Venables: Complete Works for Solo Piano

As a composer of art-song, Ian Venables is considered to be one of the most important writing today. The Songs of Ian Venables (8572514), Volume 21 of Naxos’ critically acclaimed English Song Series, was the first devoted to a living composer. This new recording introduces us to his music for solo piano and brings together works written between 1975 and 2001. It is Venables’ singular melodic gift and highly inventive use of harmony that combine to give us works that range from the deeply reflective and wistful to those in a lighter vein, full of charm and joie de vivre. Venables is certainly best known as an art-song composer, one of his country’s currently most acclaimed, but between 1975 and 2001 he composed a number of pieces for solo piano. They are tonal, sometimes nostalgic, rhythmically exciting and filled with the kind of lyricism that listeners will recall from his songs. Four of the pieces in this disc are heard in world première recordings.