With her debut solo album TERRA, Italian-American pianist Elenora Pertz returns to the origins of her artistic work. Inspired by a creative retreat on Mount Etna in the summer of 2023, the album presents itself as a musical meditation on nature, cycles, and the sacred feminine – and as a search for a renewed connection between human beings, art, and the earth.

TERRA brings together works by Beethoven, Stravinsky, Fazıl Say, Sheila Silver, Mel Bonis, Mary Howe, Janáček, Bartók, Brahms, and others with the seismographically recorded “Boati” of Mount Etna. These natural sounds function as interludes, blurring the boundaries between concert hall and volcanic landscape. “The earth has a voice – our task as musicians is to listen,” says Pertz.

Three central motifs shape the program: the earth as primal principle, as mother, and as home. Fazıl Say’s Black Earth opens the album with archaic power. Works by composers such as Mel Bonis, Sheila Silver, and Mary Howe place the theme of femininity at the center. The cyclical idea of transformation and return finds expression in Bach’s Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, Beethoven’s Op. 109, and Schumann’s Fantasie – works that symbolize renewal and rebirth.

Beyond the personal dimension, Pertz understands TERRA as an artistic statement in a time when humanity’s relationship with the earth must be reexamined. Mindfulness and responsibility toward the planet form the ethical resonance of the album.

Elenora Pertz looks back on an international career as a Lied pianist, chamber musician, and opera coach, with engagements including the Berlin State Opera, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, and the Salzburg Festival. Since 2023/24, she has led the Lied class at the University of the Arts Bremen and is committed to networking women in the art song world through “Lied the Way e.V.”

With TERRA, she invites listeners to experience classical music as elemental energy – an immediate connection between humanity and the world.