Celebrated Latvian pianist Vestard Shimkus releases world premiere recordings of his own works performed with Liepaja Symphony Orchestra in this new studio recording.

Vestard Shimkus (b.1984) is among the generation of Latvian performers who came of age and began his professional career after Latvia had regained its independence. These artists were able to study abroad, perform freely anywhere in the world and sign contracts with respectable recording labels – in other words, things that had been unavailable to his predecessors. The Iron Curtain had denied them deserved recognition in Western concert halls. Shimkus and his generation, for their part, were free to develop their careers from the very beginning.

Shimkus is not only a pianist but also a composer. He wrote his first pieces of music as a composition student under Peteris Vasks and his piano paraphrases, variations and fantasias (a typical example is Astor Piazzolla's Heartbeat) were followed by increasingly more confident and serious works. Shimkus calls himself a romantically thinking and feeling artist, and therefore the music he creates echoes the metamorphoses of turbulent imagination and vivid characters in the music of composer-pianists Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninov. Virtuosity is an integral part of his music, and here Simkus fully realises his pianistic potential – the texture of the instrument sparkles with ever new variations, waves of rhythm and harmony crashing against each other.