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London-based Chinese pianist Siqian Li announces her debut recording, Voyage among Fragments. Described as a ‘meditation on movement and memory’, the album serves as an artistic mosaic, gathering ‘shards of experience’ from Li’s life and career into a single, unified ‘language of sensitivity and refinement’.

The title reflects how my artistic identity has been shaped by many small but powerful moments rather than a single narrative. These “fragments” are memories, emotions, and cultural influences that have stayed with me – my Chinese roots, the elegance and sensitivity of French culture, and the free spirits and boldness I discovered during the years in America.

Siqian Li

Featuring transcriptions by virtuoso pianists such as Ignaz Friedmann and György Cziffra, the pieces ‘allow familiar voices to be rediscovered through the piano, inviting audiences to hear them with fresh intimacy and perspective’ (Siqian Li).

The repertoire charts Li’s development across three distinct cultural landscapes – China, France, and the United States – reflecting moments and encounters that have shaped her artistic identity.

Her native musical language is explored through Chu Wanghua’s Jasmine Flowers Fantasy, a piece that transforms a beloved Chinese folk melody into a timeless work, providing the pianist with a ‘profound sense of home’. Her years of study at the New England Conservatory in the USA are captured through the energy of the city and the spontaneity of jazz found in George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. This American experience also includes the ‘first spark of inspiration’ for the album: Maurice Ravel’s La valse. Performed in a transcription by her teacher, the Georgian pianist Alexander Korsantia, the work represents a turning point for Li, marking a period of ‘boldness and fearless expression’.

The French spirit is woven throughout the recording, particularly in Alexis Weissenberg’s evocative transcriptions of Charles Trenet’s songs. These pieces recall Li’s first major recital outside of China at the Festival d’Auvers-sur-Oise, evoking memories of ‘floral Parisian streets’ and a ‘carefree spirit’. Other works, such as Dalayrac’s Romance and Cziffra’s arrangement of Vecsey’s Valse triste, explore bittersweet beauty and the sincerity of human connection.

The album’s voyage concludes in a state of serenity with Gounod’s Meditation on Bach’s Prelude in C Major. A prayer amidst the constant noise of our time, the final track invites the listener to ‘listen inward’ and find ‘truth in simplicity’.

Siqian Li regards this album as a personal reflection on her artistic life so far – a collection of ‘moments of courage, tenderness, discovery, and transformation’. As Li says: ‘May this music remind us all that beauty often lives in the most fleeting, delicate moments between what was and what is’.

Voyage Among Fragments is released in early March on the Sagitta Musica label, an independent record label, created by Siqian Li, devoted to artistic storytelling and the infinite horizons of emotion. Drawn by the inspiring arrow of sound, it is a space where stories unfold and music flows beyond – where classical roots meet imagination, sensitivity and freedom.

Siqian Li says,‘Through this debut, I wanted to highlight a pianistic personality rooted in curiosity, sensitivity, and emotional honesty. In curating the programme, I consciously moved away from a traditional idea of how a classical album should sound, allowing contrast, variety, and intuition to guide my choices. Rather than focusing on virtuosity for its own sake, my aim was to let imagination, colour, and inner listening shape the interpretation, placing freedom and vulnerability at the centre of musical communication.’

Find out more https://www.siqian-li.com/

Launch concert – Tuesday 10 March at Fidelio Cafe, London. Tickets/info

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Opus 109 – Vikingur Olafsson

A late masterpiece by Beethoven lies at the heart of this new release by Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson to create a dialogue across the centuries.

The works of Beethoven’s third creative period feel both intimate and cosmic. It is the music of the future, yet it is fuelled by the music of the past – the music of Bach.

Vikingur Olafsson

Olafsson eschews the usual custom of presenting Beethoven’s final three sonatas together and instead places the transcendent Opus 109 alongside pieces by J S Bach and Franz Schubert as well as Beethoven’s Sonata Ppus 90 to create a ‘concept album’ where pieces connect and reflect.

For Olafsson, it was Bach’s Goldberg Variations (which he recorded in 2023) that drew him to Beethoven’s last three sonatas. He “felt the presence” of Bach in these late masterpieces, works where Bach’s influence is most strongly felt in their “wild polyphony”. The Sonata Opus 90, meanwhile, offers a prelude to the Opus 109 with its intimate, fleeting first movement and warm second movement, while also looking forward to Schubert’s early period sonata in E minor, D566, also scored in two movements. The other works on the album are Bach’s prelude in E major from the Well-Tempered Clavier and the imposing E minor Partita, perhaps the greatest of his keyboard suites.

Another unifying thread through the album is that all the pieces are in the key of E (major and minor modes) which for Ólafsson, who has a form of synaesthesia, represents lush and vibrant shades of green.

