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Amazon.com The pop charts were once regularly haunted by the melodramatic musings of pianists like Liberace, Ferrante and Teicher and Roger Williams, a sensibility that eventually gave way to the more New Age-y affectations of George Winston and his fellow Wave-format-friendly ivory ticklers. But if producer David Foster has his way, young Phoenix native William Joseph will do for instrumental piano music what the Foster-mentored Josh Groban, Michal Buble and Renee Olstead have done for classical crossover and crooner revivalism. Joseph is blessed with a forceful technique and an ear for drama (he composed the theme for his hometown NHL Phoenix Coyotes when just a teen) that recalls Williams in his prime, and approaches his material with a kitsch-be-damned, crowd-pleasing verve that occasionally invokes 1970s' prog-rock excesses (the artist's own title track and "Piano Fantasy") without apology. Bolstered by Foster's usual back-row-of -the-balcony production sensibility, Joseph tackles everything from the classics ("Ave Maria," "Eternal"'s reworking of Chopin) to Led Zeppelin (a version of "Kashmir" that's as over-the-top as the original), Kansas (vocalist Garou guests on the bathos-drenched "Dust in the Wind") and even Muse ("Butterflies and Hurricanes" as MOR melodrama) with supreme confidence, if considerably less subtlety. --Jerry McCulley

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