Iranian composer Niloufar Iravani’s 2017 string quartet The Maze contains a wonderful analogy for how people listen to music. In its three movements, Energetic, Lyrical, and Mysterious, the work presents us with the various emotions in problem solving. If we

There’s something special about piano trios. Perhaps the combination of violin, cello, and piano makes the perfect pocket ensemble. They’re not as complex as string quartets, and the addition of the strings makes an ensemble that embraces the top and

‘Echoes’ is the latest in Orchestra of the Swan’s ‘mixtape’ series, following on from ‘Timelapse’ and ‘Labyrinths’ (which has received over 8 million audio streams since 2021 and was shortlisted for Gramophone award in the Spatial Audio category). As with

This album presents the complete works of Bernard Hughes for solo piano, an eclectic collection covering a period of over 30 years. The oldest piece dates back to his teenage years and the most recent is a brand new suite,

Gold Medallist of the Van Cliburn Competition in 2009, Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang embarked on a tour de force in Hong Kong with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, accompanied by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra under the

The title alone invites further exploration of this interesting, varied disc of piano music by Robert Matthew-Walker, a British composer and an influential part of the classical music recording industry for more than half a century (he ran marketing and

As I have written before on this site, pianists with small hands often struggle with more virtuosic repertoire because of the physical demands it puts on the hands, mostly big, awkward stretches for which a larger hand span and greater

Rachmaninoff’s Preludes have been a cornerstone of the piano repertoire, showcasing the composer’s wealth of emotions, propensity for lyricism and technical virtuosity. As part of HKU MUSE’s Russian Piano Classics series, Russian pianists Konstantin Lifschitz and Alexei Volodin took turns