Orange Mountain Music is proud to announce the newest album from pianist Maki Namekawa featuring the world premiere of Philip Glass’s Piano Sonata. Namekawa was chosen by Glass in 2014 to be the first pianist to record the complete set of his twenty piano Etudes. The Complete Piano Etudes (OMM0098) went on to be a best-seller and was followed in 2019 with her solo piano version of Glass’s iconic 1985 score to the film Mishima (OMM0128).

Namekawa is one of Glass’s closest collaborators and has been touring with the composer since 2012. All that remained to complete the relationship would be for Glass to compose a work specifically for Namekawa and her particular brand of joyful precision. The opportunity came in 2019 and Glass composed his First Piano Sonata for the occasion. A major work, the Piano Sonata is twice as long as anything the composer had previously written for the instrument, and was premiered at the Piano Festival Ruhr in Germany in the summer of 2019 before having its US premiere in New York in November 2019. Large in scope, Glass’s latest published work embraces the exacting expertise, playfulness, and joy which Namekawa brings to all of her music making.

The album is rounded out by Glass’s two most recent piano works. “Distant Figure” A Passacaglia for Solo Piano was premiered in 2017 and has quickly become a staple of many pianists’ concert programmes. And finally, the album ends with Glass’s 2012 Etude no.20. After the composition of 19 Etudes over the period of more than two decades, for his final twentieth Etude, the composer wrote a piece absolutely different from all the pieces in the collection which preceded it. Etude no.20 has the simultaneous charm of a retrospective yet forward looking work. Indeed, in many ways the sense of finality in Etude no.20 foreshadows what will soon come in the Piano Sonata and Distant Figure.