"Following her critically acclaimed Stockhausen-album, Japanese, Frankfurt-based pianist Miharu Ogura (b. 1996) now displays her skills not only at the piano but also as a composer. This latest musical endeavour unveils five intricately crafted compositions, each a testament to Ogura's musical brilliance, delivered with her usual delicacy, preciseness, and soulfulness. In the international press, Ogura's remarkable performances have drawn comparisons to David Tudor and Aloys Kontarsky, and this new set of original, staggering pieces is a lucid account of her vast musical imagination."-thanatosis produktion

"Miharu Ogura, born in Tokyo in 1996, is a composer and pianist who has embarked on a celebrated international career after amassing an armful of notable awards. She is now based in Frankfurt and made this recording of five originals in Gothenburg. The present reviewer is in no way qualified to remark on the technical skill of her playing, so thankfully Ogura Plays Ogura is accompanied by a small but hefty booklet featuring an essay by colleague Jonas Olsson.

Olsson plumbs the deep depths of this "supremely accomplished pianist with a boundless appetite for the summits of the contemporary piano repertoire," who is rapidly emerging as an important composer of distinctive character as well. He marvels that in her work, "there are usually three or four (sometimes even five) different layers of music, moving at different speeds, often also using different types of rhythmical notation" while remaining - herself, at the keyboard - front and center, paying utmost attention to "dynamics, articulation, sonority and resonances." And he is awestruck by the sheer physical demands of her work, "often requiring absurd amounts of hand-crossing," particularly in the earliest piece, "Labyrinthe," wherein Ogura displays "ways of playing the piano that nobody has ever experienced before."

To the layman listener, hearing Ogura play Ogura in one fell swoop is an adventure, an exhibition of beautiful mathematics by a mind and pair of hands that can turn numbers into stunning landscapes. There is complexity and there is lucidity in her playing, which for one piece she delightfully describes as "piling sounds up and then making them go away." Spare then maximal, restrained then unbridled, she draws our attention to the freighted, mountain-air clarity of silence, then fills it to the brim with clusters of vigorous, colorful bustle. Miharu Ogura is definitely, as Olsson declares, "the real thing." "-Stephen Fruitman, Avant Music News