Piano

With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Turkish pianist Fazıl Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than twenty-five years, in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organised classical music world. He is a pianist, composer and director with firm reputation in Europe, Asia and the US. After spending five years under David Levine at the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf and further studies at the Berlin Conservatory he came to international attention 1994 when he was the winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions.

For the fourth instalment in her acclaimed Satie cycle, Noriko Ogawa has gathered music written for the stage – from the pantomime Jack in the Box (1899) to the ballet Relâche (1924) – one of Satie’s last works. Several of the pieces exist in different scorings, but the piano versions heard here are all Satie’s own.

The main mission of The Oliver Schnyder Trio (Andreas Janke, violin, Oliver Schnyder, piano, and Benjamin Nyffenegger, cello) is to celebrate classical works written for trio and commission new compositions. Their first grand opus is this timeless recording of Beethoven’s works for piano trio in a special 3CD set. The music of Ludwig van Beethoven is revolutionary and reaches far beyond the time of writing. Beethoven was unique, but at the same time, offered a central point of departure for new traditions of composition.

Angela Hewitt’s voyage of discovery through Mozart’s piano sonatas is proving a joy, the works sounding newly minted in vital, alert accounts which respect their scale and sensibility while revealing influences of Mozart’s orchestral and concerto writing of the period.

Béla Bartók’s monumental Mikrokosmos, containing 153 mainly short “progressive” piano pieces composed between 1932 and 1939, is both a very special piano method and a collection of wonderfully original performance pieces (the series actually contains almost the complete piano music by Bartók from the 1930s).

Nanako Sugiura (Piano) began playing the piano at age 5. Graduated from Kyoritsu Women's University, Faculty of Literature and Arts, Japanese Literature Course. Completed the master's course at Musashino Academia Musicae. After completing her studies, she served as an accompaniment trainee at the same university. She has studied with Shoichi Yamada, Akiko Sakikawa, Mineko Tsuchiya, Takayoshi Wanami, and others. In addition to solo recitals, she also performs a lot of chamber music.In May 2018, she appeared and performed with the Czech Philharmonic Soloists at the 10th anniversary concert of their visit to Japan. Currently, she is making her commitment to Japanese works her life's work, and is involved in recording, premiering new works, and publishing works by Japanese composers.

Pauline Huguette Dreyfus (30 November 1928 – 16 May 2016) was a French harpsichordist.

Midori was born in Japan in 1971 as the daughter of a violinist and an engineer.

Geoffrey Allen was an icon in Australian music until his death in 2021 at the age of 94. What is really interesting about Geoffrey’s music is that it looks orthodox on the page initially, but is in fact extremely thought-provoking. He has a unique way of combining the familiar with the unfamiliar: Geoffrey’s music is always extremely well crafted and looks deceptively simple on the page, but as soon as you begin to play any phrase from his works you discover that he is always subtly reinventing the wheel!

The only collected survey of George Benjamin’s piano music on record, from a Dutch pianist who specialises in new music and has worked closely with the composer.