classical

Lang Lang Recorded Game Soundtracks for Piano Book 2

Somewhere across the two discs of Piano Book 2, between Bach and Satie, Lang Lang plays Rush E. That is a piece by Andrew Wrangell written to be effectively unplayable, a joke about virtuosity that circulated as an internet video before anybody attempted it seriously, and it is now on a Deutsche Grammophon release.

The album came out on 17 October 2025 and contains thirty-two pieces. The rest of the list is almost as unusual: Nobuo Uematsu’s music from Final Fantasy X, Yu-Peng Chen’s writing for Genshin Impact and Black Myth: Wukong, themes from Naruto, Amélie, La La Land and Cinema Paradiso, and a jazz standard associated with Thelonious Monk.

Where the Repertoire Came From

The selection method is the point. Lang Lang has said the pieces were chosen from messages sent by listeners, from school music syllabuses, from what he has learned teaching, and from works that matter to him personally. He calls the thirty-two miniature masterpieces.

School syllabuses are the giveaway. This is a record aimed squarely at people who are learning the instrument, which is why the limited CD edition carries an NFC chip linking to downloadable sheet music and tutorials, and why Faber Music is publishing a companion book with the scores, photographs and his commentary.

Very few artists at his level design an album around whether the audience can play it themselves. It reframes the release as a teaching object rather than a recital, and it explains the presence of pieces that no concert programme would touch.

Classical, Contemporary and a Game Composer

The traditional half of the album covers Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Satie and Debussy. The first single, released on 5 September 2025, was Liszt’s second Consolation, which is about as gentle an entry point to Liszt as exists.

The contemporary half runs through Ludovico Einaudi’s Fly, Joe Hisaishi’s Spring, and Tony Ann’s Icarus, the last in a new four-hands arrangement made for the album and premiered with the composer at the Beijing launch.

Yu-Peng Chen is the most interesting inclusion. He composes for Chinese games with enormous international audiences, and his music is heard by far more people than most living concert composers manage, almost entirely by players who would never describe themselves as classical listeners.

A Cartoon Started All of This

Lang Lang was born in Shenyang in 1982 to a Manchu family; his father, Lang Guoren, plays the erhu. He began lessons at three, having been set off by the Tom and Jerry episode The Cat Concerto, which is built around Liszt’s second Hungarian Rhapsody.

The Beijing launch event for Piano Book 2 featured an appearance by Tom and Jerry. That is a piece of promotional staging with an unusually direct justification: the cartoon is the reason there is a career to promote.

The rest of the training was conventional and difficult. At nine he was thrown out of his tutor’s studio for a supposed lack of talent. He continued with another teacher, studied under Zhao Ping-Guo at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, won the Xinghai National Piano Competition in 1993, and moved to the United States in 1997 to study with Gary Graffman at Curtis.

What Rush E Actually Is

It is worth being precise about the strangest thing on the album, because the joke only works if you know the setup. Rush E began as a demonstration of what music notation software will happily print but no pair of hands can execute: a cascade of notes at a density beyond human reach, produced to be watched as a scrolling video rather than performed.

It became a fixture of piano internet culture, and a genre of response videos grew around pianists attempting to play as much of it as physically possible. Recording it for a major classical label collapses that whole ecosystem into a single track, and it does so without any explanatory apparatus: it simply appears between pieces by composers who have been dead for a century.

There is a serious point buried in it. The virtuoso tradition Liszt invented was always partly about spectacle and the appearance of impossibility, and Rush E is that instinct running without a human performer at the centre. A pianist of Lang Lang’s standing playing it is a comment on his own tradition as much as on the internet.

The First One Did 1.2 Billion Streams

Piano Book, in 2019, has passed 1.2 billion streams and is among the most successful classical albums released this century. Lang Lang has more than four and a quarter million monthly listeners on Spotify, which is an order of magnitude beyond almost any other classical soloist.

Those numbers explain why Deutsche Grammophon would release a follow-up containing game music. An artist delivering that kind of audience earns the right to define what goes on the record, and the label’s calculation is presumably that the people who streamed the first one are not primarily concert-goers.

