Tag Archives: piano

The music on 'Toward Light' speaks to listeners who appreciate something bracing and new from a format – string quintet – that dates back centuries.

The Italian artist wields her pianistic prowess in service of the wide-ranging expressivity that signals a true and complete virtuoso.

Kanneh-Mason's deft touch clarifies every ornament on this EP that also features music by Handel and two English composers Jane Austen was familiar with.

When music is so baldly programmatic we should listen in two ways: with the context in mind, and purely musically.

Pianist and composer Mark Micchelli twists and blows up five jazz classics with piano, toy piano, percussion, and electronics.

The meaning of simple contrasts is magnified in composer Ryan Vigil's meditative, thought-provoking works for violin and piano.

If alternate tuning systems are new to you, this album will be an introduction more musical than pedagogic, and nonetheless revealing. If not, it will be easy to admire Thornock's ingenuity and talent.

The title piece is a set of variations on a theme from the Irish folk song "Shule Agra." The lyrics to a version known in English as "Johnny Has Gone for a Solider" are hopeful but uncertain. But that doesn't take away from this colorful album's predominantly upbeat feel.

The concert was only a few minutes old and I was already scribbling in my notebook phrases like "as if pulling out the guts of the piano itself." And I meant that admiringly.

In all these works, played magnificently by Jing Yang, Vigeland makes conscious and effective use of the piano's acoustical properties to create sound worlds that couldn't exist in the same way if played by orchestral instruments.