New and noteworthy

Heaven Shines Like Silver

Stefan Lovin

This solo-piano album opens with a spellbinder (“Providential Men”), closes with a benediction (“Tantum Ergo”), and provides dramatic tension and development in between. The tension comes from a sacred-secular push and pull (two Christmas-themed songs linked by a piece called “Funeral”). The development comes from Lovin’s channeling of his Romantic impulses into improvisations worthy of titles such as “Toccata” and “Childhood.”

Alfred Hitchcock: A Portrait in Piano 

Matteo Monico

What’s the difference between those who can’t hear Rossini’s William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger and those who can’t hear Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette without thinking of Alfred Hitchcock Presents? Trick question—the latter are just the former grown up. Those who can’t hear Poulenc’s “Mouvement perpétual No. 1” without thinking of Hitchcock’s Rope are a different breed. So are those who think of The Man Who Knew Too Much and not The Doris Day Show when they hear “Que Será, Será.” The Bernard Hermann pieces, which include melodies indelibly associated with North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho, pose no complications at all.

Melancholia

Rick Wakeman

Performed on a Steinway Model D concert grand, these 12 closely and clearly miked three-to-five-minute pieces are what fans of nonclassical solo piano who’ve settled for the much heavier-handed George Winston should’ve been holding out for. Each delicate elegiac melody feels designed to bridge the gap between, say, Debussy and latter-day Benny Andersson. And Wakeman, his membership in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Yes notwithstanding, proves well suited to the task.

Close to You: The Spencer Zweifel Trio Plays Bacharach

Spencer Zweifel Trio

You’d think that the “so-and-so plays Bacharach” trope would’ve run its course by now. But whether immersing “Wishin’ and Hopin’” in Latin boogaloo, forcing “Close to You” to wobble along on high heels, depriving “Such Unlikely Lovers” of Elvis Costello, or sending “Always Something There to Remind Me” on a wild-goose chase, this Colorado-based piano-bass-drums trio deposits some of pop’s best-known melodies in remote, unfamiliar locations and forces them to find or fight their way home. Spoiler alert: They succeed. As to how, hearing is believing.

Encore

Decca released the six-disc Radu Lupu box The Unreleased Recordings: Decca Masters and Radio Tapes 1970–2002 on Black Friday, and it’s easy to see why. It makes an ideal gift not only for a connoisseur of 20th-century pianism but also for anyone who aspires to be one. It’s customary these days to talk about “letting the music breathe,” and because Lupu, who died in 2022, could summon an almost preternaturally light touch, breathe these recordings do. And in “breathing,” of course, they live.

Lupu’s fluid luminosity sparkles most on the Mozart piano quartets comprising Disc 1, the Mozart piano sonata on Disc 3, and the Mozart piano concerto on Disc 6. It’s easy to imagine listeners content to savor those to the exclusion of the rest. They’d miss, however, the sections where Lupu plays “against type” as it were. In giving Bartók’s percussive Out of Doors and Copland’s oblique second piano sonata their turbulent and expressive due, he generates pleasure from dashed expectations. —A.O.