Experience the electrifying collaboration on NOT ANXIOUS ALL (Aria Classics). Pianist Josu De Solaun joins forces with conductor Josep Vicent and the formidable ADDA Simfònica of Alicante, Spain, for a definitive performance of Bernstein's The Age of Anxiety. This album captures the symphony's jazz-infused intensity and introspective depth, offering a powerful and assured musical journey.

PARISIEN is a luminous homage to the French spirit—a dialogue between two kindred musicians, pianist Josu de Solaun and cellist Adolfo Gutiérrez Arenas, who explore the intimate emotional universe of turn-of-the-century Paris. Released in 2025 by ARIA Classics, the album is not merely a collection of French masterworks, but a carefully curated atmosphere—an evocation of an era when art salons shimmered with elegance, melancholy, and sensual introspection.

Drawing on works by Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Jules Massenet, and César Franck, the duo crafts performances that are both deeply expressive and classically restrained. Rather than indulging in sentimentality, they invite the listener into a world of subtle nuance, where phrasing breathes like a sigh across silk and where every tone is imbued with longing and clarity.

The title, PARISIEN, is less a geographic marker than a state of mind: refined yet rebellious, tender yet intellectually exacting. It is a love letter to the vanished belle époque, yet refracted through a modern sensibility. From the dark velvet textures of Debussy’s Cello Sonata to the spiritual fervor of Franck’s Sonata in A, every piece becomes part of a narrative—of memory, of encounter, of emotional excavation.

The chemistry between de Solaun and Gutiérrez Arenas is palpable: this is not accompaniment but co-creation. Their sound is one of mutual listening, of aesthetic sympathy, of shared silence as much as shared sound. The recording captures not only the music, but the artistic ethos behind it: a belief in the power of intimacy, refinement, and imagination.

PARISIEN is not a postcard—it is a passage. A passage into a city of the soul, and into music as timeless as the light over the Seine at dusk.

Rachmaninoff & Prokofiev

To perform Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto is to climb a mountain shrouded in shadow — not only for its towering technical demands, but for the emotional abyss it asks the pianist to enter. It is an epic, spiritual journey, both intimate and orchestral, a dialogue with pain, nostalgia, transcendence, and silence.

Each time I play it, I feel I come closer —only slightly— to the unfathomable mystery that is Rachmaninoff’s music. It contains, somehow, the pain and beauty of the world, compressed into gesture. It is not music made to impress —though it overwhelms—it is music that remembers, that mourns, that prays.

Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto travels another path: angular, ironic, dazzling, defiant. It seduces only to betray; it mocks structure, then implodes it. It offers the pianist no comfort —only vertigo. Performing it feels like being pushed to the edge of chaos and left to dance there, without resolution. Where Rachmaninoff searches for meaning, Prokofiev questions whether meaning even exists. And when the final note fades, there is no closure. Only the empty echo of applause, as if that were all that remains.

Together, these two concertos represent twin summits of pianistic expression. Not simply challenges to be overcome, but states of being to be inhabited.
They transform the one who plays them.
And perhaps —also— the one who listens.

Spiritual Wings
Johannes Brahms: Clarinet Sonatas Op. 120

A journey where nostalgia, youth, love, and maturity meet — not in conflict, but in embrace.

Spiritual Wings marks the first collaboration between two of Spain’s most internationally respected artists: clarinetist Joan Enric Lluna and pianist Josu De Solaun. Together, they offer a deeply personal and introspective reading of one of the final chapters in the life and work of Johannes Brahms: the two sonatas for clarinet and piano, Op. 120.

These works are farewell letters in sound — music written by a man who had already said goodbye to composition, only to be drawn back by the haunting timbre of the clarinet. They are not nostalgic in a sentimental sense, but in a spiritual one: music that remembers, that forgives, that lets go.

Lluna and De Solaun approach these sonatas not as monuments to be revered, but as intimate conversations to be inhabited — where vulnerability, restraint, and tenderness are more important than display. Their performance is not only refined in its detail, but emotionally generous in its unfolding.

