It might seem premature to issue an album titled The Complete Piano Music by a composer who is less than 50 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. But Naxos can always release "The Complete Piano Music, Vol. 2" by Magnus Lindberg if he keeps producing works at his current rate. The pieces fall into three clusters, with four written between 1976 and 1979, one in 1988, and three between 2000 and 2004. It's intriguing to hear the development in the composer's writing for the instrument, beginning with a student piece written when he was 18, through mature works written in his forties. It's easy to detect a progression from the rigorous serial abstraction of the first piece, Music for Two Pianos, to the more conventionally expressive and pianistically conceived later works. All the music is clearly the product of a probing, inventive, and disciplined imagination, but the later pieces, without relying on any post-Romantic vocabulary, have a warmth and communicative directness that place them in the tradition of expressive pianism that can be traced from the keyboard virtuosos of the nineteenth centuries through twentieth century masters like Scriabin, Messiaen, and Ligeti. Ralph van Raat plays with admirable clarity and precision, and he doesn't skimp on expressive fluidity and muscularity in the pieces in which that's appropriate. He's capably joined by Maarten van Veen in the two pieces for two pianos. The sound is first-rate, bright, and clean, and the stereo definition in the pieces for two pianos is especially good.
by Stephen Eddins
