Composer, orchestrator, and arranger Nathan Kelly has released The Concert Album, a collection that showcases a vast emotional and stylistic range of the piano.
The Concert Album explores the full expressive range of the piano across various styles, atmospheres, and moods. These compositions originated during Kelly’s graduate studies in Music Composition at Julliard, where he kept a musical notebook filled with everything from harmonies to melodic fragments to quotes, lists of techniques to try, and even drawings that might influence a piece.
A great balance of spontaneity with structure, The Concert Album allows each piece to unfold naturally while maintaining a strong narrative thread, constantly keeping the listener in mind to keep them perpetually entertained, engaged, and connected to the unfolding narratives of ideas. Each piece inhabits a distinct atmosphere, soundscape, and emotional terrain.
The Concert Album is a blend of contrasting tempos, timbres, and soundscapes into a vast collage of music, music that is harmonically and melodically rich while maintaining the collection as a cohesive statement of what the modern pianist can achieve.
“When I started out, I set a goal of composing 100 piano pieces in different styles, purely to explore the writing process. Over time, this helped me refine my voice, showing me what felt natural and what didn’t. Attempting to write like Ned Rorem never quite worked – I still can’t pinpoint what makes his music uniquely his. Ironically, the more I tried, the more my pieces sounded like me. I became aware of my habits, compositional crutches, and patterns, ultimately gaining a clearer sense of where I stood and how far I had to go.”
– Nathan Kelly
Some pieces naturally reflect cinematic, dramatic storytelling, offering a nod to the film music Kelly had studied extensively before Julliard. Other pieces are more experimental, like Flamingos, which mimics the movement of small wind-up machines that spin quietly and quickly, bursting into rhythmic grooves before fizzling out with punctuations of “funny” dyads, reminiscent of the odd creatures it’s named after. Some of these ideas were jotted down in Kelly’s music notebook and later developed into shifting, seemingly aimless rotations of intervals and augmented harmonies. The result is a hovering, elusive sound – unpredictable, yet alluring and compelling to hear.
One of the most fascinating pieces is Jester – a work full of energy and bluesy influences, from the opening riff to its ebullient, upward-moving rhythmic shifts, noting similar to Bernstein or one of those bouncing balls that hop across song lyrics in time with the beat of the music.
“In many ways, this collection of pieces serves as a bridge – linking the music that first inspired me with the composer I am evolving into. It captures not just where I began but the ongoing process of refinement, discovery, and artistic growth, With each piece, I move closer to the sound and depth I have always aspired to, shaping a voice that now feels both authentic and inevitable – music I simply couldn’t have written any earlier.”
– Nathan Kelly
To learn about Nathan Kelly and to listen to the album, click here.
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