There's perhaps a touch of irony in the title of Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen's box set Minimal Piano Collection because at nine discs, it's a pretty massive collection. The program booklet notes that he recorded the entire set, which includes more than ten hours of music, in only six days, an astounding feat. In the program notes, van Veen offers a remarkably clear and concise history of minimalism in music. He defines it broadly enough (following the lead of composer and critic Tom Johnson) to include works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Satie. Philip Glass is the composer most widely represented, with three of the set's nine CDs devoted to his music originally for piano, as well as transcriptions from his film scores and operas. Two discs are given to van Veen's mammoth 24 Préludes, organized according to the framework of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Other composers range from the very well known, such as Michael Nyman, John Adams, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage, to the familiar-to-specialists, like Tom Johnson, Wim Mertens, and Jacob ter Veldhuis, to those little-known to American audiences, like Klaas de Vries, Simeon ten Holt, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, and Carlos Micháns.
French composer Yann Tiersen has written music for various instruments, including guitar, piano, synthetizer, violin, accordion, xylophone, and melodica. Some of his compositions have been used in film scoring, such as “Amélie”, whose soundtrack primarily features excerpts from his first three studio albums (“La Valse des monstres”, “Rue des cascades”, and “La Phare”). The present recording features Tiersen’s original solo piano works selected from his very first album, but also from “L’Absente”, “Les Retrouvailles,” and from his last work - “EUSA”. It also includes some piano works found in the soundtracks for “Amélie” and “Goodbye Lenin!”.