AUGUST 2020

Spirio SPOTLIGHT

SUMMER POP SHUFFLE II, DEBUSSY PRELUDES II, OLGA KERN, MUSIC FOR WUHAN HEROES

This month STEINWAY & SONS SPIRIO, the world’s finest high resolution player piano, is now the instrument of the celebrated Chinese composer and pianist XiangDong Kong, who has composed musical portraits of a group of medical workers from Shanghai who went to Wuhan during the peak of the pandemic crisis there. Recorded in Shanghai last month, the pieces were spontaneously created as the artist interviewed and learned the story of each worker.

The eminent French pianist Pascal Rogé returns this month to complete the cycle of Debussy’s vivid and colorful Préludes. He performs Book 2 here, which includes Mists, La puerta del vino, Ondine, Fireworks and La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune.

Our summer pop shuffle playlist extends the season with Volume 2, which includes new tracks of the music of Billy Joel, Randy Newman, Willie Nelson and Journey, among others.

Russian virtuoso Olga Kern returns to SPIRIO with the intensely emotional B Minor Prélude by Sergei Rachmaninov, performed at Steinway Hall in New York City and is our featured SPIRIOSYNC video. American pianist Joanne Polk also returns this month: a champion of women composers, she gives us a taste of one of the great French composers of the 19th century, Louise Farrenc.

And Antonio Pompa-Baldi plays Piano Sonata No. 2 by the under-appreciated Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Finally, more Preludes: a delightful set of Preludi Pittorici by the Italian composer Roberto Piana.