Each and All Shane van Neerden

• Charles Ives (1874 - 1954): Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord Mass., 1840-1860":
• 1 Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord Mass., 1840-1860": I. Emerson 17:33
• 2 Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord Mass., 1840-1860": II. Hawthorne 12:33
• 3 Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord Mass., 1840-1860": III. The Alcotts 05:29
• 4 Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2 "Concord Mass., 1840-1860": IV. Thoreau 12:25
• Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937): Gaspard de la Nuit, M.55:
• 5 Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit, M.55: I. Ondine 07:22
• 6 Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit, M.55: II. Le Gibet 06:35
• 7 Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit, M.55: III. Scarbo 10:58
• Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 - 1943): Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36:
• 8 Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36: I. Allegro agitato 08:42
• 9 Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36: II. Non allegro - Lento 07:15
• 10 Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36: III. L'istesso tempo - Allegro molto 05:59
• Total Runtime 01:34:51

Info for Each and All

The debut album ‘Each and All’ of pianist Shane van Neerden, released by the label 7 Mountain Records, is a tour-de-force. The double-album was recorded during the span of four days in Hilversum's Studio 5. The program comprises three of the biggest piano works of the 20th century: Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, en Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata. This double-CD embodies many of the principles of the Transcendentalist movement, who prized individualism of thought and subjectivity of experience but also the innate connections between all creatures—“each and all.”

Charles Ives’ second piano sonata, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860, contains four movements inspired by Transcendentalists: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Emerson begins with a page of such explosive dissonance and overlaying of musical information that it’s no wonder people were daunted by the sonata at first. This chaos is deliberate, however, and is the key to the whole piece’s structure. Many different motivic elements are stated at once, jostling together in a clamor representing the non-linear rhetoric of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s own writing and the noisy public response to it. Concord’s second movement, the scherzo-like Hawthorne, focuses on the writer’s playfulness and imagination. Writing about the piece, Ives suggests some of the phantasmagorical elements flitting through the score: “little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard”. The spiritual heart of the sonata is the third movement, The Alcotts. Ives wrote of the movement of a spiritual sturdiness in the movement. “All around you, under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody… reflecting an innate hоpe—а common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity.” This could easily have been the sonata’s closing statement, but there’s still a dreamy coda: Thoreau. The surprising inclusion of a flute at the end might represent Thoreau himself playing, or an owl heard across the pond, or it could be a soul immersed in divinity at last, taken up with its fellows (“Each and All”): flowing freely with the current of Nature, no longer encumbered by thorny earth-bound questions of human sin and redemption.

Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908)—composed just a few years before Ives began work on his second sonata, in a very different artistic milieu— is a triptych of dark fever dreams, unsettlingly erotic, enclosing both player and audience in an otherworldly embrace as inexorable as it is intoxicating. The first movement, Ondine, is pure liquid sensuality. A nymph appears to a man at night; half-awake, he hears her disembodied voice calling to him, imploring him to join her as king of her underground realm. She sings with ethereal beauty, as alluring as the sirens from whose seductive pull Odysseus lashed himself to his own mast to save himself. In the second movement, Le Gibet, it is early evening; someone crosses a vast expanse of desert toward a village where a bell—a haunting B-flat ostinato—rings inexorably. Eventually, the hazy image in view becomes clear: it is a corpse hanging from a gallows, reddened by the setting sun. The last movement, Scarbo gives Gaspard its reputation as one of the most challenging pieces in the piano repertoire. Scarbo in Bertrand’s poem is a demonic gnome, a whirlwind of fiendish energy. He torments someone lying in bed at night by blocking the moon, scratching at the bed-curtains, and flitting around the room with inhuman speed and agility and menace.

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata is a richly emotional but still formally precise work. The first movement, marked Allegro agitato, begins with a vertiginous plunge to the depths of the keyboard—no mere theatrical gesture but a true melodic motive that will be explored throughout the piece’s three movements. The initial explosion continues in one unbroken build until it exhausts itself and gives way to a pensive second theme: an orthodox chant. After a searching development that heightens our sense of breathlessness, another plunge: a dissonant bell sequence (a nod to Rachmaninoff’s Orthodox upbringing) crashes down the keyboard and rings in the recapitulation, even stormier the second time, with a climax as overwhelming as Edgar Allan Poe’s bell tower. “Leaping higher, higher, higher,/With a desperate desire … How they clang, and clash, and roar!/What a horror they outpour/On the bosom of the palpitating air!” The second movement, Non allegro, is a singing intermezzo of almost unbearably poignancy. Shane imagines the movement as the singing and rocking of a mother grieving the loss of a child. Rachmaninoff picks up this closing harmony but adds a dominant addition to kick off the final movement, marked L’istesso tempo. Immediately the plunging motive is recontextualized as a bass line in a series of discursive explorations. A sudden march-like outburst breaks through, dance-like episodes wheel joyfully, huge chordal statements raise the heart rate of player and listener, and finally a series of accelerations—a tempo, più mosso, presto—push us toward a triumphant conclusion that could be the climax of a genuine folk celebration: a ritualized, thunderous, gasping release of collective emotion.

