a million viewers worldwide. Soon after he signed an exclusive recording agreement with Warner Classics. His debut album A Monument for Beethoven, released in 2022, attracted great attention from reviewers worldwide.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Mario Häring:2024-03-26

Exstase

Mario Häring has curated a program of solo and chamber works expressing various states of ecstasy, bliss, wild emotion and delirium, from Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, through Debussy, Scriabin, and Cage, to "Techno Parade" by Guillaume Connesson, where he is joined by Sharon Kam, clarinet, and Clara Andrada de la Calle, flute.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Andrey Denisenko:2024-03-24

Per aspera ad astra – Bach, Brahms, Schumann

Andrey Denisenko has chosen works born out of misery for his new album: "They arose from an inner struggle of the composer, from overcoming challenging life situations... Through music, the artists have arrived at a different state of being. They have transformed suffering, transcended it and put it into a new form, poured it into the triumph of music, and thus rendered it comprehensible for many."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Simon Callaghan & Hiroaki Takenouchi:2024-03-22

Danza Gaya – Music for Two Pianos

This CD brings together three prolific but little-known British composers: Dorothy Howell, Pamela Harrison, and Madeleine Dring. All three had dual careers as composer-performers, and wrote tonal music in a style that would fall out of fashion in the later twentieth century. Above all, they composed with a great sense of humour. The music on this disc sparkles with wit, energy and theatricality.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Lang Lang:2024-03-19

Saint-Saëns – Carnival of the Animals, Piano Concerto 2

On this French album Lang Lang mixes solo, duo, and concerto works by a rich selection of male, female, iconic, and lesser-known composers. Recording Saint-Saëns’s Second Piano Concerto was a mission to rediscover a neglected masterpiece. Pairing it with Carnival of the Animals was both an opportunity to foster a new generation's love of classical music and a chance to collaborate with his wife, Gina Alice.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Anastasia Vorotnaya:2024-03-17

Medtner & Rachmaninoff – Piano Sonatas

Rachmaninoff and Medtner were contemporaries, who marked the end of Russian Romanticism. Nicknamed the "Russian Brahms" (although closer to Liszt), Medtner composed no fewer than 14 piano sonatas at a time when the genre had gone out of fashion. The "Night Wind" Sonata is the seventh and most extensive of these, and was dedicated to Rachmaninoff.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Adriana von Franqué:2024-03-15

Filigrane

"Filigrane" is the French noun for "filigree," a goldsmith’s work made of an elaborate mesh of gold or silver thread. Here, Adriana von Franqué associates it with the delicate polyphony that unites the musical language of César Franck, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Lili Boulanger, and the Paris-educated Polish composer Simon Laks.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Beatrice Rana:2024-03-13

Chopin, Beethoven – Funeral March & Hammerklavier Sonatas

Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' and Chopin's 'Funeral March' Sonata have rarely featured on the same album. However, as Beatrice Rana puts it, these two works "transcend the human condition in very different ways – but not altogether different, because they both have so much to do with the fear of death, with the fear of loneliness... I think that made coupling these two pieces very interesting." Both works are also experiments at the highest visionary level.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Antonio Oyarzabal:2024-03-10

La Muse Oubliée II – Women Composers

"To say that it seems incomprehensible to me that for several of these pieces this one is their first recording, is an understatement." This second part of Antonio Oyarzabal's La Muse Oubliée does not intend to bring any sort of closure. On the contrary, it represents the continuation of a project as large as the number of female composers who have yet to be included.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Tamar Beraia:2024-03-08

Beethoven – Eroica variations, Rondos, Liszt – Sonata in B Minor

"It is an enormous pleasure for me to introduce my second solo album, featuring works by Beethoven and Liszt. These two composers have exerted a strong influence on me throughout my life and played a paramount role in forming me as a musician. I could be wild and unlimited in expression in Liszt, sincere and firm when playing Beethoven. The two, in tandem, always helped me convey my complex individuality."
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Duo Labèque:2024-03-06

Glass – Cocteau Trilogy

In 2021, legendary sibling pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque created the instrumental suites for two pianos taken from Philip Glass’s opera Les Enfants Terribles, based on the film by Cocteau. The result was so successful that they approached Glass to complete the set with the remaining two operas in the Cocteau Trilogy: Orphee and La Belle et la Bete.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Rochelle Sennet:2024-03-03

Bach To Black – Suites for Piano, Vol. 3

Rochelle Sennet's continuing interest in performing works by Black composers in combination with the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach has resulted in a third volume of Bach to Black. The album contains world premiere recordings of suites by Adolphus Hailstork and James Lee III as well as Black women composers Margaret Bonds, Montague Ring, Nkeiru Okoye, and Betty Jackson King, as well as a suite by William Grant Still.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Nikita Mndoyants:2024-02-29

Prokofiev – Piano Sonatas 4 & 8, Scherzo

Nikita Mndoyants, Cleveland winner in 2016, devotes this recording to Prokofiev, bringing together the Fourth and Eighth Sonatas as well as an arrangement of the scherzo from the Fifth Symphony. Mndoyants thus gives us a measure of the richness of Prokofiev's language, combining exceptional virtuosity, a sense of enchantment and biting irony.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Sofia Andreoli:2024-02-27

D'Indy – Piano Sonata, Magnard – Promenades

Any seeker of piano rarities and enthusiast for the likes of Alkan and Medtner will want to make the acquaintance of D’Indy’s Piano Sonata from 1907. Sofia Andreoli's pairing for this massive and innovative work is hardly less original: Albéric Magnard's Promenades, a suite of tone-pictures belonging to the heady world of French Wagnerism.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>

Konstantin Emelyanov:2024-02-25

Over Time – Rameau, Rachmaninoff, Bach

Konstantin Emelyanov's album weaves a tapestry of nostalgia for a Golden Age: in the pianist's words, "an epoch of eternal beauty and purity in which time itself has a completely different meaning". Rameau’s Suite in G functions as a type of prelude, Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a theme of Corelli form the central element, and Bach’s French suite in B minor is a postlude.
Audio & Booklet in NML >>