CONTEMPORARY PIANO SOLO – EASY TO VERY ADVANCED
Bentzon, Niels Viggo 22 Easy to Intermediate Pieces
Hansen WH30094/Music Sales, £14.95
Various, ed. Erased Tapes
Erased Tapes/Music Sales, £30.00
Schwertsik, Kurt Albumblätter
Boosey & Hawkes, £29.99
Harrison, Sadie Northern Lights
UYMP/Music Sales, £5.95
Muhly, Nico Perpetual Motion
St Rose/Chester/Hal Leonard Europe, £7.99
Volans, Kevin PMB Impromptu; L’Africaine
Chester/Hal Leonard Europe: £9.99; £14.99
Greenwood, Jonny 88 No. 1
Faber, £9.99
Tower, Joan Ivory and Ebony
AMP AMP 8317/Music Sales, £7.99
Sørensen, Bent Fantasia Appassionata
Hansen WH32979/Music Sales, £19.95
Ruders, Poul Étude d’Évolution, Piano Study No. 4
Hansen/Music Sales, £12.95
Viner, Frederick Herz an Herz; Bells Wrung
UYMP/Music Sales: £6.95; £5.95
Þorvaldsdóttir, Anna Scape; Trajectories
Chester/Music Sales: £6.99; £7.99
Simaku, Thomas Raggio Lunare
University of York Music Press/Music Sales, £6.95
This recent batch of new music ticks the usual ‘contemporary’ boxes: minimalist, crossover, mystic, electronic, and ultra-complex. Easiest first: prolific Danish maverick Niels Viggo Bentzon cheerfully writes two-voice ‘fugues’ in which one part simply repeats the note ‘B’ or plays a boogie bass, and the other plays a ‘gavotte’ firmly starting on the downbeat. All pieces are very short and mostly tonal; some would suit early grade exam syllabuses. Seekers of more complex Bentzon can hear online his exciting Chamber Concerto for 11 instruments including three pianos.
The Erased Tapes compilation dates from 2007 onwards; its ‘constellation’ of mostly unknown composers favours minimalism. Masayoshi Fujita's ‘Moonlight’ was, I think, originally for vibraphone – the blurb is not clear. Composers of the closing ‘Long May It Sustain’ are identified only in the appendix; the music itself is very easy, and plunges us deep into scented-candle country. Presentation is neat, though the whimsical front-cover cutout may tear in use and the album won't stay open without breaking the spine.
Kurt Schwertsik was a Stockhausen pupil, unguessably so from the sound of his Albumblätter: 14 short pieces for his friends, which start with crossover and move to Satieism and Dadaism. They range from easy to complex, and add five nocturnes and an ‘Eden-Bar Seefold’, whose extravagantly crisscrossing quaver beams must have been a nightmare to engrave. The biggest and most rewarding piece here, the ‘Fantasia & Fuga’, also appeared in Angela Hewitt's ‘Bach Book’ (reviewed in MT back in August 2012).
The tranquil arpeggiations of Sadie Harrison's Northern Lights (2015) are tonal and easy all through, undisturbing except perhaps for the price: £5.95 for just two pages. Better value in this respect is Perpetual Motion (2016) by Nico Muhly, onetime assistant to Philip Glass and, unsurprisingly perhaps, minimalist – and requiring unflagging energy. A truncated version of it may be heard on YouTube; the quiet ending may dilute the applause a complete live performance would certainly deserve. Recommended.
The two Kevin Volans titles inhabit the same sound-world, albeit more harshly. The initials of PMB Impromptu (2014, 4 minutes) are not explained; neither is the close resemblance between it and L’Africaine (2016, 22 mins). PMB would appear to be a sketch for the other, or an experimental working of motifs from it. Neither is there any hint as to which hand plays what (by no means easy to determine) in L’Africaine's frequent excursions onto three and four staves.
Jonny Greenwood (yes, Radiohead's lead guitarist) collaborated with Antoine Françoise for 88 No. 1, its revised version premiered in Budapest (2015), where the slow-fast structure might comfortingly have reminded the locals of a Hungarian rhapsody, with its lassu and friss. The ‘lassu’ is more thoughtful than the ‘friss’, fierce-looking on the page but actually a dead-easy and repetitive ramble with LH on white notes and RH on black, a device familiar from Stravinsky's Petrushka. The copious glissandi near the end could be painful, and the final clusters look as if they should be fff but are actually p.
Petrushka has much to answer for. It permeates Joan Tower's well-titled Ivory and Ebony, not a lament for endangered materials but an eight-minute test piece for the 2009 San Antonio International Piano Competition. Hand-to-hand white/black-note passages are much in evidence, while whole sections elsewhere stick to one ‘colour’ or the other – possibly weakening the overall structure as a result. Curious newcomers could instead start with her orchestral Sequoia.
The spidery manuscript of Bent Sørensen's Fantasia Appassionata (2017) comes as a shock. It's sight-readable, slowly, and thereby a useful ‘school of hard knocks’ test for pupils pampered by Sibelius-quality software. Idioms vary wildly, simple themes that float over ‘three flowing parts’ contrasting with wavering-tonality bell sounds scrupulously notated with dynamic extremes. The Spotify performance, possibly though not certainly by the composer himself, changes many dynamics en route.
The seven-page Étude d’Évolution (2014) by this month's third Dane, Poul Ruders, is scrupulously legible, large accidentals and all (they inflect every note of a chord), even if its oversize format risks flopping over the music-rest. It's thoughtful, like all this composer's music, with one enjoyably Lisztian passage of chromatically growling minor chords.
The sound-world of Frederick Viner (b. 1994) takes Berg as its standpoint and throws in at least one Wagner quote: his notation recalls Messiaen in its flurries of demisemis at quaver = 30–60. (Why not write easier-to-read semis at crotchet = 30–60?) Both pieces date from 2016 and have won awards: Herz an Herz is slightly the more appealing.
In Scape (2011), Icelandic composer Anna Þorvaldsdóttir incorporates an item new to nonpop guitarists among us: the ebow (or e-bow), a handheld electronic device capable of sustaining, apparently indefinitely, any string against which it is held. There is more work inside the piano, even harder in performance if done, as requested, in the dark. The score of Trajectories (2013) has a 15-line stave for inside-the-piano work, a normal stave (or two) for keyboard itself (used less), and a two-line stave for electronics but no description of them.
Finally, Thomas Simaku's eight-minute Raggio Lunare (‘Lunar Ray’, premiered 2017) strives to reproduce a three-dimensional quality as its initial chord evolves, though its idiom is a largely momentum-free, been-here-before mix of slow tempos, changing time-signatures obscured by pauses, glissandi inside the piano and flourishes that scurry though rarely build. Beautiful presentation, though as with the Ruders the large format risks dropping the score into a new dimension – through the floor.
