For those not in the know, Wayne Alpern is a New York City composer, arranger, and scholar who integrates popular and jazz idioms with classical techniques and repertoire to create a sophisticated contemporary style of cross-genre, or even post-genre music.

After years of composing complex new music, he embraced his personal history and indigenous musical culture and fused them with his classical background and training.

His work includes numerous jazz arrangements, string quartets, woodwind and brass quintets, mixed ensembles, pieces for string orchestra, and several piano works.

Alpern’s innovative compositions, recompositions, and rearrangements have been performed and recorded by distinguished artists from diverse musical traditions.

A native of Detroit immersed in the Motown sound, he studied at Oberlin College, University of Michigan, Yale University, and City University of New York, with additional work at Harvard, Juilliard, Wesleyan, and University of Pennsylvania.

His brand new album is entitled Modern Music, his eleventh album, extends his musical practice of compositional reinvention - reimagining and reinterpreting different musical styles, historical genres, and vernacular idioms in the language of modern music - to the essential realm of solo piano.

The single performer is the piano polyglot and musical wizard Steven Beck, a stalwart in the bustling New York new music scene and one of the very few pianists capable of mastering the multiplicity of different keyboard styles this ambitious project requires.

1. March
2. Gigue
3. Prelude
4. Variations
5. Aphorism
6. Partita
7. Reverie
8. Novelette
9. Bagatelle
10. Toccato
11. Nocturne
12. Raga
13. Courante
14. Divertissement
15. Operetta
16. Masquerade
17. Rhapsody
18. Fughetta
19. Passepied
20. Sonatina

Delivering playful renditions and emotionally charged songs, whist at the same time leaving an indelible impression upon both the songs and the listening audience, this new recording opens on the playfully flirty March and the strictly cohesive Gigue and then we get the soulful elegance of Prelude, the bountiful Variations, the artfully jagged shorter work Aphorism, the plentiful Partita, and the languishing balladry of Reverie, the upbeat Novelette and then we get the veritably glistening Bagatelle brouht forth.

Along next on this album that was produced by Judith Sherman, herself perhaps the most prominent and universally acclaimed classical music producer in the world today, is the sterner fare of Toccata and the fluidly delicate Nocturne which are themselves backed seamlessly by the dulcet Nocturne, the fervently-charged Raga, the rhythmically splendid Courante, the opulent Divertissement, the set rounding out on the resplendent Operetta, the engagingly melodic Masquerade, coming to a close on the delicate Rhapsody, the engaging Fughetta, and both the free flowing Passepied and the confidently aspiring Sonatina.