Big Tiny Little was a jazz pianist who played on the Lawrence Welk Show from 1955 to 1959. He started playing the piano at the age of 5, and in addition to playing with Lawrence Welk, he produced over 45 albums under hiw own name. He just died on March 3, 2010 at the age of 79.
Lee Floyd, III, started playing banjo professionally was at the age of 13 at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor. Since then he has played many venues, including Disneyland and Disney World.
This album is mostly instrumental, with a few songs that include passable vocals. The instrumental work is just plain fun stuff. Both artists play very energetically and you will likely be unable to stop tapping your foot to this stuff.
Stravinsky has long been one of my favorite composers and this LP has been in my collection for years. I missed listening to it, so finally got around to digitizing it. Noël Lee is an exceelent pianist and I find his interpretations wonderful.
Liner Notes:
The piano is usually thought of as the Romantic instrument par excellence. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, the major late-Romantics were content to leave the keyboard to the salon composers and the virtuosi. It was actually with the first generation of the 20th century—Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev—that the piano was rescued from its role as a purveyor of sentimentality and restored to its former place as a major creative medium.
Of the several distinct styles of 20th-century piano music, none has more character and profile than that of Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky is not nowadays thought of as a pianist and composer for keyboard. Yet almost every note he has written was conceived at the piano, for Stravinsky is one of the few "serious" composers who avowedly works at the instrument. He appeared in public for the first time in 1904 with his Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor, now lost. Petrouchka was originally conceived for piano and orchestra, and the piano still gambols through that famous work; he later arranged three movements of the music for piano solo. For many years Stravinsky toured as a pianist, first as a soloist, later with colleagues, always in specially written works. Only when he began playing the piano less and less (and conducting more and more) did his keyboard output slacken.
But for Stravinsky the piano has been far more than an instrument of convenience or practical necessity. The sound of the piano—the powerful, crisp attack of a modern concert grand—is a fundamental part of the Stravinskian esthetic. Nearly all of the major works of the first, "hard" period of neo-classicism—1917 to 1927 —are based on the sound of the piano or of wind instruments or, as in the case of the Piano Concerto, of both. Stravinsky often evokes the past through his use of the keyboard, but it is not, in his hands, a Lisztian or Chopinesque instrument. For Stravinsky, the piano is a music machine built in angles and planes. Out of it he mines his striking rhythmic accents, his block forms, his layered textures and cross-rhythmic pulses.
An exception must be made in the case of the early Four Etudes, Op. 7. For a brief, uncharacteristic moment, Stravinsky connects with the expressive chromaticism and keyboard trickery of the Romantic virtuosi. The set was written in June and July of 1908 at the summer home of his first wife's family, in Ustilug, Russia, and was performed in public by the composer later that same year. The first Etude, Con moto, dedicated to his friend Mitusov, is in C minor and features quintuplets against triplets and duplets almost all the way through. The second, Allegro brillante, D major, pits 6 against 3, 6 against 4, and 6 against 5 in an unceasing rain of sixteenth-notes. The piece is dedicated to the pianist Nicolas Richter, an early exponent of Stravinsky's music. The third Etude is a smoothly rippling 6/8 Andantino in E minor. The final Vivo in F sharp sets legato against staccato in a whirring 4/4. These last two Etudes are dedicated respectively to Andrey and Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, the sons of Nicolai, who was Stravinsky's teacher.
Stravinsky's keyboard muse really began to get cranked up during and just after World War I. Stravinsky, isolated in Switzerland, turned to simpler forms, many of them based on folk and popular sources. Again this was not only a matter of practicality but stemmed from a deeply rooted distrust of conventional and overblown romanticism. Stravinsky abruptly scales his work down from the giant forces of Le Sacre du printemps to the dry aphoristic wit of L'Histoire du soldat. There are "occasional" keyboard works—a lost Valse des fleurs (shades of Tchaikovsky) for two pianos, two sets of "easy pieces" for piano duet, a Souvenir d'une marche boche and Valse pour les enfants. These is even a Study for Pianola (Stravinsky later "recorded" a number of his works on the player-piano).
L'Histoire du soldat also introduces new notes and rhythms into Stravinsky's music—notably those of American ragtime. Let us quote the master: "My knowledge of jazz was derived exclusively from copies of sheet music, and as I had never actually heard any of the music performed, I borrowed its rhythmic style not as played, but as written. I could imagine jazz sound, however, or so I like to think. Jazz meant, in any case, a wholly new sound in my music, and L'Histoire marks my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered."
