Conor Hanick

This week on Q2, two is better than one and less is not more. Taking its programmatic cue from Texas and John Luther Adams, Hammered! presents five days of piano works that embrace t...

This week Hammered! takes an international spin, featuring piano music by composers from five different countries, beginning Monday in France and ending the week in Greece.

Pianist Marilyn Nonken thrusts the sounds of Chile into the spotlight. The program features Chilean-American composer Miguel Chuaqui's Blues en el Corazon and Frederic Rzewski's The P...

A lot to digest last week, no? The Ecstatic Music Festival marathon gave us a taste of its "multi-genre" offerings, performer-composers flourished in unique collaborations, and Q2 was blarring John Adams's El Niño, which typically ends with head-banging to "Shake The Heavens." This week on Hammered!, too much of last week's good things means reheating the uneaten pianistic highlights and serving them anew.

Last November, Le Poisson Rouge held a 75th birthday celebration for mystical Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Today at 2 pm, hear that concert in its entirety.

A utopia "where austerity and spontaneity are not rivals, but companions" is how composer and Ecstatic Music Festival curator Judd Greenstein described the compositional space of festival headliners Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson. This week on Hammered! we'll amplify that description with piano music written and performed by musicians featured in the Ecstatic Music Festival.

Music is historically a very reactive material: Renaissance motets paraphrased liturgical chants; sonata structures were modeled on Mozartean tonal schemes; "Choral" symphonies were (at least) a century-long preoccupation. This week Hammered! investigates musical actions and reactions in the modern era, showcasing compositional "causes" and "effects".

Tune into this week's Cued Up on Q2 for performances from Keys To The Future, the only festival of contemporary solo piano music in New York, which took place last year at (Le) Poisson Rouge in Manhattan.

Ten years ago, the Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov recorded Der Bote or The Messenger, an intimate collection of elegiac piano miniatures spanning three centuries and diverse nationa...