“Schoenberg is a bright young composer, and his sparkling album Pianoworks is almost 45 minutes of Schoenberg’s solo improvisations, most of them from a concert he gave at Amherst College. He’s a lyrical player with a gift for delicate interlocking melodies and extended single-note runs high up the keyboard . . . On “Gesture,” Schoenberg develops a pretty but slight opening theme and works it up, thickening the textures a bit, varying the dynamics, dotting it with quick runs. At the beginning you’d hardly have thought the little theme could have endured all of the weight. And following “Gesture,” Schoenberg diverges into a piece called “Blue Rag” which isn’t so much a rag as a dirty boogie-woogie with a rolling eight-to-the-bar rhythm and an uplifting bluesy after-hours feeling.”

Ray Murphy, Boston Globe