Two Labels and Back Again

He recorded for Telarc and Deutsche Grammophon early on, signed to Sony in 2010 for a reported three million dollars, and returned to Deutsche Grammophon under Universal in 2017. His Beethoven first and fourth concertos with the Orchestre de Paris went to number one on the traditional classical Billboard chart.

The institutional recognition has followed: Time named him among the hundred most influential people in 2009, Gramophone put him in its Hall of Fame in 2012, UNICEF made him a goodwill ambassador in 2004, and the United Nations named him a Messenger of Peace in 2013.

The Argument About Accessibility

Lang Lang has spent two decades being described as evangelical about widening the audience for classical music, and just as long being criticised for it. The Lang Lang International Music Foundation, launched in New York in October 2008, is the formal version of that project.

Piano Book 2 is the least ambiguous statement of the position he has made. Putting Final Fantasy and Chopin on the same release argues that the distinction between them is a matter of where a piece came from rather than what it is worth, and pairing it with sheet music makes the argument practical instead of rhetorical.

It is a different route to the same destination as Víkingur Ólafsson recording Bach in a studio under his house. Both are pianists with very large streaming audiences reorganising how the music reaches people: one by removing the recording studio’s formality, the other by removing the repertoire’s.

The counter-argument is the obvious one, that an album containing a viral internet piece is chasing attention rather than serving music. The response is in the track list. Rush E sits among Bach, Debussy and Rachmaninoff, played by somebody who could programme anything he wanted, and nothing about its inclusion prevents a listener from finding the Liszt.

The formats reinforce it. Two CDs, two LPs including a marbled vinyl edition, a score edition, signed art cards, and the NFC chip with the tutorials: this is a release designed to be bought in a physical form and then used. That is an odd strategy in 2025 and a coherent one for a record whose audience is expected to sit at an instrument afterwards.

By Will Lisil / August 24, 2026

Article Classical Featured Music News

Hilary Hahn Says Her Career Has a Future Again

The sentence Hilary Hahn used, posting to her own audience in February, was not the one a publicist would have written. She is, she said, now the proud owner of an artificial disc. Her career has a future again, her neck has healthier alignment than before, and she is pain free.

That is the end of roughly two concert seasons of cancellations. It is also a reminder of something the violin repertoire never mentions, which is that the instrument is held between a jaw and a collarbone, and everything else depends on what is happening in the neck.

What the Two Years Looked Like

She withdrew from concerts from July 2024 with pinched nerves. In her own account the first herniation of a cervical disc, about eighteen months before the surgery, was debilitating: muscle atrophy alongside ongoing nerve stress. She recovered from that one without an operation and went back to work.

The return came in late February 2025 with the New York Philharmonic and the conductor Herbert Blomstedt, playing the Brahms Violin Concerto across four performances at David Geffen Hall, with Schubert’s sixth symphony completing the programme. She described it as a homecoming and called the orchestra family.

She was also explicit at the time that the schedule would be managed rather than resumed, saying she was taking a measured approach with adequate rest between concerts, and that this meant cancelling dates that had already been announced. Then, over the summer of 2025, the same disc herniated again and compressed nearly all of her remaining nerve space.

The Surgeon Who Played the Violin

At that point conservative treatment was no longer an option. The disc was replaced with an artificial one, and Hahn noted, in a detail that is either a coincidence or an extremely good piece of referral, that her surgeon used to play the violin.

It matters more than it sounds. A cervical fusion and a disc replacement produce different outcomes for range of motion, and a violinist needs a specific and unusual amount of lateral rotation and flexion to hold the instrument at all. A surgeon who has done it understands what the requirement actually is rather than treating the patient as a generic neck.

The Scarves

She has told audiences to expect scarves for a while, because she has a surgical scar on her neck she wants to protect both offstage and on. She added that it might be a style she keeps.

Announcing that in advance is a practical solution to a problem that only exists in performance. A soloist stands lit from the front for two hours in front of two thousand people; anything visible becomes a subject. Naming it first turns it into a wardrobe decision rather than a rumour.

