On her debut album, Hungarian‑American pianist Julia Hamos presents a deeply personal musical journey that weaves together her dual heritage. A graduate of Juilliard, the Royal Academy of Music, and Mannes—where she studied with luminaries like Richard Goode and Sir András Schiff—Hamos brings technical brilliance to the miniatures by György Kurtág and Béla Bartók which anchor the program. The repertoire for Ellis Island, which also includes short works by György Ligeti, Charles Mingus, Meredith Monk, and Franz Schubert, is characterized as a sonic odyssey tracing Hamos’s Transylvanian roots, the folk memory of Hungary, and the cultural optimism of New York—evoking “a longing for adventure.”