Stravinsky was not the first "serious" composer to use ragtime—Ives had introduced it into many of his works a decade before—but he was probably the first to transplant it into European music and thus begin to define a rebellious post-war spirit of the '20s. The sketch of Ragtime was finished at Morges, Switzerland, on March 21, 1918; the eleven-instrument version was completed at the exact moment of the Armistice—November 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. The work, which is dedicated to Mme. Eugenia Errazuriz, was published in 1919 in both instrumental and piano versions. The latter edition boasts a cover drawing of two musicians, executed in a single continuous line by Stravinsky's sometime collaborator, Pablo Picasso. The work is in a similarly steady, syncopated line; Stravinsky considered it as a stylization of a popular dance form comparable to what older composers had done for the minuet or the waltz. None of this quite accounts for the brashness of the work.
The Piano-Rag-music, written at Morges a year later, strikes an even more ferocious, nose-thumbing note. Rather improbably, it is dedicated to Artur Rubinstein and had its first performances in a series of all-Stravinsky programs in Lausanne, Zurich, and Geneva at the hands of Jose Iturbi. The Piano-Rag-music is more complex (it has many changes of meter and texture) , freer (bar-lines are omitted in several places) , and more pianistic than its predecessor. It is a more abstract, more "composed" piece and one that is more obviously designed to overwhelm—a miniature Sacre rag pounded out on a barroom piano.
Les Cinq Doigts, children's pieces on five notes, Three Movements f rom"Petrouchka," the final version of Les Noces for pianos and percussion, and the Concerto for piano and winds open the '20s, Stravinsky's major keyboard period. The Piano Sonata was composed at Biarritz and Nice in 1924 and is dedicated to the Princess Edmond de Polignac, the famous American-born patroness of music. It was played by the composer at the Donaueschingen Festival in July of 1925 and, in September of that year, at the festivalof the International Society for Contemporary Music at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. The work is in a full-blown, etched, "neoclassical" idiom. The C-major first movement runs on in continuous triplets that fail only at a few brief points of cadence. The second movement, an Adagietto in A flat, is an old-fashioned arioso with florid right-hand lines over soft staccato bass. The last movement is another perpetual-motion machine—running sixteenth-notes in E major. The counterpoint is Bachian (well, sort of) and the piece rounds itself out nicely with references to the earlier movements.
Early in 1925, Stravinsky made his first American tour and was invited to record some of his music. Typically, he returned home (at this point, Nice) with the idea of a new piano piece, each movement of which would fit a 78-rpm record side. The Serenade in A was his first work after the Sonata, but its soft neo-classicism is very different from the hard outlines of its predecessor. The title Serenade and the movement headings Hymne, Romanza, Rondoletto, and Cadenza finala (as the fractured Italian of the original has it), along with Stravinsky's own statements about the piece, suggest an evocation of a different aspect of the 18th century—fêtes galantes, aristocratic patrons, garden music, a Watteau harlequin with guitar re-interpreted by Picasso. Yet, curiously enough, the music itself often evokes not so much an 18th-century idyllic out-of-doors mood as 19th-century potted plants—in short, the salon. Classical and early-Romantic keyboard tradition was carried forward in the genteel sentimentalities of late-19th-century salon music. The tradition of the keyboard morceau, the little character piece in a simple closed form, was particularly strong in the Franco-Russian musical orbit (Tchaikovsky was a master of the idiom) and was a familiar part of Stravinsky's youth. It crops up often in his later music—in combination with Baroque, Classical, and 20th-century elements. Obviously "neo-classicism" is something far more than a nostalgic "return" to any particular past—something new in which, as in the parallel cases of T. S. Eliot and Picasso, a larger sense of the past and of "tradition" becomes firmly a part of the present.
The Serenade is an excellent example of this and is perhaps Stravinsky's most remarkable keyboard work. The "in A" is important. Unlike the movements of the Sonata, which are in disparate keys and form a kind of composite tonality, the four pieces of the Serenade all center on A, not a key in the old sense but a center of Stravinskian polarity. The first movement with its rocking 6/8 and its strong emphasis on a "modal" B flat, the Romanza with its opening and closing cadenza and accompanied mixed-mode arioso, and the busy, pulsing, A-major motor of the Rondoletto all end up with open A strings which are not struck but vibrate sympathetically with overtones. Only the Cadenza finala with its flowing parallel chords and continuous eighth-note motion resolves on a fully-sounded A.
