Product Description It's high time that we celebrate Joseph Kubera's thirty-plus years of contributions to contemporary American music. This modest man from upstate New York is one of this country's greatest living pianists. Standard clichés don't do Kubera justice, so rare is his ability to conquer the most difficult music, and to simply reveal its great beauty through his care for it. Robert Carl of Fanfare magazine has written: "I think he may well be this era's David Tudor - virtuosic, smart as hell, far more eclectic in his tastes than you might think, with a marathoner's strength to deal with any transcendental performance challenge." The four pieces on this recording include two works written especially for him - Byron's Book of Horizons (2009) and "Blue" Gene Tyranny's The Drifter (1994) - and two pieces written independently, but ones that have never been recorded, namely Julius Eastman's Piano 2 (1986), and Stuart Saunders Smith's Fences, in Three Tragedies (1998). Review "With more than thirty years' worth of musical contributions to the American contemporary experimental music scene, pianist Joseph Kubera has pretty much played, well, nearly all of it. He is known for unrelenting precision, stamina, and patience-qualities all required to master some of the most challenging piano works of our age. He also has wide-ranging tastes... the music spans the lush to the thorny, and the textures range from sparse to brick wall density." --New Music Box"Kubera's recital not only shows off his technical prowess, but also his taste as a curator of programs. A worthy addition to discography of one of our major interpreters of new music." --Fanfare Magazine"Joseph Kubera has been an eloquent champion of new music for more than three decades. [His] impressively nuanced reading uncover the beauty implicit in these four compositions, two written specifically for him, plus two others making their first appearance on record." --International Piano