A rare jewel among the piano repertoire, Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures, a cycle of piano solo works, is mostly unknown to the public.

Following the great success of his Sibelius album in 2017, Leif Ove Andsnes once again brings lesser known piano music into the spotlight, delivering a treasure chest of accessible and romantic tunes performed with artistic brilliance. With his commanding technique and searching interpretations, Leif Ove Andsnes has won worldwide acclaim, performing in the world’s leading concert halls and with its foremost orchestras. An avid chamber musician, he is also the founding director of Norway’s Rosendal Chamber Music Festival.

“Rachel” the debut album from American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørenson, showcases the depth and variety of her incredible voice, which leading French daily Le Monde cites as “without a doubt one of the most impressive voices in the opera world.” The album includes key arias and scenes from Verdi, Mozart, Puccini, Dvořák, and Lehár that reflect her stellar career performing on the world’s most prestigious opera stages. Ms. Willis-Sørensen is joined by one of her vocal idols on the famous duet from La Bohème: tenor Jonas Kaufmann, here making his first guest appearance of this kind.

The new album sees this immensely gifted singer, who possesses an impressive vocal and dramatic range, explore a wide swathe of repertoire to showcase her versatility, vocal depth, and artistry. An intimate portrait of the artist at this stage in her career, each piece included on the album was carefully selected by Ms. Willis-Sørensen as she presents a collection of her favorite arias and scenes that she hopes will move the listener as they have moved her. Her dramatic expressivity and vocal virtuosity are both on display in full force, in arias ranging from the album’s centerpiece Verdi scenes, with weighty roles such as Desdemona in Otello, Leonora in Il Trovatore and Violetta in La Traviata, to the ‘Vilja-Lied’ from Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow and ‘Song to the Moon’ from Dvořák’s Rusalka.

Antonín Dvorák needs no introduction – neither in his homeland nor anywhere else in the world. But how widely known are his piano works? The Piano Concerto in G minor has recently enjoyed a degree of revived interest, yet Dvorák’s pieces for solo piano are in the main an unexplored landscape even for many pianists and musicologists. More’s the pity! They do not possess Chopin’s sway and finely nuanced emotionality, or Liszt’s ostentatious virtuosity. Just as he did in his entire oeuvre, in his piano works Dvorák eschewed flashiness, focusing instead on tender intimate lyricism, teeming with ideas, and shaping even his miniatures with the sensibility of a genius. Such music is certainly worthy of a new complete recording. The challenge was undertaken by Ivo Kahánek, an artist whose recording of Dvorák’s difficult Piano Concerto made with the Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Jakub Hruša has deservedly gained critical acclaim and even won the coveted BBC Music Magazine Concerto Award. The present 4-album set encompasses cycles (Silhouettes, Poetic Moods and the Suite in A major, composed in the US, which Dvorák himself valued greatly), occasional pieces, as well as several little-known works, recorded for the very first time. One such is the polka Forget-me-not, Dvorák’s first surviving miniature, written when he was 14 years of age. The recording of piano works provides yet another precious insight into the abundant world of the composer’s soul. Dvorák’s rich inner world expressed through the piano.