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Steinway & Sons releases Nostalgia - Piano Music of Cécile Chaminade, Vol. 2 from pianist Joanne Polk. This is a wonderful companion to Polk's highly lauded first Volume of music by Chaminade, The Flatterer. The works of Chaminade boast structure, architecture, beauty and harmonic interest and they strikingly display a mastery of instrumental idioms that make her works a joy to perform and to hear. Pianist Joanne Polk was catapulted into the public eye with her recordings of the complete piano works of American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944) on the Arabesque Recordings label. Ms. Polk celebrated the centennial of Beach’s Piano Concerto by giving the work its London premiere with the English Chamber Orchestra at the Barbican Center under the baton of Paul Goodwin. A few days later, Ms. Polk performed the Piano Concerto with the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco with conductor Apo Hsu in a performance described as “brilliant” by critic Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle. He went on to describe Ms. Polk’s performance as, “an enormously vital, imaginative reading. Her playing was expansive in the opening movement, brittle and keen in the delightful scherzo. She brought a light touch to the foreshortened slow movement and fearless technical penache to the showy conclusion.”