For Gerstein this music, like Beethoven and Bach’s has become part of his DNA, the difference being that with this living composer he can discuss details of performance…This recording makes an exhilarating hour of beauty and strangeness…Gerstein describes In Seven Days as being about the birth of the universe – but for me it’s simply a triumphant cavalcade of delicately glittering and gloriously sensuous effects.

This is a dazzling portrait, not only of the composer, but of an important collaboration...I find Adès now not only impressive, but his music delights me both in terms of its sound, imagination, and expressive depth.

How often is it that a piano disc comes along consisting entirely of new music as technically exhilarating in its modern way as any disc of Chopin or Liszt? There is life in the virtuoso concert pianist yet...Gerstein is a virtuoso and his brilliance pays dividends here...The story of the seven days of creation has never been told in music of more earth-shaking exuberance.

[In Seven Days] is, I would argue, Adès’s masterpiece: the fullest expression to date of his schematic musical mind...The music’s concurrent ability to evoke the seven chapters of creation...is the layer that makes this the work of a genius…The best among the piano-only works is the set of three Mazurkas, whose preordained frameworks again prompt Adès to greater levels of invention.

The brazen bravura of Adès’s Lisztian paraphrase on themes from his controversial first opera Powder Her Face is great fun, but the main event here is Adès’s telling of the creation story from Genesis, which rivals Haydn’s version for pictorial inventiveness. First light startles, birds skitter and swoop, and an entire menagerie is brought vividly to life.