Playing the piano was for Aaron Copland one of the necessities of life, like eating or breathing. Wherever he was there was always a piano somewhere near. Even during conversations and interviews, so it is said, his fingers used to move involuntarily on the table-top like on an imaginary keyboard. And it is in piano works that Copland's compositional development found it's culmination again and again. The "Passacaglia" is his very first large-scale work, and the 5"Piano Fantasy" can be regarded as his most ambitious, most extensive composition in the field of absolute music, a work in which he sums up and concentrates many characteristics of his musical style in a late work.American musician Nina Tichman has been particularly interested in contemporary compositions and their roots in traditional music for the piano. The music of Schönberg and Debussy, whose complete piano works she has presented cyclically (also released on the WERGO label), as well as that of contemporary American composers such as Copland and Elliott Carter, plays a central role in her repertoire.