Composer, orchestrator, and arranger Nathan Kelly has unveiled The Concert Album, a collection that highlights the piano’s vast emotional and stylistic range.
This album captures the instrument’s expressive depth, exploring various styles, atmospheres, and moods. The compositions originated during Kelly’s graduate studies in Music Composition at Juilliard, where he kept a musical notebook filled with harmonies, melodic fragments, quotes, technique lists, and even drawings that influenced his pieces.
A perfect blend of spontaneity and structure, The Concert Album allows each composition to evolve naturally while maintaining a strong narrative thread. With the listener in mind, Kelly ensures that the journey remains engaging, entertaining, and emotionally connected. Each piece inhabits its own distinct atmosphere and soundscape, creating a rich emotional terrain.
The album masterfully integrates contrasting tempos, timbres, and soundscapes into a cohesive musical collage. While harmonically and melodically rich, it remains a unified statement of the modern pianist’s artistic capabilities.
Some pieces evoke cinematic and dramatic storytelling, influenced by Kelly’s deep study of film music before Juilliard. Others take an experimental approach, such as Flamingos, which mimics the movement of small wind-up machines, spinning into rhythmic grooves before fading out with playful, quirky dyads—reminiscent of the odd creatures that inspired the piece. Originally sketched in Kelly’s notebook, these ideas later evolved into shifting, unpredictable harmonies, producing an elusive yet captivating sound.
One of the album’s standout pieces is Jester, an energetic, blues-infused composition. From its lively opening riff to its buoyant, rhythmic shifts, the piece carries echoes of Leonard Bernstein’s vibrant style—almost like a bouncing ball hopping across song lyrics in perfect sync with the beat.
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