For Shane, a score can act as a conduit for individual exploration—a search for enlightenment, a traversal of deep waters of spirituality, eroticism, and emotion, requiring absolute immersion and absolute humility. The rewards can be high: an unmediated certainty of the composers’ intentions for every note and the spaces between every note; a sense of rightness, even divinity, in the communion between the performer and the art itself.

Shane van Neerden, piano

Shane van Neerden
(b. 1999, United States) has performed as a soloist, in chamber music ensembles, and as a soloist with orchestra in concert halls in Germany, the Netherlands, England, Italy, Portugal, Austria, France, and in the United States, as well as for radio in the U.S., Portugal (Antena 2), and in the Netherlands (Radio 4, NTR, and in the television program Podium Witteman).

In May 2024, Shane won the Dutch Classical Talent Award with which he completed a trajectory that included a tour of fourteen concerts at the most important Dutch classical music venues (Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, Musis Sacrum Arnhem, Philharmonie Haarlem, SPOT Groningen, Theater aan het Vrijthof Maastricht, TivoliVredenburg Utrecht, De Vereeniging Nijmegen, etc.). For the competition he developed the performance "Lantaarns," including a new commissioned work for a piano in a complete new just intonation by composer Rick van Veldhuizen. During the final of the competition in TivoliVredenburg, the jury praised his courage, musical wealth, and imagination. According to NRC reviewer Marnix Bilderbeek, "his velvet touch, sensitive phrasing, and warm color palette make his a deserved winner". ​​

In 2022/2023, Shane was one of the four musicians in Toonzetters, the project out of which the current ensemble emerged, where he played, together with pianist Ramon van Engelenhoven and percussionists Arjan Jongsma and Agostinho Sequeira, 20 new pieces by 20 young composers (a.o. Mathilde Wantenaar, Jan-Peter de Graaf, Celia Swart, and Rick van Veldhuizen) in a tour throughout the Netherlands and Italy. A CD for this project was released by the label 7 Mountain Records.

Highlights from Van Neerden's 2023-2024 season include a solo CD recording with radio and television broadcaster AVROTROS, his solo recital debut in the Small Hall of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, and a chamber music recital with the Berlin Philharmonic's former first viola player Máté Szücs, Frankfurt Radio Orchestra's former first cellist László Fenyö, and Kremerata Baltica's concert master Stella Zake. In February 2025, Shane made his debut as a soloist with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra at the Vrijdagavondconcert in TivoliVredenburg and the Zondagochtendconcert in the Great Hall of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. In May 2026, Shane will give a lecture-recital in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam's Small Hall that will include the "Three-Page" Sonata and "Celestial Railroad" by American composer Charles Ives and Samuel Barber's piano sonata. He has also recently toured with PHION orchestra playing Prokofiev's 1st piano concert and conducted by Michał Nesterowicz.

In February 2026, Shane will release a solo CD with the independent Dutch label 7 Mountain Records (including Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, and Sergei Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Sonata), a documentary about him will be released by iAmsterdam (for which he was recommended by the Concertgebouw Amsterdam), and he will play at the pre-concert of the famous Prinsengracht Concert in Amsterdam.

In February 2027, he has his Polish debut with the Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic conducted by Michał Nesterowicz.

Shane began piano lessons at the age of six and has studied with celebrated pianists Jacques Rouvier, Robert Levin, Heinrich Schenk, Sasha Starcevich, Peter Takács and Susan Starr. Shane has also had private lessons from French-Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin and Portuguese percussionist and conductor Pedro Carneiro. After private lessons from age of 12 to 18 with pianist Carl Cranmer at West Chester University, he began his undergraduate studies at the Conservatory of Amsterdam with Frank Peters. He concluded his studies in 2022 with 10 "cum laude", the highest possible distinction. Shane also graduated from his masters with a 10 "cum laude". Shane also studied in 2021 at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole in Italy with Eliso Virsaladze.

This album contains no booklet.