Sol Fredrik Thordendal's Special Defects

By far the largest collection of concert etudes in the known repertoire, Kaikhosru Sorabji’s set of 100 Transcendental Studies, composed between 1940 and 1944, has a total duration of more than eight hours. On five previous discs, the Swedish pianist (and neuroscientist) Fredrik Ullen has introduced the first 83 etudes to a wider audience, the large majority of them appearing on disc for the first time. Now, 15 years after the release of the first volume comes the final installment, a 2-album set with the last 17 studies. In his own liner notes, Ullen describes the experience of learning and recording the collection: ‘From the F sharp minor of Study 1 to the F sharp minor chord concluding Study 100: traversing Sorabji’s Transcendental Studies has been somewhat like joining a comet following a long eccentric orbit through pianistic outer space, and finally returning back to mother earth.’

Debut solo album from Wobbler’s Lars Fredrik Frøislie! Fitting perfectly into the 70s prog-rock tradition where the keyboardist makes a solo album between the band albums, this is music Frøislie has been doing, mostly alone, during the pandemic. Had it not been for the pandemic, much of the material would probably have ended up on a new Wobbler album - but then run through the Wobbler grinder and with English lyrics. In other words, this is unpeeled and raw, as spontaneous as possible without going through too many rounds of processing. Trying to preserve the impulsive - much of what you hear is improvised, and one-takes (preferably with playing errors and piano strings that break and the like). Trying to preserve the human aspect to a large extent, avoiding click tracks, auto-tune, MIDI or too much technology. Expect lots of old analogue keyboards such as cembalo, Mellotron, MiniMoog, Yamaha CP70 and Hammond organ.

Stefan Pasborg is one of his generation’s most brilliant, inspiring and visionary musicians, and has within the last 20 years established himself as one of the most successful Danish instrumentalists.

Serbian-Swedish Djuro Živković has quickly established himself as one of Europe’s leading young composers. His musical style is strongly marked by Byzantine Orthodox music – spiritual, mystical and characterized by fantastic narration, virtuosic instrumentation and a stylistic, highly profiled sound. Živković’s music presents a profound and abstract space to reflect on the subject matter of mystery, ecstasy and transcendence.

With her new album, Sol Gabetta shines a spotlight on Lise Cristiani (1825–1853), the first professional female cellist to perform publicly. To mark the 200th anniversary in December 2025 of Lise Cristiani’s birth, Sol Gabetta pays tribute here to a musical trailblazer of great historic significance on her new album, set to be released on October 10 by Sony Classical. As the first woman cellist to have had the courage and opportunity to perform in front of live audiences, Cristiani broke social conventions, inspired numerous composers of her time, and became a role model for generations of women musicians. In close collaboration with musicologists, Sol Gabetta has spent recent years exploring the fascinating - if tragically short - career of this exceptional artist Lise Cristiani and to reconstructing her musical repertoire. On a sonic journey through works by the virtuoso cellists who were close to Cristiani, Sol Gabetta invites listeners to rediscover a captivating body of music and one that powerfully showcases the cello’s full virtuosic potential and rich Romantic expressiveness.