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Executive Producer: Randy Bellous

The Power of the Keyboard

My friend Gary Hollander introduced us to Nathan Ben-Yehuda.  Gary served on the Yarlung Artists board of directors for several years, and he and his wife Marcia loved our mission and supported some of our most important early projects, including our recordings with Finnish violinist Petteri Iivonen.  Gary called and told me I should pay close attention to Nathan Ben-Yehuda, a piano virtuoso in his twenties.  Nathan grew up in Southern California, but attended the Royal Academy of Music in London before earning his Master’s at Julliard.  Nathan’s performance in Belgium’s Queen Elizabeth Competition in 2021 impressed me.  Among the works he performed for the jury, Nathan chose Oliver Knussen’s Variations Op. 24 for piano, which Knussen wrote for Peter Serkin.  Indeed it was Peter who introduced Nathan to the work when Nathan was Peter’s student at Bard.  I paid special attention because Nathan transformed a fairly hard-edged work, one that in the wrong hands could sound dated at this point in the 21st Century, into a lyrical masterpiece.  Rather than waiting eagerly for something more listener-friendly on Nathan’s program, I followed each phrase of these variations with rapt attention.  I realized that if Nathan could interpret a work like this with unique power and magic, just about anything he played would transport me as a listener.  I hope you agree.  Nathan and I spoke shortly after Nathan’s return from Brussels.  

Nathan pursues a fulltime solo concert career but also plays with Astral Mixtape, an innovative crossover quartet writing new works and reimagining classics from Monteverdi to Rimsky-Korsakov, and playing with ideas and thematic material from Sigur Ros to Radiohead and Four Tet.  Nathan plays piano and synthesizer, Misha Vayman performs on violin and computers, Michael Siess plays violin, and Juan-Salvador Carrasco performs on the cello.  Misha and Michael have both studied with Yarlung Special Advisor and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concertmaster Margaret Batjer.  Juan-Salvador studied with my friend Ralph Kirshbaum at the Thornton School at USC and plays often with LACO where he also serves as an orchestra fellow.  So it turned out we had musical connections with all four members of the quartet.  After Astral Mixtape came to play for Aaron Egigian and me at Segerstrom Center, we invited the quartet to join us for Nathan’s recording sessions and share their wonderful sound and creativity with the Yarlung community. We end this album with two tracks by Astral Mixtape.  Track 6 offers Goddess Gardens, including intoxicating “mixtape” snippets from Scheherazade and Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending, as well as more recent fare.  Seven Hellos closes the album on track 7, an original composition by the four members of the quartet.  Astral Mixtape is clearly close to Nathan’s heart:

“I am part of this wonderful band of fellow classical musicians who are seeking to reimagine the conventional roles of our instruments, and applying non-classical approaches to arrangement and composition in our works. Astral Mixtape is the collaborative project most personal to me, and I’m so glad to be able to share our music as part of this record.”

Before we get to Astral Mixtape, however, Nathan’s solo piano repertoire makes a powerful statement.  Not only can Nathan handle the thorny Knussen Variations, but he plays Haydn beautifully, and he recorded my favorite performances to date of both Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Villa-Lobos’  Rudepoêma.  Nathan kindly agreed to play Gaspard for this project, but also Peter Sculthorpe’s Nocturnal, a work I have long wanted to record at Yarlung in honor of my father, who fell in love with this work many years ago after hearing it on Joel Fan’s debut album World Keys from Reference Recordings.  

We dedicate this album to my friend Jim Hannon, senior writer at The Absolute Sound.  Jim published this critically important audio magazine for many years until his retirement from this position in 2022.  When we told Jim about this dedication he said he was extremely moved.  He has been a stalwart supporter of Yarlung’s for our first fifteen years, particularly our projects celebrating solo classical piano, new music and jazz.  Jim played the piano himself in his earlier life, including annual concerts at Carnegie Hall while a student in New York City.  These concerts focused on works by Beethoven and Liszt.  Hannon received the Lincoln Center Student award for piano when he was 17 years old. I am glad Jim continues to write for TAS, and we thank him for his dedication to Yarlung and to the wider music world for all of these years.  

I’m delighted to report that Yarlung Records has dedicated its new release, The Power of the Keyboard, to my dear friend and colleague Jim Hannon. TAS readers will already know that until he retired, Jim was the highly successful Publisher of The Absolute Sound. What readers may not know is that Jim also was and is an extremely gifted musician, who, in his youth, trained professionally as a concert pianist and as a vocalist (he was a longtime featured soloist with the San Francisco Orchestra chorus). In honoring him, Yarlung has paid kind and fitting tribute to a wonderful man, who quite literally lives his life for music. Thank you, Yarlung, for this homage.

—Jonathan Valin, Executive Editor The Absolute Sound

When I told Yarlung executive producer Randy Bellous that Nathan would be recording some of my favorite repertoire on the planet, he offered to help.  Randy and his wonderful wife Linda have underwritten some of Yarlung’s most successful releases over the years, and we are incredibly grateful to them for their dedication, generosity and inspiration to keep raising the bar.  

Fellow recording engineer and equipment designer Arian Jansen and I used SonoruS Holographic Imaging technology in the analog domain to refine the stereo image, Yarlung’s SonoruS ATR12 to record analog tape, the Merging Technologies HAPI to record 256fs DSD in stereo and surround sound and the SonoruS ADC to record PCM.  We used our friend Ted Ancona’s AKG C24 microphone previously owned by Frank Sinatra, and vacuum tube microphone amplification by Yarlung executive producer and designer Elliot Midwood.  

–Bob Attiyeh, producer

Repertoire:

1 Sonata in G Major, Hob. XVI, 40 Joseph Haydn
2 Gaspard de la nuit Maurice Ravel
3 Rudepoêma Heitor Villa-Lobos
4 Variations, Op. 24 Oliver Knussen
5 Nocturnal Peter Sculthorpe
6 Goddess Gardens Astral Mixtape
7 Seven Hellos Astral Mixtape

Executive Producer: Randy Bellous

Recording Engineers: Bob Attiyeh and Arian Jansen
Mastering Engineers: Steve Hoffman, Arian Jansen and Bob Attiyeh
Microphone Preamplification: Elliot Midwood
AKG C24 microphone: Ancona Audio
Steinway Technician: Kathy Smith

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