In 1928/29, Stravinsky wrote his Capriccio for piano and orchestra, the last work designed for his own solo performance. The piano continues to play an important role in many later works, and there is one more composition for piano and orchestra—the serial Movements of 1959—but there are no more major solo works. However, there are two small occasional pieces from Stravinsky's American period which were issued in piano as well as instrumental versions. These are both rather amusing attempts by Stravinsky to adapt his personal style to a popular "American" idiom. These pieces can be viewed as Gebrauchsmusik in line with the popularizing spirit of the time and/or as potboilers. Tile Tango, composed in Hollywood in 1940, was certainly intended as a popular number. There were even plans at one time to issue it in a dance-band orchestration and as a pop song. The first orchestration was even by an arranger, although later Stravinsky did his own instrumentation. However, the clumpy piano version is indubitably the original, outdoing even Kurt Weill in its almost savage awkwardness and bite. The equally hilarious Circus Polka was commissioned by the Ringling Brothers for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Balanchine was asked to choreograph a "ballet of the elephants" featuring Modoc, premiere elephant ballerina, and forty-nine members of the Corps des Eléphants all dressed in ballet tutus! Stravinsky, when told the work was to be danced by elephants, is said to have asked, "How old?" "Young," he was told. "If they are very young, I'll do it," he answered; hence the Circus Polka "for a young elephant." One unsympathetic critic claimed that Stravinsky's music "robbed [the elephants- of their feeling of security and confidence in the world about them." Nevertheless this rather odd contribution to culture was performed no fewer than 425 times. There are versions of the music for band, orchestra, and piano, and, although the piano version is described as "a reduction by the composer," it undoubtedly came first, corresponding to the original sketch of February, 1942. No further comment is needed except to point out that the climax of the piece is formed by a bouncy polka rhythm improbably accompanied by Schubert's Marche militaire.
Canadian Clarinetist James Campbell has performed successful recital tours of France, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Canada, and has appeared numerous times on C.B.C. Radio and Television, including twice with famed pianist Glenn Gould. Born in 1949, Campbell graduated with first class honors from the University of Toronto in 1971, having studied clarinet there with Abraham Galper. From 1971 through 1973, he studied in Paris with Yona Ettlinger, and in the summers of 1970 and 1971 he studied clarinet with Mitchell Lurie at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. He won first prize in the 1971 Canadian Broadcasting Co. Talent Festival and the 1971 Jeunesses Musicale International Clarinet Competition in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
John York was born in 1949 in Eastbourne, Sussex, England. In 1956 he gained two scholarships to Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. While there, he won the Silver Medal and Beethoven prize, and graduated in 1971 with three performance diplomas and Bachelor of Music degree. He then won the French Government Scholarship to study with Jacques Fevrier in Paris, and in 1972 won a scholarship to study in Vienna with Dieter Weber. He has given concerts throughout France and in 1973 won the first prize in the prestigious Debussy International Competition in Paris. About his professional London debut in 1974, the Daily Telegraph said "here total quality, phrasing, and significance were happily united into something that could only be described as exactly right".
Track List:
Francis Poulenc, Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1962): 13:03
Allegro tristamente: 5:03
Romanza: 4:50
Allegro con fuoco: 3:02
Paul Jeanjean, Carnival of Venice (Theme and Variations): 4:50
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Studies in English Folk-Song: 3:48
Lento: 1:27
Adagio: 1:26
Allegro vivace: :44
Alban Berg, Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5: 7:40
Robert Schumann, Fantasy Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 73: 9:40
This first volume of the now legendary Lacy/Waldron duets in the '80s is a double CD, and so is the second. There are also at least two studio recordings from Paris issued by RCA/Bluebird from the same time period and two other live Lacy/Waldron duets on Hat. Are these cats just good pals who like to play together? This is, of course, only partially true and these recordings are the evidence. This pair thinks—at least musically—with a likemindedness that is uncanny. Whether Lacy and Waldron are approaching the work of Thelonious Monk—whose compositions they chose to start their sets with here—or their own works, the emphasis on stating melodic ideas in tandem with harmonic invention is prominent. In the swinging aspect of these duets there is braininess, and likewise in the deeper improvisations there is a tendency to root for melodic invention to provide balance. And that's what is achieved in these glorious sides: balance. Like the Tao, neither man approaches music to be anything other than what it is: the organization of sound, perfect conceptually, and with the proper chops and surrender to the muse, perfect musically. This is evidenced best in the two very different readings here of Monk's "'Round Midnight," one from each man's point of departure in terms of taking apart melody and mode until what is left are painterly, emotional