In these pages, Brahms whispers. And these performers listen, breathe, and respond — with honesty, with humility, with love.

This album is not just an interpretation.
It is an offering.

Pianistic virtuosity meets exquisite emotional depth in this new album, Totentanz, a powerful and personal statement by pianist Josu De Solaun.

Under the inspired direction of Jonathan Pasternack, conducting the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, this recording offers a finely sculpted and passionate interpretation of some of the most iconic works for piano and orchestra from the Romantic era.

With characteristic intensity, clarity, and poetic insight, De Solaun brings these monumental scores to life, revealing not only their grandeur, but also their vulnerability. Totentanz is more than a showcase of technical brilliance — it is a journey through the expressive extremes of the Romantic imagination.

A tribute to the dramatic, the lyrical, and the transcendent.

This album captures a unique live performance given by pianist Josu De Solaun on March 30, 2019, at the Auditorium of Fundación Juan March in Madrid. The concert, part of the Foundation’s renowned Música en la noche (“Music at Night”) series, reimagines one of the most beloved and enigmatic piano genres: the nocturne.

Rather than returning to the familiar dreamscapes of Chopin, De Solaun leads us on a journey through uncharted nightlands — selecting lesser-known nocturnes by composers from five different countries (the United States, Italy, France, Romania, and Bulgaria). In doing so, he liberates the genre from its historical clichés and illuminates its deeper poetic essence: a space of interiority, ambiguity, and suspended time.

Each piece becomes a fragment of the night — not always restful, not always serene, but always alive with emotion, memory, and the strange clarity that only darkness can provide.

In the pianist’s own words,

“This album of crepuscular thoughts and melting music is an invitation to the dream world: a journey to the far reaches of the night.”

More than a recital, this is a cartography of shadows — a luminous meditation on the many meanings of night.

A night without frontiers.
A music that dreams us as we listen.

ROOTS
Live Free Improvisation from the ADDA Auditorium, Fijazz Festival – Alicante

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ROOTS is a journey inward — a solo improvisation recorded live at the ADDA Auditorium in Alicante during the Fijazz Festival, where pianist Josu De Solaun unfolds a deeply poetic and unrepeatable musical experience.

Unlike improvisation rooted in abstraction or virtuosic display, ROOTS emerges from melodic intuition — a single gesture, a seed — which gradually blossoms into complex and unexpected forms. The performance is both instinctive and architectural, guided by emotional honesty and structural clarity, as if the music were discovering itself moment by moment.

Here, De Solaun reveals another dimension of his artistry: not the interpreter of notated music, but the creator of spontaneous form, the poet of the ephemeral. The improvisation flows with coherence and logic, yet resists predictability — echoing influences without imitating, evoking memory without nostalgia.

The result is a work that feels at once ancient and immediate, personal and universal — music that speaks not from the surface, but from the roots.

This is not simply a performance.
It is a meditation in sound,
a return to the primal gesture
where music begins:
not in theory, but in silence, breath, and instinct.

Haydn: A Love Letter

This is not a dialectical album.
It is not a manifesto against anything — not against tradition, or modernity, or performance practice, or purism, or expressive freedom.

Rather, this recording is devotional — a votive act, a kind of sonorous prayer to Joseph Haydn: to his music, yes, but also to his spirit, to what he has meant in my life, to what happens inside me when I play him. It is not a thesis. It is a love letter — personal, vulnerable, and full of imperfections — because love never is otherwise.

This album is not an attempt to offer the “last word” in Haydn interpretation, nor to “purify” him of stylistic accretions, nor to reconstruct him in historically “clean” form. It does not claim to de-ghost the ghost of “subjectivity,” or to present a Haydn stripped of ideology, emotion, fantasy, or instinct.

No.

What I hope for, rather, is something more fragile: to blend with him.
To sit at the piano and feel the intimacy of his presence, as though I were hearing him hum the themes in the corner of the room.
To follow his wit, his grace, his sudden violence, his restraint, his chaos, his serenity — without over-explaining, without defending myself.

What you hear here is simply that:
A pianist intertwining himself with Haydn.
Not for the sake of proving anything, but for the sheer, inexplicable joy of being near him.

