Music of Silence Xiaowen Shang

Welcome to ‘Dodd’s DSD Discoveries’, a review series from NativeDSD Senior Music Reviewer Bill Dodd. This series focuses on Bill’s latest selections, with new reviews regularly.

Xiaowen Shang’s debut album is a delightful program featuring a number of individual selections from Federico Mompou’s Musica Callada, interspersed with some of Antonio Soler’s eighteenth-century sonatas, and piano transcriptions of the sixteenth-century sacred composer Antonio de Cabezón- 3 centuries of Spanish music that she brings together flawlessly.

She plays with crystal clarity, yet never lets us forget the humanity of the composers. The individual pieces and the order have been chosen with great care. And, as you might expect, Linn’s recording quality is excellent. This is another album I can recommend to bring a lot of sunshine to your life.
I hope we’ll be hearing a lot more from Xiaowen Shang.

And if this program whets your appetite for a more complete presentation of Mompou’s Musica Callada, you might want to consider this album of the year from 2021: