Camille Saint-Saëns | Carnival of the Animals - The Swan

Waltz in a Minor, B. 150 (Choir Rendition)

Awakening_Luke Faulkner

The Wanderer Quintet

3rd EP - spring waltz

recording homeofficepianist             recorded May 14th 2025
please visit my website for more information and recordings:
homeofficepianist.de

Johannes Brahms   7  FANTASIEN  OPUS 116   no. 4  Intermezzo,  Adagio

Composed by Romain Dasnoy
Arranged & Performed by Nicolas Horvath

Fractal Piano

Inverted Mechanics

Thirteen miniature journeys, each a complete world in ninety seconds.

In this new album, Samuel Hamish Gray continues his exploration of spontaneous composition — music created entirely in the moment, unpremeditated yet intricately formed. Each piece was conceived, performed, and completed in a single take, bound only by one strict parameter: a duration of exactly one minute and thirty seconds.

Within that constraint lies astonishing freedom. The result is thirteen concise piano works — cinematic, lyrical, sometimes fragile, sometimes dramatic — each a distilled emotional narrative. Gray’s playing moves from shimmering introspection to bold, cinematic resonance, his improvisations sculpted by instinct and refined by long experience in both classical and jazz idioms.

Listeners familiar with his Sirius Suite (2025), a meditation on loss and love, will recognize the same immediacy and tenderness, but here the focus is on compression: each piece a single breath, a fleeting vision, a self-contained journey.

Gray is known for his fully spontaneous solo piano performances in Norway, New Zealand, and beyond, and for his forthcoming long-form work Norgesvenn (2026), recorded as one continuous arc. These new miniatures reveal another side of his artistry — concise, pure, and perfectly balanced between composition and improvisation.

Perfect for reflective playlists, film and documentary use, or simply quiet listening, each piece can stand alone, loop seamlessly, or fade into thought — small universes of sound, carved from silence.

Miniatures

Untitled V

Somewhere Only We Know - Lily Allen [Piano Cover]

The mazurka was a popular dance in the 19th century.  Its popularity stretched beyond Poland’s borders, eastward and westward.  Leo Tolstoy, for example in War and Peace as well as Anna Karenina, brings the mazurka in play to give a deeper color in settings when man and woman meet, are fascinated by each other, feel mutually attracted.  Also in Paris, where Chopin lived, the mazurka – together with Polonaise – was quite fashionable within the aristocracy.  The inflow of many Poles, fleeing the Russian invasion in Poland in 1831, certainly intensified this.  The Poles where regarded in Paris as akin to the Orient.  As William Atwood writes, people in Paris “saw Oriental faces and Asiatic outfits when looking at the Poles.  They imagined Poland as a land shrouded in Oriental exoticism and peopled by a race of Tartars whose ancestors rode across the steppes of Asia with Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.”  Exotic, indeed.

The fourth mazurka is very short and seems without an end.  It is sketchy.  Huneker says: “The harmonies are closer and there is sorrow abroad.  The incessant circling around one idea, as if obsessed by fixed grief, is used here for the first, but not for the last time by Chopin.”