The Edge of Silence (Avie 2019)

Works for Voice and piano, cimbalom, violin, bass by György Kurtág

George Perle Serenade for Piano and Orchestra

"An excellent example of the resilience of Perle’s work is a new recording on BMOP Sound. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, presents a disc of Perle’s Serenades: one featuring viola soloist Wenting Kang, another featuring piano soloist Donald Berman, and another for a chamber orchestra of eleven players...Berman does a marvelous job with the solo part, playing incisively with rhythmic precision and precise coordination with the ensemble...Rose leads BMOP through all three serenades with characteristic attention to detail and balance. The players prepared well for this challenging program. Better advocates would not have been the wish of the composer. Kudos to BMOP for keeping Perle’s memory and music alive. This disc handily makes my Best of 2019 list."

Read Review

"No 3 for piano (1983) is the finest, a real mini-concerto; Donald Berman is as persuasive as Richard Goode”

"No 3 is for piano and chamber orchestra and Donald Berman gives us power and poetics at the piano helm.”

Martin Boykan: Music for Piano

Pianist Donald Berman's recording of Martin Boykan's piano music gives passionate voice to the music of one of America's most undervalued composers. Berman describes the music as: '..lyrical, yet atonal; melodic, yet with wide leaps in register; it sustains over large expanses, yet has quick inner pulsing.' Berman describes his encounter with Boykan's music: At the start I was awed by the diamond-like purity of individual moments, daunted by the complex counterpoint...it was music that lived in my head for a long time after performing it. It is deeply personal.

Composer Scott Wheeler writes that he has “always used the piano as a sketch pad. Bach, Chopin, Shostakovich and others organized their small keyboard works systematically. Mine have just accumulated over the years, as I suspect is true for Grieg, Scarlatti, and my teacher Virgil Thomson. In fact, Virgil’s particular version of the 'sketchbook' method of writing short pieces was to write musical portraits 'from life,' in the manner of his visual artist friends. I was myself a subject of one of Virgil’s portraits, in 1981”. Portraits and Tributes presents 27 of Wheeler's short works, performed by Donald Berman, a pianist much admired for championing new and little-known music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Love’s Signature: Songs by Juliana Hall

MSR 2016

NATS Review

Christopher Theofanidis: Piano Concerto (Summit 2012)

Scott Wheeler: Wasting the Night

Wonderful songs by Scott Wheeler featuring 4 fabulous singers: Susanna Phillips, Krista River, Joseph Kaiser, and William Sharpe

“Accompanying at the piano throughout [on Scott Wheeler’s CD of songs] is Donald Berman in one marvelously subtle performance after another, gracefully reciprocating the contrasting styles of the four singers while responding to the emotional ebb and flow of the material with perfectly pitched nuance and knowingness.” - Classical Review

Wheeler's music is imaginative, varied, pungent, lyrical...
Donald Berman is the constant pianist. He is immensely experienced in this kind of repertoire, and is undaunted by the difficulty of much of the music.
- Musicweb International

Featuring U-Don Rock and Jamaica’s Songs

Jamaica Kincaid & John Elder, Readers
Brenda Patterson, Mezzo-soprano
Szilvia Schranz, Soprano
David Bowlin, Violin
Darrett Adkins, Cello
Margo Garrett & Donald Berman, Piano