World Piano Day
Deutsche Grammophon is delighted to be marking this year’s World Piano Day (Thursday 28 March 2024) with a festival of international pianism. A wide-ranging programme featuring some of the label’s world-renowned and rising-star pianists will be available on its ground-breaking audio-visual platform STAGE+. Non-subscribers can explore this and much more with 30 days of free access to STAGE+, using the promo code PIANODAY24. Full details can be found at worldpianoday.com.
A highlight of this year’s pianistic celebrations will be the STAGE+ premiere of Lang Lang’s scintillating interpretation of Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto, filmed live in Leipzig with the Gewandhausorchester and Andris Nelsons. Lang Lang calls the work, which features on his latest DG album Lang Lang – Saint Saëns, “a magnificent but underrated Romantic masterpiece”. Its stylistic diversity allows the pianist to reveal every facet of his technique. The Concerto will be streamed on STAGE+ at 8pm CET on World Piano Day, with two further screenings on 29 March.
A carefully curated selection of other full-length concerts and recitals, spanning more than three centuries of keyboard music, is also available on STAGE+. Music-lovers can enjoy, for example, a complete performance of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations from Víkingur Ólafsson, whose DG recording and ongoing world tour of the monumental work have drawn five-star reviews. Or immerse themselves in the jazz and blues rhythms of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, captured during Daniil Trifonov’s recent Carnegie Hall concert with the NYO-USA All-Stars conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. There are incandescent live renditions of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra from Yuja Wang with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, and recent Yellow Lounge sets from Alice Sara Ott and new DG signing Julius Asal. Further treats include duets by Mozart, Schubert and Stravinsky from old friends Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim; Hélène Grimaud’s interpretation of Schumann’s Kreisleriana in the idyllic setting of Polling Abbey Library; and the return of Lang Lang, this time with his wife Gina Alice, in Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals.
DG’s engagement with World Piano Day also includes a freshly compiled 80-minute film of incredible pianistic performances. This features the astonishing talents of no fewer than 22 pianists, among them Kit Armstrong, Marie Awadis, Bruce Liu, Daniil Trifonov and rising stars Elisabeth Brauß, Fabian Müller and Robert Neumann, among others, including several of those named above. The film will premiere on the Yellow Label’s YouTube channel at 9am ET/1pm GMT/2pm CET on 28 March.
DG is also showcasing its pianists in a selection of new tracks released to coincide with World Piano Day. Julius Asal plays music by both Holst (“Mars, the Bringer of War”) and Scriabin (an excerpt from his DG debut album, Scriabin – Scarlatti, out on 3 May); Bruce Liu plays the “Winter Wind” Étude by Chopin; Robert Neumann offers the Andante from Beethoven’s Sonata in F minor, WoO 47 No. 2; and there’s a first chance to hear “Darkness of Night” from Viktor Orri Árnason’s forthcoming five-track digital EP, Piano Poems (out on 12 April). Finally, two artists share new tracks especially recorded for World Piano Day. Roger Eno has created a piano rework of the 1983 classic track Deep Blue Day, while Joep Beving has written the meditative Pax, a plea for peace in today’s troubled world.
World Piano Day was founded by German composer, performer and producer Nils Frahm in 2015. Reflecting the number of keys on a full-sized piano, it takes place annually on the 88th day of the year.
