Rick Wakeman has announced details of a new studio album.
Piano Portraits will be released on January 13, 2017 and the track listing includes versions of David Bowie‘s “Life on Mars?”, which Wakeman recorded the original piano parts for, and “Space Oddity”, to which he contributed mellotron; through The Beatles, Yes and Led Zeppelin; to classical pieces composed by Debussy and Tchaikovsky.
“I’ve been wanting to do a piano album for years and I spent quite a bit of time looking at everything from straight classical pieces to stuff that I’d played on in the past like ‘Morning Has Broken’ and ‘Life On Mars?’,” Wakeman explains. “Plus pieces of music that I thought would work really well like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and classics like ‘Clair de Lune’. Nearly all of the tracks have a memory for me somewhere down the line and it just seemed to work.”
The tracklisting is:
Help
Stairway to Heaven
Life on Mars
I’m Not In Love
Wonderous Stories
Berceuse
Amazing Grace
Swan Lake
Morning Has Broken
Summertime
Space Oddity
Dance of the Damselflies
Clair de Lune
Vow To Thee My Country
Eleanor Rigby
Digital pre-orders will receive an instant download of Wakeman’s interpretation of “Help” by The Beatles.