JOHN ADAMS : Complete Piano Music (2007) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

John Adams is a crowd-pleasing composer and as such depends on the large audiences of orchestral music for the musical dialogues in which he engages. Solo piano music didn't have the same kind of public when it came out, at least in the classical realm, and Adams has not written a great deal of music for the piano. The four works presented here by Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat are advertised as Adams' complete piano music, and only one, Phrygian Gates, is among his most popular works. The album makes a real contribution, for it demonstrates how Adams nevertheless worked on major compositional questions in his piano music; it is not a "byway" of his musical path. The works on the album date from between 1977 (Phrygian Gates and China Gates) and 2001 (American Berserk). They all in one way or another attest to Adams' success in incorporating a range of Romantic gestures into a minimalist language, a potent combination indeed that is fully accessible to anybody yet never lapses into sentimentality. He translates the combination into pianistic terms, with sweeping passages of repeated figures that ebb and flow as they offer the pianist something to work at. The four works are entirely different in personality, and American Berserk is an especially vivid manifestation of Adams' use of vernacular musical languages -- it abstracts the rhythms and textures of boogie woogie in a satisfying, colorful ride. Van Raat's approach emphasizes the neo-Romantic elements in Adams' music and provides a distinctively Continental interpretation that seems to suggest a continuing rise in and geographical diffusion of Adams' reputation. by James Manheim  

MAGNUS LINDBERG : Complete Piano Music (2008) FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

It might seem premature to issue an album titled The Complete Piano Music by a composer who is less than 50 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. But Naxos can always release "The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2" by Magnus Lindberg if he keeps producing works at his current rate. The pieces fall into three clusters, with four written between 1976 and 1979, one in 1988, and three between 2000 and 2004. It's intriguing to hear the development in the composer's writing for the instrument, beginning with a student piece written when he was 18, through mature works written in his forties. It's easy to detect a progression from the rigorous serial abstraction of the first piece, Music for Two Pianos, to the more conventionally expressive and pianistically conceived later works. All the music is clearly the product of a probing, inventive, and disciplined imagination, but the later pieces, without relying on any post-Romantic vocabulary, have a warmth and communicative directness that place them in the tradition of expressive pianism that can be traced from the keyboard virtuosos of the nineteenth centuries through twentieth century masters like Scriabin, Messiaen, and Ligeti. Ralph van Raat plays with admirable clarity and precision, and he doesn't skimp on expressive fluidity and muscularity in the pieces in which that's appropriate. He's capably joined by Maarten van Veen in the two pieces for two pianos. The sound is first-rate, bright, and clean, and the stereo definition in the pieces for two pianos is especially good. by Stephen Eddins