What She Is Rebuilding

Her stated task now is getting strength and micro-coordination back while the nerves settle. The second word is the one violinists will recognise. Gross strength returns predictably; the fine differential control of individual fingers under a bow arm is a separate faculty, and it is the one that separates a professional from an amateur.

She has been careful not to overstate the position, noting that surgery brings longer-term consequences and that nobody can know the future, while describing the prognosis as really good. Given how much of the past two years she spent not knowing whether the career would continue, that is a measured way to put it.

The Programme She Built for the Comeback

The 2025 return is worth looking at in detail, because the choices were not those of someone easing back in. The Brahms concerto is one of the longest and most physically demanding works in the violin repertoire, roughly forty minutes of sustained playing with a first movement that gives the soloist almost nowhere to rest. Nobody chooses it to test a recovering neck.

Then, on the second night, she added a late-night set with Philharmonic musicians and the New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck: Max Richter’s Mercy, Jessie Montgomery’s Musings, two pieces by Carlos Simon, the Ysaÿe Ballade, a Bach courante and movements from George Walker’s cello sonata. Playing a full concerto and then a chamber programme of mostly living composers, in the same week you return from a seven-month absence, describes a particular relationship with the work.

Curtis at Ten, and an Ysaÿe Lineage

Hahn was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1979 and admitted to the Curtis Institute in 1990, at ten. She studied there with Jascha Brodsky, who had studied with Eugène Ysaÿe, and later with Jaime Laredo, graduating in 1999.

That teaching line is not decorative. Ysaÿe wrote the six solo sonatas that are among the hardest things in the repertoire, and Hahn has recorded them; when she programmed a late-night set during her 2025 return she included the third of them, the Ballade, alongside Bach, Max Richter, Jessie Montgomery and Carlos Simon.

The Grammys came in 2001 for the Brahms and Stravinsky concertos, in 2008 for Schoenberg and Sibelius, and in 2013 for In 27 Pieces. Sixteen albums have appeared since 1996 across Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca.

The Commissioning Is the Career

In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores is the clearest statement of what she actually does. She commissioned twenty-six living composers to write short encores, among them Jennifer Higdon, Nico Muhly, Du Yun, David Del Tredici and Max Richter, then ran an open contest for the twenty-seventh, won by Jeff Myers. She toured the results between 2011 and 2013 before releasing the album.

The list of other commissions is long: a concerto from Edgar Meyer in 1999, Jennifer Higdon’s violin concerto, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, six partitas from Antón García Abril premiered across 2016 and 2017, and a sonata from Lera Auerbach in 2019.

Very few soloists at this level spend that much of their working life on music nobody has heard. It is the same instinct as Víkingur Ólafsson building a studio under his own house, which is a decision to make the conditions rather than accept them. In Hahn’s case the conditions being made are the repertoire itself.

An 1864 Copy

She plays an 1864 Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume modelled on Paganini’s Guarneri, the instrument known as Il Cannone, and also owns an 1865 Vuillaume based on the Alard Stradivarius. Neither is a priceless original, which is a quietly characteristic choice from a player whose reputation rests on control rather than on tone as an inheritance.

Vuillaume was a nineteenth-century Parisian maker whose copies were good enough that soloists have used them by preference rather than by necessity for a century and a half. Choosing one over a period Italian instrument also removes a practical anxiety: a working violinist who tours constantly is carrying the thing through airports, and an instrument that is merely excellent rather than irreplaceable is a different daily proposition. She has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2016, having previously been based in New York.

The best line from the whole episode came a year before the surgery, at the first return, when she wrote that she intended to keep making music for as long as possible, and hoped to manage it until she was ninety-seven, like Maestro Blomstedt. She then added, in brackets, no pressure. On the current evidence the joke has become a plan.

By Will Lisil / August 21, 2026

Article Classical Featured Music News

Víkingur Ólafsson Made His Bach Album in a Home Studio

There is a room under his house in Iceland with teak walls and enough equipment to run a session without an engineer in the building. He calls it The Nutshell. His description of what it is for is the least grand sentence a Grammy-winning pianist has offered in some time: he can wander downstairs late at night in his pyjamas, press a couple of buttons, and start recording.

