Alex Van Pelt Four Hand Story

Using analog apparats such as reel to reel taperecorders and analog synthesizers Wouter van Veldhoven makes experimental ambient and some conceptual soundscapes. Old means, new music.

Brahms often produced four-handed piano arrangements of his orchestral, vocal and chamber music, which made his works more easily available to the general public. The final volume of this highly acclaimed series features the monumental Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major which Brahms played through with the composer Ignaz Brüll in a two-piano arrangement prior to its première in Pest, 1881. Brahms also arranged works by his great friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, among them the dramatic Overture to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Op. 7.

The protean and prolific Jeroen van Veen turns his attention to Erik Satie’s complete piano works for a 9-CD boxed set that ties in with the composer’s 150th birthday year. In a way, the collection is completer than complete. It includes all of Satie’s published and unpublished works for solo piano and piano duo, piano arrangements of theater scores as Le fils des étoiles, Darius Milhaud’s transcription of Cinéma.