Who are your favorite pianists working?

Eddie Palmieri

Cecil Taylor

I'd second Eddie Palmieri

That's what I' m wondering. Until I hear the answer I'm posting this cat that I finally caught live last week:

man I was really really hoping James had posted Keyboard Cat here

Sorry, Dan, missed that meme.

Tried to get this thread started once jazz d-bag sick piano chops youtube thread but two of those guys have passed since then.

Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu (whose Brahms intermezzi are beautiful)

Crappy live recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1DEyOoQEVc

Marilyn Crispell

also a second for Cecil Taylor

McCoy Tyner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUAN6Q83a4Y

Lupu is great for sure. Also I love saying "Radu Lupu"

I'm thinking mainly of classical piano, if people wanna talk jazz piano that's fine too, it's not like jazz dudes have lesser chops than academy dudes - however there is this big gulf in that many jazz pianists are also composing their own material, which means a whole diff. relationship between the material & the player -- i.e., if you like Cecil Taylor's music, odds are you're going to consider him a good pianist. Radu Lupu for all I know could be the worst composer in the history of the world, it wouldn't make a difference - it's all about the playing in the classical world. (Or mostly. Michael Hersch is an amazing pianist who also composes.)

http://www.audioenmuziek.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Prokofiev-pollini.jpg

this is one of my fav piano lps

the delicate filial bond between an italian intellectual and his homonculus is relayed through four greats of the modernist piano repertoire

maria lettberg is a monster imo

Call me a corny ECM fuXor but I really like Tord Gustavsen.

http://youtu.be/20-IPIsG4cI

http://boxset.ru/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/hamelin_liszt_grand_romantic_virtuoso.jpg

Hamelin is a fave among virtuosity dorks but don't hold that against him

John Tilbury

no audiophile sound feast no credibility

Ti

Ian Pace is someone who never just rests on his brill technique - he's the one I always feel is doing much more and really using the piano as a way to think. Probably unfair to others; know it sounds awkward but its the best I can manage right now.

Tilbury seconded. Saw him with AMM in 2000, absolutely stunning.

I know in itself it's a neutral observation, but Matthew Shipp has one of the most absolutely immediately recognizable piano sounds around, among contemporary pianists I've heard.

But I forgot this thread had a classical slant.

Also the Matthew Shipp Trio album from this year is excellent, though Shipp completely sits out some tracks, as far as I can tell.

OTM re: Shipp's sound.

Also, Boston's Eric Zinman has been doing amazing, amazing things for a couple of decades.

ha, I came here to say Matthew Shipp

Saw this guy playing some late pieces by Elliott Carter a couple of years ago, pretty spectacular technique:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Hodges

I am also a fan of Matthew Shipp. wish more jazz dudes would pull a Jarrett and make a Shostakovich disc or something. I don't love Jarrett's Shostakovich (I think he did Bach too, I forget) but I love it as an idea

like those old jacques loussier records?

Mark Knoop has carved out quite a presence in the last couple of years or so around London.

At the time of writing there are a couple of perfs coming up:

http://www.markknoop.com/performances/from/2015/to/2016

Shipp's recent Duke Ellington tribute is very good, I love piano trios but haven't heard a modern one I like as much as this before.

hamelin obviously

who is better out of ian pace and nicholas hodges

Now that Moravec has passed away this is a tough question. It's definitely not Hamelin for me. I can think of the active pianists who have made definitive (to me) recordings of certain pieces... Andsnes in a Schubert sonata, Frederic Chiu in Ravel's miroirs, lubimov in the Debussy preludes. Arnaldo Cohen in that Liszt recital on Naxos.

chris abrahams

https://youtu.be/YUwq63OIPtk

john tilbury - winter trees (terry jennings), w/additional field sounds.

yeah i recommend that

andsnes is excellent in liszt and bartok, lubimov i know only from his der bote elegies recital which is fine, that cohen lp i have also certainly recommended before

my favourite recent piano find is a couple of lps by michele campanella

http://www.allmusic.com/album/liszt-on-his-favorite-piano-mw0002165068
http://www.allmusic.com/album/wagners-piano-mw0002409739

tania giannouli

your mom works my pianist very well indeed

kris davis

oh i guess i should try & sell kris davis to you. check "waiting for you to grow" or "save your breath" or the "SKM" or "RIDD" discs - they're all on the clean feed label. davis also brings a lot to ingrid laubrock's anti-house, & is an equal partner in paradoxical frog w/ laubrock & tyshawn sorey.
dumb reviewers say things about cecil taylor, but no, Davis maybe be fleet of finger, but she has a little more variety than taylor's irresistible extemporised bartok/ellington/scriabin/jellyroll morton testimony.
dizzying giddiness abounds.
go sample an mp3 somewhere.

Alex von Schlippenbach

"Save Your Breath" is so good, I have heard at least a dozen clean feed releases this year but somehow missed this one up till now.

aw shoot, sten sandell, of course. kinda humourless, dubious proclivity for throat singing,largely refuses to "sit back" in his own trio, but dang!

http://counterflows.com/evan-parker-sten-sandell/

Saw this performance by Sandell and Evan Parker earlier this year, where Sandell was playing the organ in the Glasgow University Chapel - not entirely successful - Sandell was up in the rafters, Parker at the other of the church, so it often felt like two separate performances - but Sandell did coax some extraordinary sounds out of the organ, inc. some farty noises that cld be described as 'humourous'

despite parker being a braniac & giving us all the terry riley as a seagull circular squawking that we need, he sometimes brings some hokey "call and response" tricks to situations where they just reek like gorgonzola (see braxton & morris duets)

tick.jpg

http://www.discogs.com/Massimiliano-Damerini-Piano-XX-Vol-2/release/1761957

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0001/146/MI0001146120.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

I am no expert but have just been listening to the preludes disc off this Debussy complete works set, this dude can play and then some.

yeah

his lp of the stravinsky works for piano and orchestra is highly rated

I love Bavouzet's rendition of the Preludes. The very modern full frequency sound picture activates my tinnitus so I can't listen to it very often though (not Bavouzet's fault, almost all piano recordings of the digital era do this).

For recent recordings of the Preludes (my all time favorite music by anyone as I've said tiresomely often on here) Bavouzet is excelled only by Lubimov on ECM.

Bavouzet's Liszt recital on MDG is just as good, a must-have with great repertoire selection.

I think he has an early disc of Ohana works, I keep forgetting to hunt for that.

I have the first volume of his Beethoven but I have to admit I haven't spent much time with it.

Chucho Valdes can play a lot, I really love his Bele Bele en La Habana album at the moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX7E8zSb0Sw

saw matt shipp last night solo, he really is consistently amazing

I'm kind of anxious to see this. Hope it's posted soon!

It's online now!

I currently keep listening to Chano Dominguez's brilliant Over The Rainbow release, which is a recording of a mesmerising performance from a couple of years back in Barcelona. I'm not really technical enough to competently describe what is so incredible about it, but I knows + feels it when someone has magic in their hands, oh yes!

I only opened up to this self-absorbed dead eurocentric elitist shit fairly recently, but Rudolf Buchbinder's Beethoven stuff really tickles my brain.

And this, which for some reason seems to be very controversial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zucBfXpCA6s

Angela Hewitt