Contemporary Classics December 5, 2017 Contemporary Piano

Another show with contemporary piano music reaching back to the beginnings of the 20th century and them up to the 21st century.

Charles Ives' Sonata No. 1 has its genesis in improvisation: upon leaving Yale in 1898, Ives moved into a flat in New York City with some of his fellow graduates. There was a piano, and Ives spent many hours pounding out what his roommates referred to as "resident disturbances." Ives stated that most of the Sonata was written in 1900-1904. The first movement is based on a lost Recital Piece for Organ.  The second movement incorporates the "First Ragtime Dance" from Four Ragtime Dances, also known as "In the Inn." The fourth movement contains the last music written for the sonata in 1911 and is derived from the 4^th ragtime dance of Four Ragtime Dances for chamber orchestra, although Ives further overhauled the fifth movement in 1914-1917 which originally was from the 4^th of Set of Five Take-Offs and barrows from his Study No. 22.   The "finished" formal scheme would be 1) Adagio con moto, 2a) Allegro moderato-Andante, 2b) Meno mosso con moto ("In the Inn"), 3) Largo-Allegro, 4a) no tempo given, 4b) Allegro-Presto, 5) Andante maestoso.   

 Für Alina written in 1976 by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and was the first in his Tintinnabuli compositional style which is a simple style characterized by two types of voice, the first of which (dubbed the "tintinnabular voice") arpeggiates the tonic triad, and the second of which moves diatonically (white keys) in stepwise motion.   In this case both voices are in the treble clef with just a echo in the bass clef.  The tempo markings are “peacefully, in an elevated and introspective manner.” 

In the Mists is a piano song cycle written in by Leos Janáček  in 1912.  All four parts of the cycle are anchored in "misty" keys with five or six flats; characteristic of the cycle are the frequent changes of meter.  The movement are marked I. Andante, II. Molto Adagio, III. Andantino. IV. Presto    The atmospheric nature of the cycle has been compared to impressionist works, in particular the works of Claude Debussy.  Here is a performance by Paul Crossley in performance of Leos Janacek’s.   In the Mists from the album set Janacek: Chamber & Orchestral Works          

Marin Bresnick  Strange Devotion     One of the artist Francisco de Goya's most enigmatic etchings in his famous series "Caprichos Enfaticos" or "Emphatic Caprices" is entitled "Extrana Devocion". The etching depicts a group of ordinary Spanish people as they kneel on the roadside to pray while a donkey pulls a bier with a corpse in a strangely see-through coffin through the street. The donkey's mute yet somehow knowing expression seems to reveal both the sincerity and futility of the people's unquestioning faith.    This image was Martin Bresnick’s inspiration for this piece.

Many consider his piano Sonata  among Charles T. Griffes’ highest musical achievement. The Sonata for Piano has its roots in an unfinished work that Griffes undertook in the fall of 1917, not long after completing his incidental music for the Celtic play The Kairn of Koridwen. The unfinished piece was the torso of a Sonata for Piano that Griffes was ultimately to abandon in December of that year. At that point, Griffes decided to start over from scratch, and happily completed the 15-minute sonata in just one month. Griffes himself gave the premiere of the Sonata for Piano at a concert of his works held at the MacDowell Club in New York on February 26, 1918. At this juncture the sonata was cast in a single movement only; however, during preparation of the work for publication, Griffes changed his mind and divided the piece in three movements to be played without pause.   The Sonata for Piano is unique among Griffes' output. Whereas his earlier music tended to rely on a variety of approaches ranging from German-styled post-Romanticism to pseudo-oriental exotica, Griffes demonstrates a tough and single-minded attitude in the Sonata for Piano. The sonata shares little if anything with stylistic traits exhibited in Griffes' earlier works, and is cut from whole cloth that is free from exterior influences. Griffes' Sonata for Piano is dramatic, even tempestuous, dynamic (much of it is played forte) and makes quite liberal use of dissonance, although that is not to say the sonata is in any way disorienting to listen to. Griffes adheres strongly to a predetermined strategy of key relationships, and exercises a masterly control over the overall structure. Griffes does not digress, and his Sonata for Piano is a taut, highly disciplined, and compelling realization of his ideas.      Virgil Thomson once said that the sonata was "shockingly original." Critical reception to the sonata was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, with pianist/composer Rudolf Ganz proclaiming it as "the finest abstract work in American piano literature." The quality of the Griffes Sonata for Piano is attested to by the fact that since its introduction in 1918 there have been relatively few serious challenges to its status in this regard. The Griffes sonata has such "long legs," in fact, that in 1941, upon receipt of a manuscript copy of this sonata, Griffes' publisher G. Schirmer thought it a newly discovered work, and promptly signed a contract with the Griffes family to publish it. Only then did Schirmer realize that they'd already had it in their catalog for 20 years.