The Power of the Keyboard: Yarlung’s 20th Anniversary Edition [Pure DSD – Direct Mixed]

This Pure DSD – Direct Mixed album was recorded, mixed, mastered and delivered purely in DSD 256. It is available now only at NativeDSD.

Remastered for Yarlung’s 20th anniversary, The Power of the Keyboard showcases pianist Nathan Ben-Yehuda — a Royal Academy of Music and Juilliard graduate who studied with Peter Serkin at Bard — across a demanding solo program before closing with two tracks from his crossover quartet, Astral Mixtape. Ben-Yehuda’s own notes trace the hidden threads connecting the repertoire: Haydn’s Sonata in G major feeding directly into the opening of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, whose “Scarbo” finds a playful-turned-terrifying counterpart in the mammoth, Rubinstein-inspired violence of Villa-Lobos’s Rudepoêma — a piece Ben-Yehuda has obsessed over since age nine. Oliver Knussen’s Variations, Op. 24 (dedicated to Serkin, who introduced it to the pianist) and Peter Sculthorpe’s Nocturnal round out a program built as much around personal history as repertoire logic.

Astral Mixtape, the genre-blurring quartet Ben-Yehuda calls “the collaborative project most personal to me,” closes the album with Goddess Gardens (threading in snippets of Scheherazade and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending) and the original Seven Hellos. Recorded using Yarlung’s SonoruS Holographic Imaging technology, an AKG C24 microphone once owned by Frank Sinatra, and vacuum-tube preamplification, the album is dedicated to longtime Absolute Sound publisher Jim Hannon.

Read Notes from the Producer, Bob Attiyeh

Nathan Ben-Yehuda, piano & synthesizer
Astral Mixtape (tracks 6–7):
Nathan Ben-Yehuda, piano & synthesizer
Misha Vayman, violin & computers
Michael Siess, violin
Juan-Salvador Carrasco, cello