Heresy Records Announces an Ambitious 2026–2027 Series of Piano Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HERESY RECORDS ANNOUNCES AN AMBITIOUS 2026–2027 SERIES OF PIANO RELEASES

Six recordings. Three singular musical voices. One boldly integrated visual collection.

Distributed worldwide principally by Naxos, the new series brings together pianist Ji Liu,
composer-pianist Boris Bergmann and composer-pianist Roger Doyle in a far-reaching portrait of
the piano as instrument, orchestra, laboratory and archive.
Heresy Records announces a major 2026–2027 sequence of piano-centred releases, uniting
landmark repertoire, first recordings, original transcriptions and nearly half a century of
composition. Across six albums, three unmistakably individual artists test the expressive reach of
the keyboard: Ji Liu illuminates Philip Glass and Liszt and reimagines the music of Philip Glass
and David Bowie; Boris Bergmann offers deeply personal new works shaped by poetry, mortality
and transformation; and Roger Doyle surveys a lifetime of invention in music written and
performed by the composer himself.

The recordings are joined by an equally distinctive visual identity from English designer Gareth
Jones. Conceived like a fashion collection, every cover is an original statement with its own
character, while every design belongs unmistakably to a larger, integrated whole. The result is a
series intended to be encountered both album by album and as a complete artistic edition.
“The piano can contain an orchestra, a private diary, a theatre of memory and an
entirely new world. This series brings those possibilities together without smoothing
away the differences between its artists. Ji Liu, Boris Bergmann and Roger Doyle
each speak with a voice that could belong to no one else, while Gareth Jones’s
artwork gives the releases the coherence of a collection. It is adventurous, beautiful
and a new direction for Heresy.”
— Eric Fraad, Founder and CEO, Heresy Records

THE 2026–2027 RELEASE SCHEDULE RELEASE ALBUM / ARTIST

16 OCT 2026 EK-R: Five Stages of Transformation Boris Bergmann, piano; Raphael Zweifel, cello & voice

20 NOV 2026 Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes Ji Liu, piano

8 JAN 2027 Piano Nobile: Piano Music of Roger Doyle Roger Doyle, piano

5 FEB 2027 SLOW: Scardanelli – Songs Without Words Boris Bergmann, piano

5 MAR 2027 Low Symphony & Bowie Songs Ji Liu, piano; original piano transcriptions

14 MAY 2027 Liszt: Transcendental Etudes Ji Liu, piano

THREE ARTISTS, SIX DISTINCT WORLDS

JI LIU: THE ETUDE AS TRANSFORMATION
Ji Liu’s contribution forms a series within the series. Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes
presents all twenty works in a two-disc traversal of one of contemporary piano literature’s defining
cycles. Liu’s technical command serves an interpretation of unusual lyricism and emotional
breadth, revealing music that is never merely repetitive but continually changing in colour, scale
and perception. Recorded at Shenzhen University Concert Hall following Liu’s 2021 Chinese
premiere of the complete cycle, the album opens Heresy’s extended exploration of the etude as
far more than a technical study.
That inquiry continues with Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, part of Liu’s ongoing Etude series for
Heresy: twelve works in which the piano becomes landscape, drama and pure virtuoso
imagination. Between Glass and Liszt comes Low Symphony & Bowie Songs, a project of
audacious reinvention. Liu brings Glass’s symphonic response to David Bowie and Brian Eno’s
Low into the solo-piano realm, paired with Bowie songs in original piano transcriptions recorded
here for the first time. The album turns the piano into both orchestra and singer, tracing the line
from Bowie’s experimental sound world through Glass and into Liu’s own creative musicianship.

BORIS BERGMANN: MUSIC AT THE THRESHOLD
Composer-pianist Boris Bergmann’s two releases approach the piano as a place of reflection and
radical intimacy. EK-R: Five Stages of Transformation is an immersive work for piano, cello,
spoken word and voice inspired by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s influential model of grief and
acceptance. With acclaimed Swiss cellist Raphael Zweifel and texts by the late Winfried Dulisch,
Bergmann’s world-premiere recording moves through uncertainty, loss, memory and renewal.
Music by Bach and Britten, together with Zweifel’s Überem Zürisee, extends the album’s dialogue
between private experience and timeless expression.
SLOW: Scardanelli – Songs Without Words enters another interior landscape. Inspired by
Friedrich Hölderlin’s enigmatic late ‘Tower Poems’ and the poet’s alter ego, Scardanelli, these solo
pieces preserve melody and song while allowing poetic image to take precedence over
conventional thematic development. Reduced, patient and quietly intense, SLOW turns listening
into an act of attention, finding expressive power in stillness and in what language leaves unsaid.

ROGER DOYLE: A PIANO LIFE
Piano Nobile gathers piano music composed and performed by Roger Doyle, one of Ireland’s
leading composers. Spanning nearly fifty years of work, this retrospective is at once a portrait of an artist and an alternative history of the instrument in Irish music. Across the collection, the piano
becomes a vehicle for memory, experiment, theatre and direct emotional communication. Heard
together, the pieces reveal the continuity beneath Doyle’s restless invention and the unmistakable
imagination that has sustained his long creative life.

A COLLECTION BUILT TO LAST
Although each release occupies its own aesthetic territory, the full series is bound by a shared
belief: that the piano remains inexhaustible. It can carry the accumulated weight of the canon,
absorb and transform popular culture, give physical form to grief, translate poetry without words
and preserve the evolution of a composer’s voice across decades.

ABOUT HERESY RECORDS
Heresy Records is an independent label dedicated to singular artists and boundary-crossing
projects. Its catalogue brings contemporary composition, early music, traditional music, folk,
electronica and unique combinations of these styles and distinctive visual culture into
conversation, presenting recordings as complete artistic statements.

PRESS / REVIEW COPIES / INTERVIEWS
Heresy Records | www.heresyrecords.com | Sidney Roberts – Email. pr@heresyrecords.com
Tel. 353 87 437 8905 or info@heresyrecords.com