Dear friends,

I hope this finds you well, and that the new year has gotten off to a great start for you.

My 2023 has been quite the whirlwind so far—highlights include a New Year’s concert with the Bucharest Symphony and John Axelrod broadcast on CNN Romania, the concluding performances of series of concerts I’ve been giving this season for the Dresdner Philharmonie, and a quick tour of the UK. I’m now gearing up for a tour of Canada, starting off with the premiere of Kati Agócs’s piano concerto “Transluminescence” with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Raiskin at the Winnipeg New Music Festival.

This year we celebrate the anniversaries of two major composers of the past century: Rachmaninoff’s 150th and Ligeti’s 100th. I have a host of exciting upcoming projects exploring the work of both composers, and in this note I’d like to highlight those about Rachmaninoff. (More on Ligeti soon!)

New album

I’m glad to share that my next album, “Rachmaninoff, Refracted,” will be coming out on the Steinway label later this year. The disc explores a number of perspectives on his work—as a pianist, composer, a transcriber and one whose music is also often arranged—and centers around the monumental, rarely-heard Sonata No. 1.

Publications

Among the other works on this disc program is my new piano arrangement of the Adagio from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, recently published by Muse Press, available in digital and hard copy versions here. Another piece on the disc, my work “Memories of Rachmaninoff’s Georgian Song,” will be published by Muse Press later this year.

Spiriocast and recitals

Following recording sessions for the album at Calgary’s Bella Concert Hall in October 2022, I also performed the program as a live recital at the venue on a Spirio, Steinway’s high-definition player piano. The piano recorded my performance, and the video of the recital shall be Spiriocast this year: namely, screened around the world with the audio played back on Spirio pianos. The recital was met with rave reviews:

“Namoradze played the sonata as well as I can imagine it being played. Namoradze is extraordinarily undemonstrative at the keyboard; he never seems to be exerting himself. But close your eyes and you will hear an artist with an amazing command of dynamics from almost inaudible – as at the beginning of his ‘Georgian Song’ piece – to hair-raisingly loud as in the last movement of Rachmaninov’s Sonata No. 1.” — La Scena Musicale

“In the performance of all these works, Namoradze played with the kind of nuance, ease, and refinement that the Honens family has come to expect of him, a type of musical searching and exploration found only in the playing of the most intelligent of pianists. And to cap it off, Namoradze concluded his program with Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, a rarely played, barnstorming work composed about the same time as the Second Symphony, whose transcriptions of the second movement was heard earlier in the concert – yet more refractions.” — Calgary Herald

I shall continue to perform this program, among others, in a slew of exciting concerts coming up in the next months. Check the list on social media or on my website, and I hope to see you during my travels.

Kind regards,

Nicolas