The album opens with the Prelude No. 9 in E from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, played with Olafsson’s trademark luminous tone. It’s an intimate opener and contrasts with the drama of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 27, the first movement of which is imposing yet carries with it, especially in the second movement, the same airy elegance of the Bach Prelude.

The E minor Partita is serious, majestic, articulated with clean Baroque detachment and sensitive voicing. Olafsson finds the same intimacy in the middle movements of the Partita, in particular in the Allemande, which is almost tender in its counterpoint. The Sarabande, prayer-like and sombre, has an improvisatory quality. The closing Gigue, meanwhile, is energetic and crisply articulated.

We stay with E minor in Schubert’s two-movement Sonata D566. Olfasson’s transparent sound and subtle phrasing suit Schubert and he brings a warm cantabile to the music, in particular in the second movement.

With his characteristic clarity, poetic imagination and instinct for colour, Ólafsson approaches Beethoven’s late-period masterwork as a living, breathing meditation – fragile, searching, ultimately transcendent. The opening movement is natural, almost spontaneous, with a conversational quality in its phrasing.

The middle movement bursts forth with a controlled ferocity. Here, Ólafsson’s articulation is exceptionally clean, almost crystalline, but never merely virtuosic.

The emotional heart of this sonata is the third movement, with its tender, prayerful theme. Each variation has its own emotional landscape, shaped with meticulous attention to detail and rich in genuine feeling, yet Olafsson never loses sight of the overall narrative arc of this movement. His voicing allows inner lines to glow while the delicate filigree in the upper registers shimmers delicately. The music seems to unfold in a single, unbroken breath, time almost suspended in the later variations. Here is the music’s spiritual core and Olfasson invites us to bask in its radiance.

The album closes with the Sarabande from the E major French Suite, as Olafssons takes us back to the beginning, as it were, with J S Bach, the daddy of them all.

As with his previous releases, notably his recordings ‘Rameau and Debussy’ and ‘From Afar’, Olfasson brings a fresh perspective to well-known repertoire through thoughtful programming, finding intriguing connections and shining a new light on the familiar. And it’s all beautifully presented too.

Opus 109 is released on Deutsche Grammophon on CD and streaming

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This new release of music by British composer Francis Pott, performed by Duncan Honeybourne, brings together piano works written between 1983 and 1997.

The title of the album, ‘A House of Ghosts’, reflects the character of the pieces: short works and miniatures which offer glimpses of places and voices that remain just out of reach, rather than an overall narrative. Pott’s music is elegant and restrained, reflecting on memory, landscape, and legend, occasional reference to medieval song (Minnelied, Blondel, Walsinghame), Chaucer (Pageant, with its distinctively ‘Medieval’ open fourth and fifth chords), T. S. Eliot (Revenant), and the abandoned community of St Kilda, a remote archipelago in Scotland (Farewell to Hirta). The mood of many of the pieces is wistful or nostalgic, with a timelessness which harks back to earlier times and musical styles: Pott’s influences include William Byrd, Gustav Mahler and Vaughan Williams, and one hears echoes of these composers, and others, in his harmonies, textures and long-spun melodies.

“A House of Ghosts is a sequence of a dozen short pieces concerned with the past, whether imagined, historical or (as in the case of the final piece) autobiographical. These movements are combined here with freestanding longer items, where sea music (Farewell to Hirta and Hunt’s Bay) is mixed with explorations of elusive memory (Le Temps qui n’est plus and Drowned Summer). Gently distinctive in its harmonic and tonal language, this music is the work of a professional pianist-composer with a refined and subtle insight into the physical and textural properties of the instrument.”

Duncan Honeybourne, pianist

I had the pleasure of page-turning for a performance by Duncan Honeybourne of several of the pieces featured on this album. This not only introduced me to Pott’s compelling soundworld but also offered a glimpse of his writing style. ‘A House of Ghosts’ is music written for the intimacy of the home, with the amateur pianist very much in mind. This is music that will appeal to the sophisticated amateur pianist who enjoys contemporary music that is melodic, structured and expressive, yet not overly-challenging. The music is highly pianistic (the composer is a pianist himself), approachable yet thought-provoking, consonant…. They may appear simple, but there is much scope for sensitivity in voicing, dynamics and pedalling to bring these finely-crafted pieces to life.

Duncan Honeybourne brings clarity, gracefulness and emotion to this elegant, atmospheric music, responding with much musical thought and sensitivity to its subtly-shifting colours and moods to create an album that is wholly enjoyable and deeply absorbing.