The controversy, of course, is served.

Loss & Love brings together the lyrical intimacy of Schubert and the impassioned inner world of Robert Schumann in a program that explores the full emotional arc of the Romantic spirit — from tenderness and nostalgia to exuberance and grief.

At the heart of the album lies Schubert’s Sonata in A minor D.821, composed for the arpeggione — a now-extinct instrument bridging the cello and guitar. Heard here in its modern cello transcription, the work offers a poetic narrative: a gently melancholic opening, a luminous song without words in the slow movement, and a spirited, almost mischievous finale. It is Schubert at his most graceful, his most inward, his most human.

The Schumann selections — the Fantasiestücke Op. 73, Adagio und Allegro Op. 70, and the deeply characterful Fünf Stücke im Volkston Op. 102 — were originally written for other instruments but find new expressive life in the cello, whose voice seems naturally suited to Schumann’s blend of ardor and introspection.

In the Fünf Stücke, premiered after Schumann’s death with Clara Schumann at the piano, humor and heartbreak coexist. Each movement is a distilled scene — tender, rustic, lyrical, or stormy — all bound by Schumann’s gift for spontaneity and contrast. From the whimsical to the wounded, these pieces speak of a world felt from within.

Together, Josu De Solaun and Adolfo Gutiérrez Arenas offer not just performances, but an encounter: two voices joined in empathy, navigating the shared terrain of loss, memory, and love — the sacred core of the Romantic tradition.

With FIRST TIMES, two of Spain’s most singular musical voices — saxophonist, composer, and improviser Josep Lluís Galiana, and concert pianist and composer Josu De Solaun — come together to champion free improvisation as an art form of radical honesty and profound connection.

This album is not a composition, but a co-created event, recorded live on June 20, 2021 at the Teatre Auditori de Catarroja (Valencia). It is a meeting of minds, of gestures, of silences — a spontaneous unfolding of form, space, and sound across 23 improvisations, of which 14 are presented here. Moving fluidly between avant-garde jazz, contemporary music, electroacoustic textures, and poetic abstraction, the duo forges a sonic terrain both unpredictable and intimately structured.

Despite coming from seemingly divergent worlds — Galiana from decades of free improvisation, sound experimentation, and electroacoustic creation; De Solaun from a brilliant career in classical performance and international concertizing — the two artists share a deep aesthetic and philosophical complicity. Their long-standing friendship (dating back over 25 years) lends this album an emotional cohesion that transcends genre.

De Solaun, known for his refined interpretations of Brahms, Enescu, Rachmaninoff, and others, steps here into a space of cathartic unpredictability, revealing a parallel artistic voice shaped by spontaneity and poetic instinct. Galiana, with his vast sonic palette developed over four decades of exploration, engages the moment with masterful sensitivity and textural imagination.

As De Solaun says,

“Playing with Josep Lluís has been an unpredictable delight — a cathartic adventure that reconnects me with the origins of my artistic path and challenges everything I know.”

And for Galiana,

“This album is a celebration of creative freedom — a culmination of many firsts we’ve shared, and the beginning of many more.”

The album’s title — FIRST TIMES — evokes both the thrill of discovery and the humility of listening anew. Each piece is a dialogue, not just between two musicians, but between two lives, two traditions, two poetic intuitions. The track titles, added later, act as painterly brushstrokes, reflecting the music’s own primordial voice, not determining it.

In the words of critic Paco Yáñez, who contributes an insightful booklet essay:

“What we hear here is free improvisation as a site of mutual reflection — a demanding act of listening turned into a game of self in the other.”

More than an album, FIRST TIMES is an artistic act of trust.
An offering of vulnerability.
A moment suspended in time —
where two artists meet without a map, and find, in the unknown,
a shared language.

George Enescu: Piano Quartet No. 1 & Piano Trio in A minor

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Chamber music runs like a secret thread through the life and imagination of George Enescu, a composer often celebrated for his orchestral and symphonic genius, but whose most intimate artistic revelations lie in works such as these.