Continuum II, which Deutsche Grammophon releases on 13 November 2026, is the first album Víkingur Ólafsson has made entirely in there. Everything about the record follows from that fact.

Bach as a Diary

The project has an unusually plain premise. For more than thirty years he has played a little Bach every day, and he has described it as the one constant in his life regardless of what else is happening. Continuum, whose first volume appeared in October 2024, is that habit turned into a release schedule rather than a concept devised for one.

He has called this instalment his first album domesticum, built around intimate works associated with the home. The word choice is exact rather than decorative: these are pieces written for domestic instruments and domestic occasions, now recorded in a domestic building.

What Is Actually on It

The repertoire declines almost every opportunity for display. Six chorales, including Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, Welt, ade!, and Es ist genug. Six short preludes Bach wrote as practice pieces for his pupils. The Largo from the Keyboard Concerto No. 5 in F minor. The Larghetto from the Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D major, itself Bach’s reworking of Vivaldi, which was released as the second single in August.

There is one ensemble piece: the Adagio from the Violin Sonata No. 5 in F minor, arranged for piano, string quartet and double bass, with the Siggi String Quartet and the bassist Xun Yang. Everything else is a man alone in a room with an instrument, which is what the studio was built for.

Choosing student exercises for an album is a real decision. The short preludes exist because a teacher needed material for children, and they are usually heard played by beginners rather than by soloists who have sold out Wigmore Hall. Recording them at this level is an argument that the domestic Bach is not lesser Bach.

Two Versions of the Same Air

The first single, released in July, was his own arrangement of Air on the G String, dedicated to György Kurtág for his hundredth birthday. He recorded it twice: once on a grand piano and once on an upright.

That is the clearest demonstration of what the home studio changes. Booking two instruments and a hall to record alternate takes of one three-minute piece is an expensive proposition that a label would question. Doing it in your own basement costs an afternoon, and the second version exists because there was no reason it should not.

What Continuum Means

The title points at something specific. Ólafsson has noted that the project is named for the unbroken thread linking all music, and that the composer’s own surname is the German word for a stream. A series of albums assembled from daily practice is that idea made literal: the recording is a section cut out of something that was running before the tape started and carries on after it stops.

It also solves a problem that catalogue Bach usually has. A pianist recording the Well-Tempered Clavier or the partitas is producing a definitive statement on a fixed text, and the format invites comparison with every previous recording. An open-ended journal makes no such claim. Each volume is only what the playing was like during that stretch, which is a far more forgiving frame and, on this evidence, a more honest one.

Why He Built It

He has connected the studio to turning forty and wanting the freedom to record with complete spontaneity. Classical recording normally runs on the opposite principle: a hall booked months out, a producer, an engineer, a tuner, a schedule measured in sessions, and a piano that has to be right on the day.

Under that system a performance has to be ready when the diary says so. Removing the booking removes the deadline, and a musician who plays Bach every morning can simply record on the days when it goes well. For a project explicitly framed as a journal, that is the only sane way to work.

He Ran His Own Label First

None of this is out of character. Ólafsson was born in Reykjavík in 1984 to a mother, Svana Víkingsdóttir, who was a piano teacher and gave him his first lessons. He studied in Iceland, then took a bachelor’s and a master’s at Juilliard.

Before Deutsche Grammophon signed him in 2016, he released three albums on his own label, Dirrindí: a debut of Brahms and Beethoven in 2009, a Chopin and Bach programme in 2011, and a Winterreise with the bass Kristinn Sigmundsson in 2012 that won Classical Album of the Year at the Icelandic Music Awards. He also founded the Reykjavík Midsummer Music festival in 2012 and has premiered six piano concertos by Icelandic composers.

Building infrastructure rather than waiting to be given it is the through-line. It puts him alongside Igor Levit naming a new label after a concert he gave in Berlin: two pianists of the same generation who have concluded that owning the means of release is part of the artistic work rather than a business afterthought.

