Music Chamber

Philip Glass (1937-) Wichita Vortex Sutra

 

John Cage (1912-1992) In a Landscape    

 

George Gershwin (1898–1937)

But not for me (arr. Finnissy)

They can't take that away from me (arr. Finnissy)

The man I love

(encore) Do It Again

 

Jane Beament has an international reputation as a contemporary music specialist. She has given more than fifty premieres and has had many works written for her. Whilst living in Philadelphia, she gave the US premiere of Spectrum, gave several performances on WFLN Radio and was director of the Quintet:Essentials concert series. She also appeared at the Tampa Bay Composers’ Forum. Jane has appeared at the Istanbul Film Festival and was a guest performer in the American Adventures Festival promoted by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. In London Jane has performed at the Wigmore Hall, Blackheath Concert Halls and St Martin’s in the Field. She has featured as concerto soloist with the Dartford Symphony Orchestra and the Blackheath String Orchestra. Most recently she appeared at the Tete-a-tete opera festival and made a live appearance on Radio 3’s In Tune programme. She has recorded the piano sonatas of David Osbon on the Music Chamber label, CDs available here for £10 each.

 

Notes on Copland’s Four Piano Blues: For a collection of pieces so short, these four choice morsels had a rather lengthy gestation: 22 years. It wasn't that Copland agonized over them, he merely wrote them at different times during his career and then assembled them into a collection in 1949, the year they were published. Lasting under 10 minutes, they impart a genuine bluesy character, showing the influence of Gershwin, Debussy, and Ravel, and for all their lightness of expression, they are fairly sober, somewhat Impressionistic pieces. Each carries a dedication and subtitle. The first piece is "For Leo Smit" (1947). Smit, not to be confused with the Dutch composer Leo Smit, was an American composer, pianist, and photographer, well known as a champion of Copland's music. He recorded the Piano Blues (4) and other Copland piano music in 1978 for CBS, in performances now available on Sony Classical. The first is subtitled "Freely poetic." The music mixes the bluesy sounds of Gershwin with a drier Debussyian character, the whole free-spirited, yet reflective in its slow tempos and dreaminess. The second piece is "For Andor Foldes" (1934). Foldes was a prominent Hungarian-born American pianist, closely associated with Bartók and his music, but also a friend of Copland. Subtitled "Soft and Languid," the music here certainly lives up to its label; that said, it is marginally livelier than its predecessor. It is also playful, especially in a few mild bursts of energy in the middle section. William Kapell is the dedicatee in the third piece, which is subtitled "Muted and Sensuous" (1948). As many are aware, Kapell was a brilliant virtuoso pianist, probably destined for a Horowitzian career had his life not been cut short in a plane crash in 1953, when he was a mere 31 years old. As the description suggests, the music is, once more, subdued and restrained, though the big chords at the outset impart an almost epic character to the mood, giving weight to much of the music. Debussy comes to mind throughout, though in a somewhat bluesy mist. The final piece, "For John Kirkpatrick" (1926), is subtitled "With Bounce." The music begins with a lively, rowdy main theme, which then yields to a dreamy, bluesy alternate theme. The material is heard again and then quietly ends. The dedicatee here, American pianist John Kirkpatrick (1905-1991), was strongly associated with the music of Charles Ives, but was also an acquaintance of Copland.

 

It was by chance that pop-minimalist icon Philip Glass and counterculture guru Allen Ginsberg met at St. Mark's bookshop in New York in 1988. Glass had just been asked to perform at a benefit for the Vietnam Veteran Theater, and asked Ginsberg to join him. At the performance, Ginsberg read his poem Wichita Vortex Sutra to music composed by Glass. The score, while clearly the product of Glass' minimalist musical language, incorporates what is for the composer a less characteristic element of chromatic inflection; this ironically nostalgic effect serves as an effective counterpoint Ginsberg's evocative commentary on postwar America. The Glass/Ginsberg collaboration on Wichita Vortex Sutra proved fruitful; the work served as the germ for their later, much acclaimed multimedia effort, Hydrogen Jukebox.

 

Fresh from achieving notoriety with his invention of the prepared piano (meaning one attached various dampers, mutes, and noisy things to the strings inside the piano to transform it from a harmonic instrument into a box of percussion sounds), Cage wrote In a Landscape for the dancer Louise Lippold in 1948. It is a companion piece to Dream, written the same year for Merce Cunningham, and uses the same compositional technique. Namely, it is limited to only a certain number of tones and depends on the use of sustained notes to make its effect. In comparison with the earlier work, though, it uses more different notes and therefore has a more expansive feeling.  Cage wrote the piece to the rhythmic structure of the dance piece as conceived first by Lippold, who gave him the counts of the dance. He credits the lack of organization that was the usual state of these lists of counts with leading him to his ideas of "structural rhythm." The tonal oddity of this piece is that all the notes are contained in two octaves. One of the two uses a mode based on B flat, while the other octave has only notes of a mode in the key of G. Shifts from one octave to another create a bitonal effect that creates a momentary impression of being out of tune, which gives In a Landscape a uniquely haunting quality.

 

"But Not for Me” was written for the musical Girl Crazy (1930) and introduced in the original production by Ginger Rogers. "They Can't Take That Away from Me" is a 1937 song introduced by Fred Astaire in the 1937 film Shall We Dance. The arranger of these pieces Michael Finnissy has taught many of the new generation of British composers at the Royal Academy of Music, the University of Sussex, and more recently as Professor of composition at the University of Southampton. He served as president of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 until 1996.

 

"The Man I Love" was part of the 1927 score for the Gershwin anti-war satire Strike Up the Band, the song was deleted from the show as well as from the 1928 hit Rosalie after tryouts. Popular torch singer Helen Morgan first made the song into a big success. “Stairway to Paradise” and “I got rhythm” both feature in Gershwin’s 1928 symphonic composition (and later 1951 film) An American in Paris.