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.’
