Ralph Shapey

“Holzman’s committed, intelligent playing [makes this disc] an entertaining and fun listening experience, something you can rarely say about a recording dedicated to avant-garde piano music.” Classics Today

“Radical traditionalist” is what I’ve been called. My music combines two fundamentally contradictory impulses—radical language and romantic sensibility. The melodies are disjunct and dissonant; they contain atonal harmonies and extremes in register, dynamics and textural contrast. Yet the musical structures are grandly formed and run the gamut of dramatic gestures. Like the Romantics, I conceive of art in a deeply spiritual way. A great work of art transcends the immediate moment into a world of infinity. Ralph Shapey