Piano Music of Lera Auerbach

Eli Kalman

The musical journey recorded here reflects on Auerbach's borderless creativity and partially on the role and nature of 'play' as a cultural phenomenon. Gramophone: Her music for solo piano - often technically challenging but always highly idiomatic, and which has proved especially popular - also includes a set of 24 preludes, as well as the terse, epigrammatic Ten Dreams (both 1999).

The latter work serves as a useful introduction to Auerbach's colourful and vivid imagination - a world of extreme contrasts and sharp juxtapositions which often exploits wide registers while foregrounding pounding, obsessive repetitions of notes and chords. These oneiric visions are sometimes bathed in a sound world of blurred sonorities and indistinct edges, but such innocent moments disclose the shadow of something far more unsettling lurking underneath.