May 1: New Sony Classical Album by Pianist Arcadi Volodos Featuring the Music of Franz Schubert & Robert Schumann - New Single Out Today
New Sony Classical Album by Pianist Arcadi Volodos
Schubert: Piano Sonata No.17 In D Major, D.850
Schumann: Kinderszenen Op.15
Kinderszenen, Op.15/VII. Träumerei
Out Today - Listen Here
Album Release Date: May 1, 2026
Pre-Order Available Now
A musician known for conjuring up magical sounds on the piano is back. Seven years after his last album, the exceptionally gifted Arcadi Volodos is releasing a new and long-awaited Sony Classical album on May 1, 2026, recorded live at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. And again, he is devoting himself to the music of Franz Schubert as well as Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen. Accompanying today’s announcement is the first single, Kinderszenen, Op.15/VII. Träumerei - listen here.
“The great difficulty with Schubert”, says Volodos, “is the basic outline, the absolute transparency. It is in silence that the personality and the spirituality of the interpreter shine through.” For Volodos as an interpreter, it is here, in this world of stillness and half-tones, that his real work begins, since “this demands simplicity and depth”.
Volodos’s earlier Schubert recordings have included the great sonatas in G major (D 894, released in 2002) and in A major (D 959, first issued in 2019). He is now turning his attention to the D major Sonata D 850, a work sometimes known as the “Gastein” Sonata since Schubert composed it during the summer of 1825, when he was taking the waters at Bad Gastein to the south of Salzburg.
Arcadi Volodos draws particular attention to the “extreme sensibility” of Schubert’s music, which explains why he favours a freedom of approach that allows for flexible tempos.
“It is absurd to want to fix the tempo by means of a metronome,” he argues, because “music is a language, not an equation.” It is very much the many incomparable transition passages, the melodies and the gently changing harmonies that make Schubert’s music so unmistakably his own. And this is all the more true when they are performed by a pianist as exceptional as Arcadi Volodos.
The second work on his new album is Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen, a set of thirteen priceless miniatures for the piano, the best known of which is the famous “Träumerei”.
“I think that it is only when you grow older that you understand these pieces better and better,” says Volodos, referring obliquely to the fact that Schumann did not write them for children. What matters more, as Volodos explains, is “It is a question of rediscovering within oneself the child’s sense of wonderment, this pure and sincere understanding of a world that one spends an entire lifetime trying to rediscover.”
To that extent this recording of Kinderszenen seems like a summation of Volodos’s whole life as an artist: each piece is a little jewel that allows the piano to radiate with light and to shine in all its colours and nuances. One could argue that this profundity is accessible only to those artists who, like Volodos, have a relatively manageable repertory at their command, at least in terms of their public appearances. “I like it when the works come to life inside me and become a part of me.” The present recording attests to the truth of this comment in many different ways.
Arcadi Volodos was born in St Petersburg and it was there, too, that he studied. He first became famous for his highly virtuosic piano arrangements of Romantic orchestral works but since his international breakthrough in the late 1990s he is now invariably numbered among the finest pianists currently before the public. He appears in all the leading concert halls and at festivals all over the world. His relatively few recordings have regularly garnered the most prestigious international awards.