A House of Ghosts is released on digital streaming and download

Scores of Francis Pott’s music are available from Composers Edition

Francis Pott, composer
Duncan Honeybourne, pianist

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Kapustin: Between the Lines

Ophelia Gordon, piano

Nikolai Kapustin (1937–2020) occupies a distinctive place in 20th- and 21st-century music. A classically trained pianist and composer, Kapustin cleverly fused the formal, structural rigour of classical music with the rhythmic vitality and improvisational idioms of jazz. His works defy easy categorisation: though they sound spontaneously jazzy, they are entirely notated in classical form, leaving no space for actual improvisation. This paradox became the hallmark of his style.

Born in Horlivka, Ukraine, Kapustin studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory, under Alexander Goldenweiser, at a time when jazz was still viewed with suspicion by Soviet authorities. Kapustin’s fascination with American jazz pianists like Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner led him to explore the genre secretly and he absorbed its harmonic language, rhythmic energy, and phrasing to create his own compositional language. His music is vibrant, cerebral, witty, exuberant and alive.

Nikolai Kapustin
Ophelia Gordon

British pianist Ophelia Gordon makes a striking recording debut with this album of works by Nikolai Kapustin, drawn to his music as it reflects her own background (she grew up in a household full of music, both jazz and classical), her musical versatility and her desire to challenge the barriers between different genres of music.

Ophelia says, “I dream of a world where classical and jazz musicians can perform side by side, with no gatekeeping or barriers. Kapustin’s music makes that dream feel possible. It sits beautifully in the space between genres. It speaks directly to jazz musicians through its harmony and rhythm, and to classical musicians through its texture and form.”

This album is a celebration of the space “between the lines” where Kapustin’s music sits. In preparation for the recording, Ophelia tracked down many long out-of-print vinyl recordings of the composer’s own performances to find the essence of Kapustin’s voice. The recording is also a milestone in that it’s the first full release of Kapustin’s music by a female British pianist.

The album opens with Big Band Sounds, Op. 46 (1986), a piece rich in swing and the textures and timbres of Big Band jazz. Ophelia sashays through it with panache, making a bold opening statement for the rest of her debut album.

Selections from the 24 Preludes follow. Based on Chopin’s model, most of the Preludes presented here are upbeat and foot-tapping, but No. 5 in D Major is more wistful, with hints of Bill Evans. Contemplation follows, a gentle, introspective piece which conjures up a late-night smoky jazz club. Ophelia gives this a wonderful spaciousness, so much so that it sounds improvised there and then.

The Paraphrase on “Aquarela do Brasil” is Kapustin’s take the famous Brazilian standard “Brazil,” composed by Ary Barroso in 1939. Ophelia played along with a samba beat “to lock into the groove” and the piece has a joyful, pacey mood, rich in colour and textures, with occasional moments of almost Lisztian bravura.

The eight Concert Etudes are probably Kapustin’s most well-known pieces and each has a distinct character – punchy, impressionistic, groovy, funky, the Etudes reflect the influences of jazz greats such as Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, Bill Evans, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Ophelia really revels in this music, switching effortlessly between the different characters of each Etude – from the shimmering sixths (perhaps drawn from Chopin?) to the driving energy of Toccatina. There are sonorous bass sounds and hints of Rachmaninov in some of the chords, reminding us of Kapustin’s heritage. Performed here as the complete set, the Etudes are witty, poetic, fierce, relentless, and often beautiful too.

To close, the Paraphrase on Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” for Two Pianos. With its nod to the virtuosic paraphrases of Franz Liszt, with its dramatic flourishes and sparkling fioriture, the piece has a wonderful vibrant energy. Unable to find another pianist with whom to record the piece, Ophelia learnt both parts herself:

“The process was lengthy and difficult but incredibly rewarding. I split the parts into “rhythm” and “melody.” Though both switch roles, it was essential to record the rhythm part first, then play the solo part alongside it. I now perform this live with the rhythm coming through a PA system!”

Recorded on a characterful 1961 Steinway, the piano sound is rich and warm, colourful and immediate, and engineered with a microphone setup designed to balance the immediacy of a jazz trio with the depth and clarity of the classical solo piano. Ophelia plays with a natural virtuosity which never feels contrived nor forced, completely at home with Kapustin’s rhythmic vitality, and myriad harmonies and textures. She clearly loves this music because, as she herself says in the notes, it allows her to “be all of myself at the piano”.

With detailed notes by Ophelia Gordon herself, lending a more personal take on traditional liner notes, this is an impressive debut recording that leaves one wanting to hear more from this bold and authentic artist.

Kapustin: Between the Lines is released on 14 November on the Divine Art label (CD and streaming).

(Artist image: Ben Cillard)