Min Kwon's "America/Beautiful" on International Piano

Korean-American pianist Min Kwon’s new album, America/Beautiful, is available now on Delos. Conceived, commissioned, and performed by Kwon, the five-volume collection comprises 76 new piano works by American composers inspired by the iconic patriotic song “America the Beautiful.”

“Min Kwon has not done things by halves when compiling an anthology that, launched at the outset of the Covid pandemic, has gone on to encompass just where American music and, by extension, culture finds itself a quarter of the way into the 21st century,” writes Richard Whitehouse for the summer 2026 issue of International Piano.

The entire project is initiated with Samuel Adler’s transcription of Samuel Ward’s song and concludes with Kwon’s own arrangement sung fervently, though not a little histrionically, by Stephen Costello. Confidently played, stylishly presented and thoughtfully annotated, this is a significant release, impressive not least for the sheer diversity of encore material it has created for inquiring pianists everywhere. That in itself is surely more than justification for ‘America/Beautiful’, aside from whether it should have a bearing on the wider issue of national identity.

More than an album, America/Beautiful aims to celebrate the cultural melting pot that makes up the United States, to bring together as many voices as possible, and to better listen and understand the voices of others, probing the question, What is America?

Like America itself, the 76 featured composers, born between 1928 and 2000, represent an enormous diversity of musical aesthetics, backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders; they include MacArthur Fellows, Pulitzer Prize winners, Rome Prize recipients, and Grawemeyer and Grammy Award winners. The individual pieces vary in tone, texture, and mood, but ultimately, form a united whole, much like the United States.

Read the full review here.

Listen to the album on your favorite platform: oh.lnk.to/AmericaBeautiful