Album description:
The debut album ‘Each and All’ of pianist Shane van Neerden, released by the label 7 Mountain Records, is a tour-de-force, presenting three of the biggest piano works of the 20th century: Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, en Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata.

Charles Ives’ second piano sonata, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860, contains four movements inspired by Transcendentalists: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Ives wrote of the melody on which the piece is based: “All around you, under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody… reflecting an innate hоpe—а common interest in common things and common men.” The surprising inclusion of a flute at the end of the fourth movement might represent Thoreau himself playing, or an owl heard across the pond, or it could be a soul immersed in divinity at last, taken up with its fellows (“Each and All”). Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908)—composed just a few years before Ives began work on his second sonata, in a very different artistic milieu—is a triptych of dark fever dreams, unsettlingly erotic, enclosing both player and audience in an otherworldly embrace. A water nymph who appears to a man at night. A bell ringing across the desert in a far away village where a corpse hanging from a gallows is reddened by the setting sun. A demonic gnome, a whirlwind of fiendish energy. Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata brings the bell theme present in the other two works to its climax. The album is closed with a genuine folk celebration: a ritualized, thunderous, gasping release of collective emotion.

For Shane, a score can act as a conduit for individual exploration—a search for enlightenment, a traversal of deep waters of spirituality, eroticism, and emotion, requiring absolute immersion and absolute humility. The rewards can be high: an unmediated certainty of the composers’ intentions for every note and the spaces between every note; a sense of rightness, even divinity, in the communion between the performer and the art itself.

Physical- and digital album release: 13 February 2026

Catalogue number: 7MNTN065
EAN: 5051083232456

Available as a physical copy at e.g.
bol.com

Click here for booklet

Promo video
video credits: Hilde Verweij

Photo credits: Tjerk Muilwijk