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Recordings
Les Annees De Pelerinage, Books I and II
LabelRomeo Records
Year2012
Recorded live in Seattle, Sheppard’s traversal of the first two books of Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage follows the composer’s musical journeys through Switzerland and Italy. The collection transforms landscapes, literature, visual art, and personal experience into some of Liszt’s most poetic piano writing, moving from Alpine grandeur and pastoral reflection to works inspired by Raphael, Michelangelo, Petrarch, and Dante.
Claude Debussy: Estampes, Images, 12 Etudes
LabelRomeo Records
Year2013
This two-disc continuation of Sheppard’s Debussy project brings together Estampes, both books of Images, the complete twelve Études, and Hommage à Haydn. The program spans Debussy’s impressionistic evocations of distant places and natural imagery through the increasingly concentrated and technically exploratory language of the late Études, offering a broad portrait of the composer’s evolving approach to color, rhythm, touch, and pianistic sonority.
Claude Debussy: 24 Preludes
LabelRomeo Records
Year2013
Sheppard performs Debussy’s complete two books of Preludes, a collection that encompasses atmospheric landscapes, character studies, dances, literary references, humor, and some of the composer’s most radical experiments with harmony and keyboard color. Recorded live at Meany Theater, the album emphasizes Debussy’s extraordinary range of sonority, from the submerged grandeur of La cathédrale engloutie to the brilliance of Feux d’artifice
Scarlatti: Sonatas; Rachmaninov: Nine Etudes Tableaux, Op. 39
LabelRomeo Records
Year2021
This recital juxtaposes the crystalline keyboard writing of Domenico Scarlatti with the dark, orchestral sonorities of Rachmaninoff’s Op. 39 Études-Tableaux. The contrast is deliberate: Scarlatti’s compact sonatas combine rhythmic vitality, elegance, and keyboard invention, while Rachmaninoff’s nine studies create expansive musical “pictures” characterized by dense textures, virtuosity, and heightened emotional intensity.
Robert Schumann: Novelletten; Blumenstuck; Traumerei
LabelRomeo Records
Year2021
This Schumann recital centers on the eight Novelletten, Op. 21, a cycle of richly contrasted character pieces combining intimacy, fantasy, rhythmic energy, and large-scale Romantic rhetoric. Blumenstück offers a gentler, lyrical complement, while Träumerei distills Schumann’s gift for poetic simplicity into one of his best-known miniatures. Together, the works present different facets of Schumann’s highly personal keyboard language.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988; Paritta No. 5, BWV 829
LabelRomeo Records
Year2021
This album preserves Sheppard’s live performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one of the defining monuments of the keyboard repertoire, alongside the Partita No. 5 in G major. Beginning and ending with the same aria, the Goldberg Variations unfolds through thirty variations encompassing canons, dances, virtuoso writing, counterpoint, and profound introspection, while the Partita provides a more compact example of Bach’s transformation of Baroque dance forms.
J.S. Bach - The Klavierübung, Part I
LabelRoméo Records
Year2005
Sheppard’s recording of Bach’s six keyboard Partitas, the first part of the Clavier-Übung, explores one of the composer’s most sophisticated collections of dance suites. Combining contrapuntal clarity with a modern piano’s range of color and dynamics, the performances move from the intimacy of the individual dances to the larger architectural sweep of each partita.
Chopin and Scriabin Preludes
LabelRomeo Records
Year2021
This live recording places Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28 alongside Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 11, connecting two landmark cycles organized through the complete sequence of major and minor keys. Chopin’s concise studies in character and atmosphere are answered by Scriabin’s increasingly chromatic and psychologically charged language, illustrating how the Romantic prelude evolved across the nineteenth century.
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II
LabelRomeo Records
Year2009
The second book continues Sheppard’s traversal of Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues, recorded live at Meany Theater. His interpretation emphasizes articulation, transparency, and the shifting relationships among independent voices, while using the modern piano’s tonal resources without obscuring the music’s contrapuntal architecture.
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I
LabelRomeo Records
Year2009
Sheppard brings a highly analytical yet expressive approach to the first 24 preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The recording highlights the collection’s extraordinary variety of character while maintaining clarity of line and contrapuntal structure, revealing Bach’s exploration of every major and minor key as both an intellectual and expressive journey.
The Genius of the Young Brahms
LabelRomeo Records
Year2020
Designed as a counterpart to Sheppard’s recording of Brahms’s late piano works, this three-disc set focuses on music written during the composer’s youth. The collection includes sonatas, variations, and character pieces, showing how Brahms’s early writing already combined formidable virtuosity, structural ambition, Romantic intensity, and a deep engagement with earlier musical traditions. The performances were drawn from Sheppard’s Mostly Brahms concert series at Meany Theater.
The Essence of An Iron Will: Chopin Fantasy, Sonatas and Mazurkas
LabelRomeo Records
Year2017
This all-Chopin recital centers on some of the composer’s most substantial and psychologically complex works, including the Fantasy in F minor, major sonata repertoire, and selected mazurkas. Rather than emphasizing Chopin primarily as a miniaturist, the program presents a composer of formidable structural imagination, dramatic power, and emotional resilience, balancing large-scale works with the compressed expressive world of the mazurkas.
Dmitri Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87
LabelRomeo Records
Year2015
Inspired in part by Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Shostakovich’s monumental set traverses all 24 major and minor keys while moving through an extraordinary range of emotional worlds—from austere counterpoint and chorales to dances, marches, irony, lyricism, and tragedy. Sheppard recorded the complete cycle live at Meany Theater, approaching the work as one of the central large-scale achievements of twentieth-century piano literature. MusicWeb International
Aufrichtige Anleitung (Honest Guidance)
LabelRoméo Records
Year2005
This album presents Bach’s complete two-part Inventions and three-part Sinfonias, works originally conceived as both pedagogical pieces and models of contrapuntal composition. Sheppard emphasizes their compact construction, independence of voices, and remarkable expressive variety, treating these short works as fully realized musical statements rather than exercises
Beethoven: A Journey
LabelRoméo Records
Year2005
Recorded live across seven concerts at Seattle’s Meany Theater, Beethoven: A Journey presents all 32 piano sonatas in chronological order. Sheppard conceived the cycle as more than a survey of Beethoven’s keyboard writing: the sequence traces the composer’s artistic, spiritual, and intellectual development from the early sonatas through the visionary late works, allowing the complete cycle to unfold as a portrait of transformation across a lifetime.
Brahms: The Late Piano Works
LabelRomeo Records
Year2018
Sheppard gathers Brahms’s final four collections of solo piano music—Opp. 116 through 119—into a single portrait of the composer’s late style. These fantasies, intermezzi, capriccios, and rhapsodies are among Brahms’s most intimate works, moving between tenderness, melancholy, agitation, nostalgia, and concentrated dramatic power. Recorded from live performances, the album emphasizes the inward, reflective character of music Brahms himself associated with his later years.
Bach: The Art of the Fugue
LabelRomeo Records
Year2018
Sheppard approaches Bach’s unfinished Art of Fugue as both an intellectual summit of contrapuntal writing and a living performance work. Built from increasingly elaborate transformations of a single principal subject, the cycle explores fugue, canon, inversion, augmentation, and contrapuntal combination on an extraordinary scale. The recording uses Bach’s revised score and includes a completion of the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV by music theorist Kevin Korsyn.