Philip Glass - The Complete Piano Etudes (Performed by Vanessa Wagner)

2025

With this eagerly anticipated complete recording of Philip Glass’s Études, Vanessa Wagner offers far more than an album: it is a testament to the deep bond she has forged with a body of piano music that now straddles the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her reading is embodied, exacting, and profoundly lived-in.

A Victoire de la musique winner in 1999, Wagner shows the same spark whether playing Mozart, Schubert, or Tchaikovsky, or partnering with electronic visionaries Murcof and Rone. She has also recorded modern voices such as Meredith Monk, Caroline Shaw, Arvo Pärt, and Pascal Dusapin. Thanks to this bold, forward-looking approach, she has become a major force on today’s classical scene, crossing borders and charting fresh territory.

Wagner treats Glass not as a museum piece of American minimalism but as a living, breathing organism—revealing its shadows, its subtle modulations, its sudden rhythmic lightning. Each Étude becomes a shifting inner landscape, poised between austere clarity and meditative vertigo. Far from a stylistic exercise, the cycle unfolds as a personal narrative, an emotional voyage in which tension, fragility, stamina, and surrender weave together.

In an age that is relearning the virtues of long-form and immersive listening, Vanessa Wagner asserts herself as a vital interpreter of this language—poetic, introspective, and unmistakably contemporary.