Rarely do I get to enjoy reading the newspaper on a Sunday morning as much as this morning. The following review is of a CD produced at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. I provided the piano service. Fine recording. Kent Swafford February 3, 2008 CLASSICAL RECORDINGS Discs Filled With Discoveries By THE NEW YORK TIMES COPLAND: PIANO VARIATIONS, PIANO SONATA, PIANO FANTASY Robert Weirich, pianist. Albany Records TROY 989; CD. IN general the concertgoing public may not think of Aaron Copland as a composer of piano music. Yet three of his most original, important and thorny compositions are works for that instrument: the Piano Variations (1930), the Piano Sonata (1939-41) and the Piano Fantasy (1955-57). It’s inexplicable that these landmark scores are not repertory staples. So thanks go to the acclaimed pianist Robert Weirich, also a noted teacher, author and composer, who has recorded the three works here in brilliant, probing and austerely beautiful performances. Those who know only the Americana Copland may be shocked by the ascetic, unabashedly modern Piano Variations. It begins with a steely, slow, angular four-note motif, followed by a dissonant, loud and lingering chord. The pitches announce themselves, to quote Mr. Weirich’s liner notes, “as if delivered on stone tablets from the mountaintop.” Thus begins an exhilarating 13-minute exploration of the theme through a myriad of means: canon, inversion, augmentation, transposition and other techniques championed at the time by the composers of the Second Viennese School. The Piano Sonata was written after Copland had enjoyed great success with populist scores like “Billy the Kid.” Yet despite moments of hymnal beauty and tart tonality, the sonata has a spare-textured and rigorous character. The three-movement structure is also unconventional, with slow outer movements framing a scherzo: perky, slightly jazzy music that keeps mischievously slipping out of its asymmetrical 5/8 meter. In the mid-’50s Copland appropriated the 12-tone technique for his Piano Fantasy, but on his own terms. The row, such as it is, has just 10 notes, and the piece has passages of lush yet fresh and acute tonal harmony. Mr. Weirich’s gripping account of this volatile, ingenious 30- minute fantasy makes the question of how Copland fashioned its harmonic language seem beside the point. ANTHONY TOMMASINI -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20080203/728c49a5/attachment-0001.html
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