Qingqing Ye - From Joplin to Kapustin (2019)

Born in 1937, the Ukrainian-Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin has gradually gained recognition among Western music scholars and pianists by blending American jazz idioms into classical forms, such as concertos, sonatas, and preludes; recently he has become a very prominent composer. The uniqueness of his compositional philosophy is that he consistently treats the music language of jazz as a core element in all his output, while others might only use jazz idioms experimentally in their works.

Some of his most famous works, including the Variations, Op. 41, the Eight Concert Etudes, Op. 40, and the 24 Preludes in Jazz Style, Op. 53 have been recorded by other prominent artists, such as Steven Osborne and Marc-Andre Hamelin.

This album features Kapustin's piano output from 2007 to 2013. All these selectiones are professionally recorded and relasesed for the first time worldwise. In contrast, this ablum also includes three most notable works from the classical ragtime composers such as Scott Jopin, Joseph Lamb and Willam Bolcom to give the audience a different taste of how the classic ragtime sounds like.