Works For Solo Piano brings together ten works penned by Spanish composer Gabriel Erkoreka between the mid-’90s and the early 2020s. The composition featured here are often rapid ‘n’ urgent in their feel and attack- yet there is also a feeling of mood-to-felt harmonics, as well as touches of playful invention present.

The ten-track CD appears on Austria’s Kairos Music. It’s presented in the labels house style four-panel digipak- this features a forty-five-page glossy inlay booklet with English and German texts, regarding composer Erkoreka, the pieces presented, and Alfonso Gómez- the Spanish pianist who plays all of the compositions.

Gabriel Erkoreka was born in Bilbao, Spain in 1969. He has been seemingly actively composing since the early 1990’s- with work for soloists, ensembles, chamber orchestras, vocalists, and even electro-acoustic line-ups. 

The compositions featured here date from between 1994 and 2021, and while that’s a fair timescale Erkoreka’s often busy and rapid style is present and very recognisable throughout.  We move from the seesawing disquiet ‘n’ rush of "Nubes II" (1995)- which counterbalances low-end bounding’s, with dramatic mid to high-key races. Onto tinkling rolls meet manic chimings of "No. 3 - Olivier Messiaen in memorial" (2017-21), which features this wonderfully unbalancing whistling element that appears ever so often catching the piece's slippery melody line. 

In the second half of the CD, we go from ornate-yet-slight wonky notation clustering of "Jaia" (2000). Through to the palliatively bounding and felt key pickings of "Kalia Kantuz"(2004). With the release playing out with the richly rapid and layered key patterns of "Mundaka" (2009)- which feels both forthrightly dramatic & complex.

Works For Solo Piano highlights Erkoreka’s talent as both an expressively urgent, yet wholly creative composer- whose style is instantly recognizable, yet never predictable or stayed. If you’d like to buy this direct, as well as checking out some more of the label's releases in the modern classical genre- drop in here