The Piano Quartet No. 1 in D major, composed in 1909, represents the zenith of Enescu’s early maturity — a work of expansive architecture and emotional breadth, where Brahmsian depth meets Romanian lyricism. Its structural richness and contrapuntal ingenuity are matched by a deeply expressive language: one that is as introspective as it is noble, as earthy as it is refined.

In contrast, the Piano Trio in A minor, an earlier and long-unpublished work rediscovered only in 1965, offers a glimpse into Enescu’s transitional voice — compact in form, yet no less sophisticated. At its core lies a sequence of variations full of rhythmic vitality, harmonic subtlety, and intimate chamber dialogue. Though more modest in scale, it reveals a composer already seeking ways to blur boundaries between form and freedom, national identity and European tradition.

This album brings together four internationally acclaimed artists in a reading that emphasizes clarity, character, and poetic interplay. Their interpretation sheds new light on Enescu’s multi-dimensional language: at once Classical and modern, folkloric and cerebral, instinctive and architectonic.

These are works not just to be performed, but to be inhabited — with patience, with openness, with wonder.

panDEMiCity is not merely a recording — it is the captured breath of an unrepeatable moment. On March 13, 2021, at the Auditorio Ciudad de León, pianist Josu De Solaun offered an evening of spontaneous creation that ignited the space with sound: improvisations forged in fire, shaped by light, and saturated with emotional immediacy.

This album is the sonic photograph of that singular instant, a hic et nunc in De Solaun’s artistic life, where no score stood between the artist and the instrument — only instinct, memory, risk, and presence.

With panDEMiCity, Josu De Solaun affirms his place as a radical voice in the world of free improvisation, a rare musician whose improvisatory language is at once exuberant, sophisticated, deeply personal, and unbound by genre. His playing evokes a kaleidoscope of influences — a silent dialogue with ghosts of the repertoire: Schumann, Janáček, Bartók, Chopin, Brahms, Enescu, Carter, Liszt, Debussy… and always, unmistakably, Keith Jarrett, to whom this album offers a moving, wordless homage.

But De Solaun is no echo. His improvisations are alive, breathing, searching. They are acts of communion — with the audience, with memory, with vulnerability.

panDEMiCity is a landmark in the discography of an artist known for his fearlessness — a pianist who dissolves the boundaries between composition and improvisation, classical and contemporary, control and freedom.

This is not a recital.
It is a ritual.

Here is a recording that combines the aesthetic value of music together with the musical works’ historical underpinnings. The pianist Josu De Solaun offers us his interpretation of two of the most significant pieces of the Romantic period: Davidsbündlertänze (1837) by Robert Schumann (1819-1856), the Spring and revolutionary high point of a first Romanticism, and two works by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), heterodox and conflicting protagonists of an autumnal kind of Romanticism: the Intermezzi op. 117 (1892) and the Klavierstücke op. 118 (1893). At the same time, the performer proposes a title that, on the one hand, supports his interpretative ideas and, on the other, aims to be a guide for our understanding and comprehension of how many singularities articulate the content of the recording: DIGRESSIONS, a title suggesting a kind of reflection that sets in during the flow of the musical works themselves.

Franziska Pietsch and Josu De Solaun continue their electrifying collaboration in their recording of French violin sonatas. From Fauré's nostalgic finesse to Debussy’s aphoristic dreams, from Ravel's eclectic urbanity to Poulenc's sardonic humour and heartfelt sensuality, spanning almost 70 years, the music takes you into the land of fantasque magic – the wondrous and bizarre, the outlandish and bittersweetly nostalgic, the multifaceted and humorous, and even the warmly tragic.