clusters of timbres that still hold the composer's intentions in the forefront—though the tune has been extended and redesigned exponentially. When Lacy moves the entire structure up and octave and Waldron plays both harmony and rhythm, the inner beauty of Monk's character—and what he heard in Gershwin and Harold Arlen songs—becomes evident. In Waldron's "Snake Out," an exercise written particularly for this duet, the counterpoint gets knottier and gnarled and still comes out swinging. The listening is on the intense side, and neither man speaks with anything but a respectful economy—these guys play only what the music calls for, and no more. Waldron's soloing here reflects his kinship with Herbie Nichols: He is a technician in the best sense of the word and possesses a deep lyricism that informs his every key strike. His subtlety is breathtaking. Frank O'Hara wrote in the poem The Day Lady Died that "Mal Waldron whispered across the keyboard," and he does no matter what he's playing. This calls Lacy in from his outer reaches and brings his own sense of melodic genius to the fore. And both men have deep commitments to the jazz root-bed: blues. Entwined on two Monk tunes, two by Lacy, and six by Waldron (there are two versions of "Snake Out" here as well), Lacy and Waldron display what so few duets in jazz history have been able to conjure: true synchronicity. This is a wonderfully gratifying set; one only wishes she or he could have been there.—Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
One of those forgotten minor gems by Beethoven. Long out of print and no complete recording by anyone currently available. The Musical Heritage Society had a penchant for releasing stuff like this. Sadly many of their older recordings have never been re-issued.
Liner Notes:
In a letter dated March, 1819, to his close friend Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven, in speaking of the recently completed monumental Hammerklavier Sonata, wrote, "The Sonata was composed under distressful circumstances, for it is hard to write almost for the sake of bread alone, and to this pass I have come." Indeed, in almost all the Beethoven letters of this period, one comes across the same complaint in various forms; namely, that the composer was compelled to do a lot of "scribbling" for the sake of money in order to procure leisure for great works. In addition to the hackwork, some of the "distressful circumstances" mentioned above included the tragically drawn-out legal suit Beethoven was bringing against his widowed sister-in-law in order to gain custody of his nephew Karl. Admirers of the composer's genius are rarely surprised, therefore, at the outbursts of demonic strength exhibited in some of the major works of the 1818-23 period: it is almost as if Beethoven were seeking some sort of heroic release from the pitiful circumstances of his private life.
And yet, a selfish posterity is grateful for the pitiful circumstances which compelled Beethoven to seek release in his art. It is even grateful that the composer had "to write almost for the sake of bread alone," for to the group of hackwork "scribblings" dating from this period we owe one of Beethoven's most charming and uncharacteristic works, the Ten Varied Themes for Pianoforte with optional accompaniment of flute or violin, Op. 107. The history of this delicious masterpiece in small is as follows:
On January 1, 1816, Beethoven's English publisher George Thomson wrote the composer and asked him to send him some specimen airs from Germany, Poland, Russia, the Tyrol, Venice, and Spain. Previously, Beethoven had done some work on selected British airs for Thomson and this had stimulated his interest in this particular branch of music. Thus had the idea come into being of some arrangements for trio of the folksongs of various nationalities. Beethoven was delighted with Thomson's request and on the following July 8th, sent him eighteen such airs, following this up shortly afterwards with one more.
According to C. B. Oldman ("Beethoven's Variations on National Themes: Their Composition and First Publication," Music Review, XII, 1951, pp. 45-51—summarized as one of Elliot Forbes' emendations to the masterly Thayer biography, Vol. II, p. 716), Thomson's subsequent request that Beethoven construct six potpourri overtures "for the pianoforte with these melodies as a basis" was humorously rejected by the composer. A later request from another publisher, Birchall, for "variations for favorite English, Scottish, and Irish airs," also came to nothing. Finally, on June 25, 1817, Thomson offered 72 ducats for variations (not more than eight) on any twelve of the airs "in an agreeable style and not too difficult."
When Beethoven finally answered (on February 21, 1818), it was with a counter-proposal that he compose twelve themes with variations either separately or simultaneously with twelve potpourri overtures, for the sum of 224 ducats.
Thomson's reply was to the effect that the composer could choose the majority of his themes from the Scottish airs which he already had harmonized and add a flute part ad libitum to the accompaniment. The publisher added, rather naively: And it would be quite desirable if you wrote the variations in a style that is familiar and easy and a bit brilliant, so that the majority of our ladies may play them and relish them." Whatever Beethoven may have thought of his publisher's advice, we know from the music that he complied with Thomson's requests to the letter, composing in all sixteen Themes and Variations on folk-song material. According to Thayer, six of them were published by Artaria in Vienna (Op. 105) and the other ten by Simrock in Bonn. (Op. 107).
