For his debut album on Delos, the brilliant emerging virtuoso Sean Kennard has chosen a captivating program featuring solo piano music by two of America’s most iconic composers: Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland. While neither composer’s body of work includes a great many pieces for solo piano, each has left a legacy of superb compositions to memorable effect. Of the five works on this album, Barber’s finger-twisting Sonata and Copland’s stunning Piano Variations stand as enduring masterpieces of twentieth-century American piano music. And most of the shorter pieces offer delightfully evocative treatments of musical Americana.