Richard Strauss’s jubilant and romantic Violin Sonata (1888) was written amidst the relative innocence of fin-de-siècle Europe; Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his mournful and bleak Sonata (1968) at the height of the Cold War, in the twilight of his existence. Franziska Pietsch and Josu De Solaun bring new life to two starkly contrasting works that together present a complex and emotional portrait of human existence.
The electrifying duo debut recording of violinist Franziska Pietsch and pianist Josu De Solaun features two masterpieces: the violin sonatas by Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Since 2017, Pietsch and De Solaun have forged a remarkable partnership, each balancing and complimenting the other's musical temperaments and sensibilities.
Franziska Pietsch, who caused a sensation among other things with her solo recital recording last year, led several prestigious orchestras in Germany and Luxembourg as concertmaster before she continued her career as a soloist and chamber musician. The Spanish pianist Josu De Solaun, winner of the renowned competitions Enescu and Iturbi, has performed with orchestras and in recitals throughout the world. Next to his solo career he is a passionate chamber musician.

Together, these two artists breathe new life into two powerful compositions, presenting a complex, passionate, and emotional portrait of human existence.

Described by Pablo Casals as "the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart", George Enescu's prodigious virtuosity as a violinist, pianist and conductor made him one of the most renowned musicians of his day. His fascination with the indigenous music of Romania can be heard in the haunting melodies of his Nocturne, and the Pièces Impromptues that conclude with an uncanny evocation of bells in the remarkable Carillon Nocturne. The massive First Piano Sonata lays a strong claim to be one of the 20th century's greatest.

This first of three discs devoted to George Enescu’s piano music presents three significant pieces. Indebted to Romanian folk music and in three large sections, the ruminative yet striking Nocturne in D flat is a work of shifting sonorities and moods. The Pièces impromptues, Op. 18 are independent, unrelated character pieces that illuminate once again the composer’s fascination with the indigenous music of Romania. The Sonata No. 1 in F sharp minor, Op. 24, No. 1 is—by contrast—a massive statement characterised by harmonic surprises, innovative techniques, insistent rhythms and, in the final, slow movement, the doina, a type of Romanian song at once contemplative, nostalgic and melancholic.

Described by Pablo Casals as "the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart", George Enescu's prodigious virtuosity as a violinist, pianist and conductor made him one of the most renowned musicians of his day. His fascination with the indigenous music of Romania can be heard in the haunting melodies of his Nocturne, and the Pièces Impromptues that conclude with an uncanny evocation of bells in the remarkable Carillon Nocturne. The massive First Piano Sonata lays a strong claim to be one of the 20th century's greatest.

The four works in this second of three volumes devoted to Enescu’s piano music range over a period of more than 30 years. The earliest is the joyful, ebullient Suite ‘Des cloches sonores’, Op. 10 which covers a wide expressive range including use of the melancholy Romanian song, the doina. The Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 24 is a mercurial, puckish work, both spirited and contemplative, and the Pièce sur le nom de Fauré is a charming souvenir from one composer to another.

Described by Pablo Casals as "the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart", George Enescu's prodigious virtuosity as a violinist, pianist and conductor made him one of the most renowned musicians of his day. His fascination with the indigenous music of Romania can be heard in the haunting melodies of his Nocturne, and the Pièces Impromptues that conclude with an uncanny evocation of bells in the remarkable Carillon Nocturne. The massive First Piano Sonata lays a strong claim to be one of the 20th century's greatest.

This third and final volume dedicated to Enescu’s piano works shows the unique blend of influences he acquired during his teenage years in Vienna and Paris. These start with his Brahms-like treatment of the piano as a symphonic instrument in the Scherzo and Ballade to the infusion of French late-Romanticism and Fauré in the Impromptus. The crowning achievement of these early compositions is the Suite dans le style ancien, Enescu’s first public solo piano opus, a stylised evocation of Bach seen through the prism of turn-of-the-century Paris.

The three works on this recording were composed at a crucial juncture in Stravinsky’s musical life. The Soldier’s Tale, a small-scale theatrical work for instrumental septet, narrator and two speakers completed in 1918 [Naxos 8.573537]. It is performed here in the suite premièred in 1920. The Octet marked a new element in Stravinsky’s writing, inaugurating a turn to neo-classicism, whilst Les noces (The Wedding) is a ballet cantata impelled by dramatic motor rhythms, and once again saturated in his Russian background. Scored for pitched and unpitched percussion, vocal soloists, and mixed chorus, it is a pivotal work in Stravinsky’s development.