Heal Summit 2022

This collection spotlights six legendary pianist-composers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Adolf von Henselt’s ferocious technical studies and Romantic salon pieces led Schumann to dub him ‘the Chopin of the North’. Polish virtuoso Ignaz Friedman’s works offer delightful melodic beauty and harmonic inventiveness set alongside works by his countryman, Józef Hofmann, renowned as a poet of the keyboard. The French master musician Alfred Cortot is represented here with a selection of stylish piano arrangements of works by great composers. As one of Finland’s most respected musicians during the early 20th century, Selim Palmgren displays a wide variety of technical and stylistic challenges with music that is both traditional and visionary; while music by the exiled Russian composer Nikolay Medtner is highly Romantic and spiritually charged. These six towering superstars represent the summit of the piano’s Romantic golden age, heard here in critically acclaimed performances by award-winning pianists.

Pip Millett has shared her excellent debut album ‘When Everything Is Better, I’ll Let You Know’ in full.
The highly creative London artist has been working on the project for some time, with elements of it going back years. A vastly personal document, the album holds together as a 17 track display of soulful vibrancy.
The use of interludes splits the record into four parts, a triptych that moves through neo-soul shades while emerging as something triumphant, and highly original.

The forest has always been an important place for Olivia Gay. She wanders through the woods alone, listening not only to its silence but also to its murmurs. It is a place of creation where her cellist’s instincts are awakened and where she can find peace and quiet outside the city. She joined forces with the Office national des forêts (ONF) in 2022 to raise public awareness of such spaces by inviting spectators to concerts given in the heart of the forest or in natural site. This album continues this project and includes works by Jacques Offenbach, Camille Pépin, Edward Elgar, John Luther Adams and Max Richter; the programme as a whole is under the aegis of Antonin Dvořák’s magnificent Silent Woods , which also lent its name to this initiative.

Their collaboration has been hailed as a summit meeting of two jazz masters. Enrico Rava, trumpeter from Trieste, and Fred Hersch, pianist from Cincinatti, share a deep affection for the tradition and a profound sense for melodic invention. In this recording, with flugelhorn and piano glowing in the superb acoustic of the Lugano studio, Rava and Hersch explore some much-loved standards: Jerome Kern’s “The Song Is You”, Thelonious Monk’s “Mysterioso” and “’Round Midnight”, Jobim’s “Retrato em Branco e Preto”, and George Bassman’s “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”. They also play their own tunes, Fred’s “Child’s Song” and Enrico’s “The Trial”, and improvise freely together. Enrico Rava has been an ECM artist for almost fifty years. The Song Is You is Fred Hersch’s first for the label. The album was recorded at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in November 2021, and produced by Manfred Eicher.