Composed between 2006 and 2010, Frederic Rzewski’s Nanosonatas are a cycle of 56 brief piano pieces, structured into eight books. Conceived after his vast work The Road, these sonatas focus instead on concision, restraint, and the poetics of incompletion. Each nanosonata offers a fleeting glimpse—suggesting larger ideas, then stopping abruptly, like a character in Tolstoy evoked in just a few lines.

Despite their brevity, the Nanosonatas contain striking variety: echoes of Scarlatti, Schumann, Shostakovich, folk tunes, protest songs, and even boxing gestures all contribute to a vivid and unpredictable sound world. Deeply personal and philosophical, the cycle embraces imperfection as an aesthetic, resisting closure while reflecting on time, memory, and fragility.

Rzewski saw these works as part of a living keyboard tradition—from Frescobaldi to the present—and a continuation of the composer-performer lineage. Pianist Daan Vandewalle’s performance, shaped by years of artistic dialogue with Rzewski, captures both the intimate nuance and radical spirit of this masterful late work.

Booklet: EN

A landmark in contemporary piano literature, The Road is Frederic Rzewski’s epic cycle—nearly nine hours of music composed between 1995 and 2003. Conceived as a “novel for piano,” it fuses storytelling, improvisation, political reflection, and virtuosity across 65 pieces. With references ranging from jazz and folk to Tolstoy and Gogol, Rzewski maps a musical journey as unpredictable and rich as life itself.

Pianist Daan Vandewalle, Rzewski’s close collaborator and dedicatee of many works, offers a deeply informed interpretation shaped by years of dialogue with the composer. His performance brings out the full spectrum of Rzewski’s vision—intimate, radical, and defiantly human.

Booklet: EN

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988) wrote 61 works for solo piano, of which only nine were published before the middle of the 1930s. The last of these publications was the Opus Clavicembalisticum, a work of unprecedented complexity and it is considered one of the longest and most complicated pieces ever written for solo piano. It shows the composers desire to push the boundaries of what is possible in piano music and remains a fascinating and challenging work within the realm of 20th-century classical music.

The pianist Daan Vandewalle is an internationally acclaimed performer of 20th and 21st century piano works who has been teaching piano at the Ghent Conservatory since 2001. He is one of the few pianists in the world to have mastered the entire Opus Clavicembalisticum by Sorabji, which he performs in this recording in over 5 hours on 5 CDs

Booklet: EN, FR, DE

Surviving this extreme experience, the cellist Arne Deforce (cello) and Thomas Goepfer (live-electronics) lead us into a new universe.

Booklet: EN, FR

Tim Mariën uproots and challenges the musical experiences to which we as listeners are accustomed. Above all, the use of unconventional tunings makes one feel at first like a stranger in the music of the Belgian composer, then nevertheless “at home”. Mariën, who appreciates a certain unruliness in the sonic material, detunes and reconstructs instruments in order to elicit unique microtonal scales and timbres from them.

This portrait album presents works by the Belgian that have been composed since 2001 and performed by the Tiptoe Company, by Ictus and by Ensemble Temporum. The modular string composition A Basement Suite, the album’s namesake, takes us into a surreal sphere of sounds and invites us into Tim Mariën’s acoustic wonderland.

Booklet: EN, FR, NL