Contemporary Composition / Piano

The rare SPA recordings and private audio documents, 1943-1958. Composer George Antheil (1900-1959) is most remembered for his mechanistic piano music hailed by 1920s Paris, but by 1948, when he’d become the third most-played American-born composer of orchestral music, his style reflected a more emotional, more mature personality. This centennial collection highlights selections from Antheil’s later “neo-romantic” period and includes the only recordings of Antheil himself at the piano. A 60-page…

Hidden treasure is always thrilling, particularly when it means recovering the forgotten works of a great artist. This historic CD offers a selection of previously unrecorded rarities by composer Conlon Nancarrow, including Piece for Tape, a dazzling rhythmic exercise in musique concrète. Listeners are also treated to the composer’s own recording of his study for prepared player piano, as well as a rare interview with the composer himself.

This CD marks the first time that Igor Stravinsky’s own pianola version of his famous composition Les Noces has been released commercially. In addition, Rex Lawson’s ingenious arrangements of well-known classics, including Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Solomon, and the ballet Pineapple Poll by Sir Arthur Sullivan.

Limited Edition of 50 numbered copies. Chromatic Fields by Jamie Crofts are compositions for piano that make use of the entire keyboard. Explorations of the expressive range and depth of the instrument taking a unique view of the instrument's sonic potential. Chromatic Fields is the fruit of a world of relationships. The relationships between the sound of a piano, the space of a blank page, silence and emptiness, color and sound.The chromatic sound fields of Jamie Crofts, the result of a profoun…

* 2020 Stock * Florian Fricke (1944 – 2001) was a German music pioneer who started his career in electronic music using the Moog synthesizer within the famous Krautrock group ‘Popol Vuh’. Fricke studied piano, composition and directing at the conservatories in Freiburg and Munich where he also dedicated himself to new kinds of music like ‘free jazz’. In 1967 he met German film director Werner Herzog and the two formed a life long friendship (Fricke was later responsible for the soundtracks of se…

The pianist, two days in the studio, alone at the piano. A retreat in Zurich. Focus is on the now, the recording is running. Preparation time for the new compositions: about a year. Getting attuned to the music: a lifetime. Alexander von Schlippenbach, Slow Pieces For Aki, the emphasis being on the word “slow,” not on rediscovering slowness but discovering slowness anew - dedicated to his wife Aki Takase. with slow pieces, short pieces, compositions in which every single note demands the highest…

*2020 stock* Unlike my earlier freetonal and 12-tone works, my music since 1981 has been characterized by the use of repetition, and since 2004 by generally soft dynamics. While often termed "minimalist" or "postminimalist," I have come to prefer the term "focused music," as my works tend to concentrate on very specific, and often a limited number of, music elements. Typically, there is but a single dynamic level specified, and sometimes not even that. I like to provide a good deal of freedom fo…

*2021 stock* What is one to make of Maria de Alvear’s two long solos for piano, De puro amor (‘Of pure love’) and En amor duro (‘In hard love’), both composed in 1991. The scores themselves, if one decides to start from here, are completely perplexing. Pages and pages are marked with hastily scratched notes, sometimes repeating themselves dozens of times. Little priority seems to have been given to rhythm, dynamics or articulation; even less to the notational conventions such as barlines, spacin…

Perhaps more than any of Feldman other piano music Triadic Memories is about that reality, the acoustic space created bythe piano’s strings and soundboard, and in Judith Wegmann’s recording that space is withina magnificent Bösendorfer 280VC piano

Claude Debussy's two books of Preludes played by Argentine pianist Haydée Schvartz, on 2CD with bonus tracks including a song with baritone Bryan Church. Awarded the 2021 Premio Gardel for Best Classical Album.

George Crumb's earliest and most recent piano works on one CD: the first recording of Metamorphoses (Book I), ten pieces after famous paintings written for Margaret Leng Tan, and the Five Pieces for Piano (1962).

All of Morton Subotnick's piano music on one disc for the first time, with four first recordings, including Liquid Strata and The Other Piano with electronics, played by SooJin Anjou and supervised by the composer.

Volume 10 of Mode's John Cage piano series, with Thomas Schultz playing Two Pieces for Piano (1935), Solo for Piano from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Two Pieces for Piano (1946) and Swinging (1989).

Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus (1985), an hour-long solo piano work, played by Aki Takahashi, for whom Feldman wrote all his piano music after Triadic Memories.

**CD version** Bram De Looze is a Belgian pianist and composer whose distinct musical vision has found its way through both solo projects and collaborations. His unique technical skill and musical maturity have earned him considerable critical acclaim back home as his work spotlights his far-ranging interests – from traditional classical piano music, to solo improvisations that have often been compared to Keith Jarrett and Jason Moran.

Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions. Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery. Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking…

**300 copies** "There have been quite a few releases of Antoine Beuger’s music over the past several years and it’s an odd, and very pleasurable thing to consider them en masse. On the one hand, his music is so diaphanous, so air-suffused that you’d think it might be difficult (not to mention unnecessary) to differentiate them mentally. On the other, they’re always very different. There’s that old AMM aphorism: “as alike or unalike as trees” that conveys something of my feelings about Beuger’s w…

Kayn's earliest keyboard music in historical recordings: Fünf Kleine Klavierstücke (1952), Divertimento (1955), Quanten (1956) and Fractals (1994) on the first disc; on the second the studio Quanten and Diffusions (1965) for one to four electronic organs, from Sonology in Utrecht.

Music for two and four pianos tuned a quarter tone apart: Wyschnegradsky's Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra and 4e Fragment symphonique with ondes Martenot, plus new works by Alain Moëne and Alain Bancquart. Several first recordings.

First recordings of Christian Wolff's Tilbury pieces (1969-70), Snowdrop (1970) and Tilbury 5 (1996), minimalist open-form works played by trombonist Roland Dahinden, pianist Hildegard Kleeb and violinist Dimitrios Polisoidis.