Jazz
Nonesuch · 13 November 2026
“Each piece is more like a distillation of emotion,” Brad Mehldau writes of the fourteen “Reveries” that close “Fantasy & Reveries”, a solo piano album of his own works, out today, 13 November, on Nonesuch. “Fantasy for Piano”, a single piece of just over eleven minutes, opens the record; the “Fourteen Reveries” are miniatures, some barely longer than a minute. The first two “Reveries” reached streaming services on 8 September, and “Fantasy” on 13 October.
According to the label, “Fantasy for Piano” was written in the same period as “Three Pieces After Bach”, while the “Reveries” are a set of shorter pieces along the lines of “Suite: April 2020”. In his liner note, Mehldau says the fantasy “shares similar obsessions with Three Pieces After Bach: long, extended pedal-points, sharp juxtapositions between triadic consonance and extreme dissonance, and a freely subdivided 7/4 meter”. Of the “Reveries”, he also writes: “I’ve eschewed larger-scale development, opting for brevity.”
It was recorded on 11 and 12 December 2025 at the Casals Forum of the Kronberg Academy in Kronberg, Germany, on a Hamburg Steinway D prepared and tuned by Daniel Brech. Mehldau produced it, and Rainer Maillard engineered it, then mixed and mastered it at Emil Berliner Studios in Berlin. His previous Nonesuch release was “Ride into the Sun”, a set of Elliott Smith songs, out on 29 August 2025.
Text by Aina Torrents