Pianist Lukas Sternath to Release Debut Album on NO SILENCE RECORDS

The debut album by ARD Music Competition winner and BBC New Generation artist Lukas Sternath, featuring works by Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt, will be released on October 23, 2026 on NO SILENCE RECORDS, the label founded by Igor Levit, in collaboration with Sony Classical.

'A young man walks onto the stage and seems to conjure magic from the piano.' This was how one of Germany's leading newspapers described an early performance by the Viennese pianist Lukas Sternath.

Sternath first came to international prominence when he won the 2022 ARD International Music Competition, taking home an extraordinary seven prizes. Yet almost as remarkable as his success was his decision to decline the accompanying offer of a debut recording. At just 22, he felt the time was not yet right. Rather than rushing into the studio, he chose to wait until the project felt truly his own.

That moment has now arrived. This October, Lukas Sternath releases his debut album on NO SILENCE RECORDS, the label founded by Igor Levit in partnership with Sony Classical.

Levit, Sternath's teacher at the University of Music, Drama & Media in Hanover, Germany as well as a close mentor and friend, gave him complete artistic freedom in shaping the programme. The first disc brings together five Schubert songs in Liszt's celebrated piano transcriptions alongside Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy. The second is devoted entirely to Liszt, featuring Deuxième Année: Italie from Années de Pèlerinage, culminating in the vast and visionary Fantasia quasi Sonata: Après une lecture du Dante.

Sternath approached the recording with exceptional care and a clear artistic vision:

'I knew very early on that Schubert had to be part of my first album. His songs touch me more deeply than anything else he wrote. In them, I feel he is completely himself, in his sound world and musical language. Liszt's transcriptions are extraordinary, and my aim has been to shape them so naturally that they retain the quality of the human voice.'

The importance of breathing in music is something Sternath has carried with him ever since his years with the Vienna Boys' Choir. Even today, he sings through the songs as he practises.

'It helps me to understand their vocal flow and to bring that sense of breath and phrasing into my playing.'

The result is a deeply personal album. These songs explore states of mind, emotional landscapes and ways of seeing the world, not least that of the performer himself. Running through the programme is the recurring figure of the wanderer, a theme with which Sternath feels a profound affinity:

'The feeling of being 'a stranger wherever I go' is one I know well. You are always searching, always moving forward, never quite arriving. Yet when I sit at the piano, I feel at home.'

Throughout Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage, Sternath remains closely connected to the spirit of song and the expressive power of language. Drawing inspiration from Petrarch's poetry, he seeks to translate its meaning directly into sound. Rather than treating Liszt's virtuosity as an end in itself, he understands it as the outward expression of an inner necessity, an emotional and spiritual eruption. What emerges is an interpretation shaped by curiosity and reflection: a continual process of questioning, discovering, discarding and, ultimately, letting go.

The album will be released on October 23, 2026 on NO SILENCE Records / Sony Classical, available on CD and digital formats.