In 1941, Breitkopf and Härtel brought out the numbers of Op. 107 in a rather expensive five-volume set (2 themes apiece). This is to be regretted, as the interested student, listener, and/or performer has no alternative, if he wishes to obtain the work, but to acquire Volume 19 of the Breitkopf Complete Works or the separate Breitkopf edition (which, incidentally, is difficult to get hold of). Possibly this accounts for the relative neglect which Beethoven's folk-song potpourris have been subjected to since their initial appearance. As was mentioned earlier, Op. 107 is a lovely and delightful work, made doubly interesting by the massive opus (the Hammerklavier) which it chronologically follows. In other words, it is fascinating to compare the piano writing, the emotional and technical resources of the folk-song potpourris to the deliberate aesthetic of the flawed masterpiece composed almost simultaneously with them. In the Hammerklavier, Beethoven, as had previously been the case with the Eroica Symphony, consciously tried to break with his artistic past and create something grander, more stirring, more resourceful than he had hitherto produced. Thus, to a friend who told the composer early in 1818 how moved he had been by a performance of the youthful Septet, Op. 20, Beethoven replied ". . . at that time [i.e. the year Op. 20 first appeared] I scarcely knew how to compose. Now [with the production of Op. 106] I am much more knowledgable." (!) One is reminded of Beethoven's remark after the composition of the great C sharp minor String Quartet: "Thank God there is less a lack of fancy than before!"
Thank God, too, that he saw fit to "relax" artistically, so to speak, after his most ambitious creations. To this "fancy" we owe the brilliant piano writing, the lovely flute/violin embellishments, the daring (extremely so) harmonic touches to be found in the Ten Varied Themes. Of the three versions in which the work may be found —piano solo, piano with violin or flute accompaniment—this writer prefers the one recorded here, as the piano/ flute combination generally called forth Beethoven's most exquisite coloristic experiments. For example, the careful listener should pay particular attention to the alternations of B Flat/C Flat in the opening variation of the ninth set and to the later alternations of FAG Flat in the same movement. The crowning variation of the entire work is unquestionably the penultimate one, which contains florid piano writing (Adagio espressivo) comparable to the great variation sets that followed: namely, the slow movements of Opp. 109, 111, and the Variations Nos. 29-31 of the Diabelli set. Altogether, an unjustly neglected representative of the composer's "unbuttoned" (the word is Beethoven's own) artistic moods.
MARK GANTT
Credits:
Warren Thew, Piano
Raymond Meylan, Flute
Track List:
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - I Air Tyrolian
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - II Air Ecossais
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - III Air de la Petite Russie
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - IV Air Ecossais
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - V Air Tyrolian
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - VI Air Ecossais
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - VII Air Russe
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - VIII Air Ecossais
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - IX Air Ecossais
10 Varied Themes for Flute and Piano - X Air Ecossais
"Antonín Kubálek was born in Libkovice, Czechoslovakia, in 1935 and is one of the most talented Czech pianists of today. He received his early music education at the Prague Conservatory of Music and the Prague Academy of Music was active as a pianist and teacher in Czechoslovakia since 1959. Mr. Kubalek toured Rumania (1958) Hungary (1959) Poland (1967) Germany (1968) and has recorded in Bucharest, Bratislava, Plzen, Ostrava and Prague, as well as for the Supraphon label.
"Like many other Czech artists and musicians, he left his native country in 1968 with his wife and two children and settled in Toronto. Since coming to Canada, he has been active as a teacher, soloist and accompanist on CBC Radio and CBC T.V. and has been heard in concert in many parts of the country. He was soloist with the Toronto Symphony in 1968 and 1972.
I would like to quote the music critic Jaromir Kriz of the Prague Music Magazine, who wrote this account of Antonín Kubáleks' performance of the Suite (1922) by Paul Hindemith. "It was profoundly and sensitively perceived musical expression, that could have hardly been developed by another pianist. We heard music of utmost perfection, beauty and breadth of sound".
"I believe that Antonín Kubálek is truly a gifted pianist and musician who we will hear a great deal from in years to come."
