InonBarnatan

Press

• Rachmaninoff Reflections

  Pentatone

  Nov 2023

  • Rachmaninov’s compositional processes are laid bare with unflinching clarity, and as a performer Barnatan’s fundamentally intellectual approach probes them with fascinated scrutiny. The crisp articulation at the outset engorges into thunderous, though tightly controlled, plenitude without allowing Rachmaninov’s thematic obsessiveness to overpower. And the wistful second main idea is imbued with a luminous soulfulness that never trespasses into mawkishness.

    • BBC Music Magazine
    • 26 December 2023

  • Apparent immediately is his sensitivity of touch and elegance of phrasing. There's no shortage of memorable moments during the thirty-five-minute journey. Rachmaninoff Reflections allows the pianist's artistry to be fully savoured. After he made his his solo recording debut with a Schubert album (issued on Bridge Records in 2006), Gramophone called Barnatan 'a born Schubertian.' It's certainly conceivable that the magazine might amend that to 'a born Rachmaninoffian' upon hearing this latest Pentatone set.

    • Textura
    • 01 December 2023

• Spivey Hall

  Sep 2023

  • Barnatan’s Schubert was warm, often voluptuous, as if they were full-bodied songs without words. He played No. 2 in the set, in A-flat major marked andantino, with the glowing lyricism of old-time tenors like Fritz Wunderlich or Aksel Schiøtz, loaded with a Viennese sense of beauty and sorrow in every phrase. He asked deep Schubertian questions and played it with pastoral simplicity, as if noticing for the first time the waving wheat and the clouds in the sky.

    • Arts ATL
    • 28 September 2023

  • Barnatan’s recital celebrated an almost-lost art of programming and performance familiar to the great pianists of the past, where technical acumen, expressive depth, and insightfully re-creative repertoire merged well on the concert stage.

    • Ear Relevant
    • 28 September 2023

• Brahms Piano Concerto No.2

  San Diego Symphony, Rafael Payare

  May 2023

  • The interplay between Payare and soloist was immediate and palpable, as if the two musicians share an established intimacy. Barnatan possesses a virtuosity that can disturb equilibrium, rising suddenly from moments of carefully-crafted tenderness, as in the gentle Andante, with its famous opening cello solo finely played by Yao Zhao. Barnatan made Brahms’ ubiquitous hemiola rhythms sound new, rising to rhapsodic heights, and then receding into spectral pointillism beneath a ghostly wind chorale.

    • The San Diego Union-Tribune

  • His brilliant attacks, muscular figurations, and sweeping dramatic gestures released the passion of this wonderfully larger than life concerto. For Barnatan, this was a commanding ebullience we had not experienced before...

    • San Diego Story

• Brahms Piano Concerto No.1

  LA Philharmonic, Walt Disney Hall

  Apr 2023

  • Pianist Inon Barnatan...was graceful and elegant in his playing as he took over with a dominating presence while maintaining a curiously unassuming physicality at the piano. His playing was crisp and clear throughout, and he wasn’t afraid to get dirty during deep, rumbling parts. He carefully paced Brahms’s long phrases and brought out the dense polyphonic textures.

    • Stage and Cinema
    • 10 April 2023

• Beethoven Piano Concertos: Part 2

  Pentatone

  May 2020

  • In the second concerto, the soloist Barnatan delights us with his celestial playing, bringing lightness and well-being. The piano concerto No. 5 is the apotheosis, Inon offers us all the splendour of his talent and his great sensitivity. Supported by the splendid Academy of St Martin in the Fields, this Part 2 album is of pure beauty. It is a triumph.

    • Choix Classique HD

  • All-embracing musicianship: Inon Barnatan brings exhilarating pianism to his Beethoven concerto cycle.

    • Gramophone Collector