A Billion Streams of Mostly Bach

The commercial position is unusual for a classical soloist. He has passed a billion streams worldwide, about half of them Bach, and the Goldberg Variations won him the 2025 Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. The shelf also holds BBC Music Magazine Album of the Year, two Opus Klassik awards, Gramophone Artist of the Year, the RPS Gold Medal, the Nordic Council Music Prize and Iceland’s Order of the Falcon.

The Deutsche Grammophon run since 2017 has been deliberately varied: Philip Glass, then Bach, then Debussy paired with Rameau, then Mozart and his contemporaries, then From Afar, then the Goldbergs, then Opus 109. A pianist who programmes that way is not repeating a formula, which makes the decision to settle into a multi-volume Bach project a change of method rather than a safe retreat.

The Rest of the Year

The diary around the release is heavy. He created and curates the PULSE festival at Lucerne, where he played the Goldberg Variations in July with the artist Olafur Eliasson. A recital at the Edinburgh International Festival followed in August, then a European tour with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra playing Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto, and three recitals at Wigmore Hall in September.

October brings the world premiere of Mark Simpson’s piano concerto with the London Philharmonic, then a recital tour of South Korea, China and Taiwan. He closes the year on 4 December playing Brahms’s first concerto with the Berliner Philharmoniker in Baden-Baden.

Against that schedule, the argument for the room under the house becomes obvious. A musician on the road for most of a year has very few days at home, and the only way to record on those days is to have somewhere to do it that requires no notice from anybody.

By Will Lisil / August 20, 2026

Article Classical Featured Music News

Igor Levit Named His New Label After a Concert He Gave in Berlin

Somebody had to decide how many copies to press. The answer, for Igor Levit’s recording of Erik Satie’s Vexations, is 840, and it is not an arbitrary number. Satie’s manuscript carries a note suggesting the short motif be repeated 840 times, which is why complete performances run past twelve hours. The edition size is the piece’s own instruction, turned into a manufacturing decision.

That album is one of the first three releases on No Silence, the label Levit has founded in partnership with Sony Classical. All three arrive on 23 October, trailed since 19 June by a single: Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1. For a pianist who has recorded exclusively for Sony since 2013, starting a label inside the same company is less a departure than a change of authorship over what gets made.

Where the Name Came From

No Silence takes its name from a concert. After the attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023, Levit performed at the Berliner Ensemble in an event titled Against Silence, Against Anti-Semitism. The label carries that title forward, and Levit has been direct about the implication: “NO SILENCE is not simply a label. NO SILENCE is a stance.”

Naming a record label after a protest concert is unusual, and it sets an expectation the catalogue will have to meet. Levit has spent much of the last decade placing his playing inside public argument rather than beside it, from streamed house concerts during lockdown to programming that pairs canonical repertoire with pieces written in response to catastrophe. The label formalises a position he already occupied.

The Eroica, but for One Pianist

The second of the three releases is the most technically curious. Levit plays Liszt’s piano transcription of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, a piece Liszt reduced from a full orchestra to two hands without simplifying it. Transcriptions of that kind are a strange genre: the pianist has to imply an orchestra rather than imitate one, and the writing frequently asks for more notes than a player has fingers.

It is paired with Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, performed with the conductor Antonello Manacorda, the Kammerakademie Potsdam and the actress Dorte Lyssewski. Schoenberg wrote the Ode in 1942 as a setting of Byron, and its subject is a tyrant’s fall. Programming it against Beethoven’s Eroica, a symphony whose dedication to Napoleon Beethoven famously withdrew, makes the pairing an argument rather than a coupling.

The forces involved also explain why this is not simply a solo record. Schoenberg scored the Ode for a speaker, piano and string quartet, with the text delivered in Sprechstimme, the half-spoken, half-sung delivery that sits between recitation and melody. Casting an actress rather than a singer in that role is the orthodox choice and the more demanding one, because the part has to carry Byron’s contempt while staying tied to written pitches. Placing it after forty-five minutes of solo Beethoven transcription gives the album an abrupt change of texture at exactly the point a listener might have settled.