Karel Ancerl Conductor & Musical Director Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Suite, op. 26 Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
Paul Hindemith came to artistic maturity in the disillusioned and unsettled society of Germany in the 1920's. Composers were turning away from the lavish introspection and effusive outpourings of Mahler and Strauss, and were replacing them with cynicism and the ridiculous, with satire and the grotesque. This same period saw the growth of the neo-classical movement, with its simple forms, direct musical statement, and open textures. The new style suited the instincts of the young Hindemith whose early work was already distinguished by the contrapuntal ingenuity and whimsy which were lifelong trademarks of his work. The early works, however, also reflect the harshness of the German artistic outlook of the 1920's, as evident in the one-act Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murder, Hope of Women), with a text by the painter Oskar Kokoschka, or Melancholie, for contralto and string quartet, words by Christian Morgenstern. From this period dates the Suite op. 26 for piano (1922).
Like its early baroque models, the Suite is a series of stylized dance movements. But the dances have none of the charm and elegance of earlier suites, for here is wry and often bitter satire.
I Marsch — A mockery of a march, with a wandering sense of tonality.
II Shimmy — The shimmy was a popular American dance which was introduced towards the end of World War I.
III Nachtstück — This nocturne serves as an intermezzo at the mid-point of the Suite. The jazz influences are still apparent, even under a Schumanesque guise.
IV Boston — The "Boston" was current during the period c. 1917-1935 and was a jazz piano style characterized by accented bass figures. This angular, syncopated Waltz movement is interrupted by a long recitative passage.
V Ragtime — To "rag" a tune was to syncopate it, and the term ragtime came to signify the "hot" style of early jazz. It is a flamboyant and delirious finale to the Suite. Hindemith offered the following directions on the manner of its performance:
"Take no notice of what you learned in Piano School.
Do not consider long whether you must strike the d-sharp with the fourth or the sixth (sic) finger.
Play the piece very wildly, but keep very strictly in rhythm, like a machine.
Consider the piano here as an interesting kind of percussion instrument and handle it accordingly."
Vmlhach (In the Mist)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
Andante Andantino
Molto Adagio Presto
Janáček spent much of his life as a little known provincial musician in his native district of Moravia. He was over 40 before a significant work appeared, and it was not until 1916, when he was 62, that the opera Jenufa brought him international fame. This and five or six other operas, in which he reached his greatest stature, have secured a continuing place for him in the, theatre, but his output in other forms was slender and is little known. There are only a few piano pieces, including a Theme and Variations (1880) and a Sonata (1905). In the Mist (1912) is a four-movement suite composed in the grand tradition of late 19th century piano writing, with a personal modal sense which perhaps recalls the music of Janáček's youth in Moravia. Despite the title of the composition, there is no apparent programmatic intent.
The third movement sounds like pure folk-song, but it is an original piece which recreates the sense and mood of folk-music. The Finale is very free and rhapsodic, suggesting an improvisation, and briefly alludes to a motiv from the preceding movement.
Etude in F
Polka in A
Etude in F Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959)
Martinů was born in eastern Bohemia. He grew up in the nationalist movement of his country, had a dislike of formal training, embraced the neo-classicism of the 1920's, and lived much of his creative life abroad while remaining attached to his national origins. In 1923 he left Czechoslovakia and settled in Paris where he remained until 1940, when he left for the U.S.A.
His compositional output was vast — it included at least twenty works for the stage, six symphonies, about twenty concerto style works for various instruments, and some fifty chamber works. Martinů developed a distinctive personal style derived from Moravian folk-music, a classical concern for clarity of texture and form, and a romantic inclination.
In 1945 he wrote three books of Etudes and Polkas for piano. The three played here are the last of Book III and demonstrate the o extremely effective idiomatic piano style of Martinů, and his romantic musical disposition. The first of the Etudes is a study in arpeggio figures, and the second is a study in chords and irregular rhythms. They are separated by a gentle and sophisticated polka.
Notes by Carl Morey Cover painting by Florence Mahon
Track List:
PAUL HINDEMITH/1895-1963
"1922" Suite for Piano/1922
I. March
II. Shimmy.
III. Nachtstück
IV. Boston
V. Ragtime
Publisher: B. Schott's Söhne, Mainz, West Germany.
LEOŠ JANÁČEK/1854-1928
"In the Mist"/1912
I. Andante
II. Molto Adagio
III. Andantino
IV. Presto
Publisher: Hudební Matice, Prague 1924, Czechoslovakia.
BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ/1890-1959
"Etudes and Polkas" Book III/1945
Dave Catney's second recording, considered by many to be his best. Had he not died of AIDS in 1994 he would certainly have produced many more fine recordings. I posted his first recording a while back, First Flight (1990).
