Album Elevator Pitch

Sergei Kvitko, award-winning pianist and the GRAMMY-nominated producer, steps back in front of the microphones for one final performance. Exit Music (for the End of Time) is his farewell to solo piano recording: 14 transcriptions of his favorite works spanning four centuries, from Bach and Mozart to Radiohead and Björk, built around a single question — what would you want to hear if the world ended in an hour?

Album fun facts

• the album’s cover image is the original painting by my good friend Anthony Michael Cairo (oil on canvas, 20×20). It hangs proudly in my studio

• exactly half of the works on the album are world premiere recordings, they did not exist before I started this project

• The dedication of Lowell Liebermann’s Five Etudes on Songs of Richard Strauss, Op. 146 reads “to Sergei Kvitko”

• I wrote Dichterliebe Rückblick (after Robert Schumann) in about 15 minutes, and did not change a single note since then. It took me over 3 years to write the arrangement of Mahler’s Adagietto, and I have been tweaking it even after the album came out.

The Program

• Sergei Kvitko — Dichterliebe Rückblick (after Robert Schumann)

• David Biedenbender — Falling Light: Rhapsody on Björk Guðmundsdóttir's Overture from "Dancer in the Dark"

• Sergei Rachmaninoff — How Fair This Spot (arr. Arcadi Volodos)

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Ave Verum Corpus (arr. Franz Liszt)

• Lowell Liebermann — Zueignung, from Five Etudes on Songs of Richard Strauss, Op. 146

• Eugène Ysaÿe — Malinconia, from Sonata Op. 27, No. 2 (arr. Noah Mallett)

• Olivier Messiaen — Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus, from Quartet for the End of Time (arr. Sergei Kvitko)

• Johann Sebastian Bach — Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen, from Cantata BWV 127 (arr. Harold Bauer)

• Johannes Brahms — Herzlich tut mich verlangen, from 11 Chorale Preludes, Op. 122 (arr. Ferruccio Busoni)

• Gustav Mahler — Adagietto, from Symphony No. 5 (arr. Sergei Kvitko)

• Franz Schubert — Gute Nacht, from Winterreise (arr. Leopold Godowsky)

• Radiohead — Exit Music (for a Film) (arr. Christopher O'Riley)

• Gabriel Fauré — In Paradisum, from Requiem (arr. Emile Naoumoff)

• Igor Iachimciuc — Precious Lord (Fantasia on the Hymn Tune)