Debut album "Souvenirs"
Release Date: March 22nd, 2024
Label: Immersive Sound Art
From New York via Amsterdam to Paris and Vienna – on their debut album the Onyx Piano Duo combines musical souvenirs from four different countries to create a colourful overall picture. In this personal retrospective, well-known piano works for four hands appear in a new light alongside exciting discoveries - always united by the two pianists' captivating joy of performing.
Samuel Barber: Souvenirs op. 28
Leo Smit: Divertimento
Maurice Ravel: Ma mère l'Oye
W.A. Mozart: Sonata C major K.521
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Stereo-CD and Pure Audio Blu-ray (immersive Dolby-Atmos format)
28-page booklet in German and English
Programme notes by Holger Slowik
Illustrations by Isabel Roos
"These recordings are brilliant, as is the playing of the Onyx Duo, who is bursting with playfulness and creative joy on this debut album. When has Maurice Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye ever been heard as beautifully, intimately and sonically as it is here? (...) Souvenirs is pure listening pleasure."
- Alain Steffen, pizzicato
"The Onyx piano duo (...) plays with extraordinary sensitivity, unrivalled precision and an unerring feel for subtle nuances. (...) shows a piano duo that is not only perfectly attuned to each other, but also makes music in a highly refreshing and infectious way. From Mozart to Barber, everything is played with nuance, at the highest technical level and with relish."
- Guido Krawinkel, Klassik heute
"Souvenirs is their debut album,which shows the two musicians as first-class pianists with a high degree of precision and a sure instinct for musical characters. They play Samuel Barber's "Souvenirs", from which the album takes its title, with marvellous musical enthusiasm. (...)
Ravel's suite "Ma mère l'Oye" is also extraordinarily well-performed and fascinates with a great deal of passion and a finely balanced sound. What's more, this album is superbly recorded and can also be played on audio Blu-ray. You can hardly make a better debut!"
Rating: 10 (out of 10)
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- Mario-Felix Vogt, Pianist Magazine
"What a strong hit! They present their debut album as a piano duo and you can't help but be amazed. (...) [Mozart and Ravel] have been recorded many times by leading piano duos and are well known, and yet they wrest their own colouring from them. With pleasantly flowing tempi, transparency and clarity of sound, an unheard-of density of events emerges from the Ravel: the agogic is consummate in the interplay, the balance between the voices is perfect, the range of colours seems inexhaustible. (...) Here two stupendous forces of exegesis unite to play with one voice. (...) An absolutely promising debut, chapeau!"
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- Marco Frei, Piano News