The Label’s First Signing

The third album belongs to someone else entirely. Lukas Sternath, a winner of the ARD Music Competition and a BBC New Generation Artist, makes his debut with a programme of Liszt and Schubert. That choice says as much about the label’s intent as Levit’s own releases do: a new imprint led by an established soloist could easily have been a vehicle for his catalogue alone.

Sony’s executives have framed the partnership in the language labels use, with Per Hauber, who runs Sony Classical, describing it as the next milestone in a long relationship. The more informative signal is structural. Levit is not leaving a major to go independent; he is being given an imprint inside one, which is a different arrangement and a rarer one in classical music.

What Levit Already Built

The catalogue behind this is substantial. Levit signed to Sony at twenty-five and made his debut on the label in 2013 with Beethoven’s late sonatas. His complete Beethoven sonata recording, released in September 2019, went straight to number one in the official classical charts. Along the way he has collected four Opus Klassik awards, Gramophone’s Artist of the Year in 2020, Musical America’s Recording Artist of the Year the same year, and both the Recording of the Year and Instrumental awards from BBC Music Magazine.

He has also built institutional roles rather than only touring. Since the 2022-23 season he has been co-artistic director of the Heidelberger Fruhling festival, and a year later he initiated the Piano Fest with the Lucerne Festival. Those are administrative jobs as much as artistic ones, and they suggest someone comfortable running things, which is the temperament a label demands.

His repertoire choices have pointed this way for years as well. On DSCH, released on Sony in 2021, paired Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, a cycle running about two and a half hours across every major and minor key, with Ronald Stevenson’s rarely played Passacaglia on DSCH, itself built from more than three hundred variations on Shostakovich’s musical monogram. Issuing two such demanding cycles together is the kind of decision a label normally resists and an artist-run imprint exists to make. The pattern repeats across his catalogue: Life in 2018 ran from Busoni and Bach to Bill Evans, and Tristan in 2022 set Henze against Wagner and Mahler.

Satie, Twice Over

Vexations is not new territory for him. In spring 2025 Levit performed the piece for thirteen hours at London’s Southbank Centre with the performance artist Marina Abramovic, a decade after the two collaborated on Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. A recording of a work built on endurance is a paradox: the thing that makes a live Vexations extraordinary is the duration a listener shares with the player.

The physical edition acknowledges that. The 840 copies carry an NFC chip and signed sheet music, which turns the release into an object rather than a document. Whether that translates the experience or simply commemorates it is a fair question, and it is the same one facing any recording of music designed to happen in a room, including the three volumes Immanuel Wilkins cut at the Village Vanguard.

What Vexations Actually Asks For

It helps to know how little music is involved. Vexations is a single page: a bass line, then two harmonisations of it, built from intervals that refuse to settle into a key. Played once it lasts somewhere between one and two minutes depending on the tempo taken, and taken alone it would be a curiosity rather than a landmark. The instruction to repeat it 840 times is what converts it into an ordeal, and Satie left no explanation for the number.

The piece went largely unperformed for decades, and its modern life began when John Cage organised a relay performance in New York in 1963 using a rotating team of pianists. Most complete accounts since have worked the same way, which makes a solo traversal the harder proposition and the reason Levit’s Southbank performance drew attention. Recording it raises a further question that a concert does not: a listener can stop a recording, and the composer’s instruction assumes they cannot.

The Season That Follows

The label arrives at the start of a heavy stretch. From October 2026 through June 2028, Levit returns to his complete Beethoven sonata cycle, presented as eight-recital sets in New York, London, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, timed towards the Beethoven anniversary in 2027. Further Beethoven recitals in the 2026-27 season take him to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Lisbon, Milan, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw and Zurich, alongside a North American tour.

In December he plays the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm with Sir Antonio Pappano and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Set against that schedule, launching an imprint looks less like a side project than a consolidation: the recitals, the festivals he directs and now the recordings all run through decisions he makes himself. His own website describes him in three words, in this order: citizen, European, pianist.

By Will Lisil / August 7, 2026