Ralph’s newest CD release on Naxos, French Piano Rarities, has just been awarded a 10/10 score in Crescendo Magazine, scoring maximally on all four elements: the sound recording, the liner notes, the repertoire and the interpretation! It has also been awarded the Crescendo ‘Découverte Award’. Crescendo’s music critic Pierre-Jean Tribot has also interviewed Ralph; the text (in French) can be found here.
Today, music critic Seth Colter Walls wrote a very positive review about Ralph’s new CD in The New York Times: ‘In addition to other solo piano writing from Boulez, van Raat’s new album shows his lustrous way of playing lesser-heard gems by Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen. Given this repertoire, the album’s title, “French Piano Rarities,” makes plenty of sense. Yet it doesn’t do justice to the worldliness that informs this pianist’s process, no matter which tradition he is exploring.’ Dutch NRC Handelsblad critic Joep Christenhusz describes Ralph’s playing as ‘alert, powerful pianism‘ in this review!
New, very positive reviews on Ralph’s new CD ‘French Piano Rarities’ keep coming in! For example, music critic Bas van Putten describes the recording in ‘De Groene Amsterdammer‘ as ‘an overwhelmingly relevant CD‘. Critic Emanuel Overbeeke writes for OpusKlassiek: ‘Van Raat plays with equal dedication both well-known and lesser-known composers and he still grows as a pianist every year. From the beginning, Van Raat had a strong focus on the music’s structure, and was not intimidated by the beauty of the specialty of the musical moment. However, during the course of years, his palet became everytime richer and more nuanced.’ Italian magazine Il Manifesto : ‘Ralph van Raat [is] a pianist who has a talent for launching a dialogue with the most intellectual and lofty contemporary music (Bryars, Adams, Riley) and also possesses the intimate sensitivity that is required to understand the groundbreaking twentieth-century music most ideologically and conceptually rooted in the nineteenth century (Stravinsky). […] Like in a Borges’ novel, van Raat manages to untangle [Pierre Boulez’] critical and polemical rigour through a creative rendition that seamlessly establishes […] a nexus that gets changed and self-adjusts as it encounters the performances and works of other composers.’
The Netherlands’ Radio 4 classical music presenter Lex Bohlmeijer has elected Ralph’s new French Piano Rarities release on Naxos, as a featured CD for his daily evening program Passaggio. Starting today, every workday this week, between 19h and 20h, a track of the CD will be played, introduced by a short interview with Ralph. The broadcast can be heard live here.
On May 28th, Ralph took part in a special and memorable live-stream concert, straight from an empty Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. This project, called Music for Empty Spaces, was initiated and produced by composer, pianist, musicologist and organizer Heather Pinkham. For this project, Heather has asked twelve composers, residing in The Netherlands, to write a 4-minute piece for a specific soloist (twelve in total as well), reflecting on the lockdown corona situation. For every performance, the composer was the only audience member. Composers involved were a.o. Jacob TV, Heather Pinkham, Chiel Meijering, Aspasia Nasopoulou, and Anthony Fiumara. Joey Roukens wrote a concise but dramatic piano work for Ralph, called Roaming Empty Streets. Besides the live stream, the concert was live broadcasted by the Dutch national radio. The entire concert can now be watched back here, with Ralph’s performance starting at 49’30”.
On Friday, May 29th, an extended interview with Ralph, in the context of his new CD with French piano rarities, has been published by newspaper Trouw (written by Sandra Kooke). Also, the first review was published in newspaper De Volkskrant, in which the album is much praised: ‘Ralph van Raat is a pianist who plays pieces that most of his colleagues don’t dare. […] He plays it all with great excitement’. The CD has also been described as ‘very refined’ in this Belgian review by Michel Dutrieue. Raymond Bisha has made a podcast about the CD here.
