Released by Avie Records, Crossing the Bar explores the wide expressive possibilities of the contemporary marimba. Percussionist Mika Stoltzman assembles a rich and varied program that moves fluidly across styles and eras, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to John Zorn, with Claude Debussy and 21st century composer Miho Hazama in between. Built around close collaborations with several musicians, most notably clarinetist Richard Stoltzman (Mika’s husband and regular collaborator), the program brings together arrangements and contemporary works, including several world premieres. The album opens with the monumental Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in an arrangement for marimba and strings. From the outset, the approach highlights…
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Pekka Kuusisto, from Finland, is not your typical classical violinist. He’s been known to swallow tiny microphones in concert, and he might just break into a homegrown folk tune, strumming his fiddle like a mandolin.
Despite describing the piano in liner notes as a “non-malleable instrument” (something specialists in prepared techniques would presumably challenge) and “an instrument [he’s] been avoiding throughout [his] compositional career,” Ivan Vukosavljevic, a Serbian composer based in The Hague, has nevertheless created a mind in the heart, a solo piano collection produced in collaboration with Portuguese pianist Joana Gama. She’s issued recordings on a number of labels, including Room40 and Pianola, and presented music by Satie and, on Travels in My Homeland: Portuguese Piano Music (Grand Piano, 2019), composers from her homeland.
On her latest album, 
Michael Stephen Brown’s bona fides as a classical pianist were well-accounted for by his 2021 release Noctuelles and its Medtner and Ravel content. The NYC-based Brown (b. 1987) now demonstrates his prowess as a composer with this debut collection of all-original works. The seven presented speak to the versatility and imagination of their creator in featuring solo piano pieces, chamber works, and art songs. Whereas the piano setting Four Lakes for Children (2024) nods in the direction of Impressionism, the vocal-and-piano work Love’s Lives Lost (2023) flirts with the theatricality of a flamboyant Broadway score. There is variety aplenty in the material, and variety too in the arrangements, with the composer appearing as a solo pianist and accompanist to soprano…
Released a month before the composer’s 89th birthday, 
One might debate whether the phrase “lies, damn lies and statistics” belongs to nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli or to Mark Twain, but it is hard to dispute the popularity reflected in over 100 million streams. Whatever the numbers say, Swedish pianist Joel Lyssarides’ music is clearly resonating with audiences around the world. Alongside his streaming success, Lyssarides has accumulated numerous jazz awards, which makes it all the more intriguing that the two words most naturally applied to his music might be “quiet” and “intense.” Classically trained, he deals in subtlety, light grooves and fine details. His melodic compositions and cascading patterns are supported by his longtime collaborators, bassist Niklas Fernqvist and drummer…
Over the past decade, Sono Luminus has done an incredible job promoting the music of Icelandic composers and granting listeners multiple opportunities to hear the wondrous music they make. It’s safe to say that names such as Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Vikingur Ólafsson, Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, and others would be far less familiar to those outside the country in the absence of the label’s efforts. One of the country’s greatest home-grown talents and exports is composer Daníel Bjarnason, who currently holds the title Artist in Collaboration with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and was previously its Principal Guest Conductor (2019-21) and prior to that Artist in Residence.
Any contemporary composer would thrill at the prospect of having pianist 
Italian composer and pianist 
Their last album with works by Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg and Tõnu Kõrvits saw the Gazzana sisters Natascia and Raffaella “achieve the highest levels of instinctive expression”, according to the French daily paper Le Monde, and one could argue that this holds even more true for their new recording with music by Sergei Prokofiev, Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke.
The latest album from 
The Colin Currie Group formed 20 years ago to honour Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with a performance of 
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical settings that couple piano, strings, and painterly dashes of woodwinds, synthesizers, and electronics into transporting chamber wholes.