Magnus Lindberg: Complete Piano Music (2008)

It might seem premature to issue an album titled The Complete Piano Music by a composer who is less than 50 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. But Naxos can always release "The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2" by Magnus Lindberg if he keeps producing works at his current rate. The pieces fall into three clusters, with four written between 1976 and 1979, one in 1988, and three between 2000 and 2004. It's intriguing to hear the development in the composer's writing for the instrument, beginning with a student piece ... Read More

It might seem premature to issue an album titled The Complete Piano Music by a composer who is less than 50 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. But Naxos can always release "The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2" by Magnus Lindberg if he keeps producing works at his current rate. The pieces fall into three clusters, with four written between 1976 and 1979, one in 1988, and three between 2000 and 2004. It's intriguing to hear the development in the composer's writing for the instrument, beginning with a student piece written when he was 18, through mature works written in his forties. It's easy to detect a progression from the rigorous serial abstraction of the first piece, Music for Two Pianos, to the more conventionally expressive and pianistically conceived later works. All the music is clearly the product of a probing, inventive, and disciplined imagination, but the later pieces, without relying on any post-Romantic vocabulary, have a warmth and communicative directness that place them in the... Read Less