Jazz
Brad Mehldau releases “Fantasy & Reveries” on 13 November through Nonesuch. The album collects two of his works for solo piano: the “Fantasy for Piano” and the “Fourteen Reveries”.
The “Fantasy for Piano” is a commission from pianist Jeremy Denk, and he wrote it during the same period as the “Three Pieces After Bach”. Mehldau says it shares with those pieces “the same obsessions: long sustained pedals, abrupt juxtapositions between triadic consonance and extreme dissonance, and a freely subdivided 7/4 metre.”
The “Fourteen Reveries” are fourteen short pieces, conceived the way “Suite: April 2020” was: “Each piece is more of a distillation of an emotion,” he says.
It was recorded on 11 and 12 December 2025 at the Casals Forum of the Kronberg Academy, in Germany, on a Hamburg Steinway D prepared and tuned by Daniel Brech. Mehldau produces it, and Rainer Maillard is at the desk, also mixing and mastering it at Emil Berliner Studios in Berlin.
Text by Aina Torrents