New Piano Albums

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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Duo Ancelle-Berlinskaya:2024-02-23

Passage secret – Bizet, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel

In French piano music, the cycles Jeux d’enfants, Petite Suite, Dolly and Ma mère l’Oye have a special place: these four hand collections have become some of their respective composers’ best-known works. Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle are a symbiotic couple on and off stage, whose previous 8 albums have been well received and awarded by the international press.
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Orli Shaham:2024-02-21

Mozart – Complete Piano Sonatas, Vol. 5 & 6

The sense of wonder the three-year-old felt on her first encounter with Mozart in 1979 hasn’t diminished more than 40 years later. Orli Shaham was mesmerized when she heard her eldest brother practice the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. With the present release, she has recorded all of Mozart's 18 Piano Sonatas, reaching the end of an exhilarating journey through music she has known all her life.
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Nathan Williamson:2024-02-19

Christopher Brown – 24 Preludes & Fugues

In 2011, Christopher Brown set himself the challenge of writing a book of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys before he reached his 70th birthday in 2013. In fact, the project took him a further six years. Pianist Nathan Williamson: "Despite unashamedly drawing on a wide spectrum of styles and influences… Brown’s 24 Preludes and Fugues stretched the limits of my ear and musical imagination."
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Igor Levit:2024-02-18

Mendelssohn – Lieder ohne Worte

Levit's release of 14 of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words and an Alkan Prelude is his personal response to the 7th October 2023 atrocities in Israel, and what he describes as an alarming rise of anti-Semitism around the world. Levit and his team gave their time pro bono for the recording, and proceeds will be donated to two German organisations fighting anti-Semitism.
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William Youn:2024-02-17

Boulanger, Fauré, Hahn

William Youn's first orchestral recording for Sony Classical is a double album in co-operation with Deutschlandradio Berlin, dedicated entirely to the exuberant flair of fin-de-siècle Paris with rare repertoire by Reynaldo Hahn, Nadia Boulanger and Gabriel Fauré - a musical excursion into the salons of the Belle Époque full of dazzling rediscoveries.
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Piotr Anderszewski:2024-02-15

Bartók, Janacek, Szymanowski

"The works recorded on this album carry within them a spirit of rebellion. Bartók reconnects with the essence of Hungarian folk music, its raw, vital quality, the wildness of its rhythms. Szymanowski, with the dances of southern Poland’s mountain folk... As for Janacek , he forges a direct connection with the essense of the Slavic soul at its most generous."
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Martin James Bartlett:2024-02-13

La Danse

Martin James Bartlett has long been drawn to Le Tombeau de Couperin – its reflective nature, incredible virtuosity, and Ravel’s uncanny ability to look both backwards and forwards in musical terms. On this all-French album, it's coupled with music by Couperin himself, Rameau, two four-hand waltzes by Reynaldo Hahn, and more Ravel: Pavane and La Valse.
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Nour Ayadi:2024-02-10

Carnaval

Nour Ayadi juxtaposes Schumann's Carnival of Vienna with Poulenc's Les soirées de Nazelles, the score of which reads: "The variations that form the center of this work were improvised at Nazelles during long country evenings wherein the composer played "portraits" for friends gathered around his piano. We hope that these variations… will have the power to evoke this game in the spirit of a Touraine region living room– with a window open to the night."
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