EXIT MUSIC (for the End of Time) (Sergei Kvitko)

Award-winning pianist Sergei Kvitko announces Exit Music (for the End of Time), his final solo piano recording, to be released August 21, 2026. The album presents an extraordinary program of transcriptions drawn from across the full span of Western music, from Bach to Björk, Mozart to Messiaen, Rachmaninoff to Radiohead, and more. The works are all united by Sergei Kvitko asking himself: 

“What would I want to hear at my own funeral? If I knew the world would end in an hour, what would I want to play, and what would I want to listen to?”

After his 2025 nomination for the GRAMMY® Award for Producer of the Year (Classical), pianist Sergei Kvitko came to the realization that his production career had become as meaningful to him as performing. He recalled meeting legendary Russian pianist Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid when he was in his late eighties. Bashkirov told him, “You know, when I turned 80, I decided to stop playing. I felt like I could not play any better, and I didn’t want to play any worse.” While Kvitko is not near that landmark age, coming to terms with the fact that his production career was bringing a new journey, brought him the courage and the occasion to close his performing chapter on his own terms. 

The album takes its title from two sources at once: Radiohead’s haunting “Exit Music (for a Film),” which appears on the program in Christopher O’Riley’s celebrated transcription, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, from which Kvitko’s own transcription of the Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus is drawn. The collision of the secular and the sacred captures the album’s essential spirit.

Kvitko’s career has brought rewarding relationships with incredible composers, and it was important for him to feature them on this final album. Of the fourteen works on the album, three are newly commissioned by Kvitko for the album: David Biedenbender’s Falling Lighttakes Björk’s simple melody from Overture from Dancer in the Dark and extends it into an epic rhapsody; Igor Iachimciuc’s Precious Lord (Fantasia on the Hymn Tune) uses Kvitko’s favorite hymn to create a completely fresh, reverent, and unselfconscious look at a familiar melody; Noah Mallett’s arrangement of Eugène Ysaÿe’s “Malinconia” from Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 27 approaches the score with a fearless hand, expanding the piece into a complex, polyphonic landscape. The album also features two of Kvitko’s own transcriptions: Mahler’s Adagietto, Messiaen’s Louange, and his own work, Dichterliebe Rückblick (after Robert Schumann).

Receiving its premiere recording is the closing movement “Zueignung” from Five Études on Songs of Richard Strauss, Op. 146, which was dedicated to Kvitko by composer Lowell Liebermann and transforms five of Strauss’s most beloved songs into virtuosic concert etudes.