Quiet Music (for piano), Midwest American Piano Project (Albany Records, TROY 1069)
American Record Guide, July/August 2009
This is mostly interesting new piano music by composers connected to the American Midwest, superbly played and recorded. Some of it – Joseph Dangerfield’s Two Geometric Etudes and Luke Dahn’s Downward Courses, for example – sound forbiddingly abstract in concept, but the actual sounds are enticing. The collection opens with David Karl Gompper’s 2001 Homage to WA (William Albright), an appropriately varied tribute to an eclectic composer that opens somberly with bell-like sonorities and ends rowdily with a “bluesy riff.” David Maki’s Lake Sonata is a vivid piece of tone painting, with two languid, introspective movements called ‘flowing’ and ‘floating, lonely’ followed by two aggressive romps called ‘driving, with intensity’ and ‘violent.’ Even more meditative than Maki’s opening sections, John Allemeier’s Quiet Music is an exercise in rapturous attenuation.
Stacey Barelos, a DMA student in piano and composition at the University of Wisconsin, plays with authority and poetic nuance, her beautiful tone captured vividly in this warm recording made at the University of Iowa. One of her own works, Free and Unticketed is an inventive homage to Debussy, Cowell, and other 20th Century masters yet has its own personality. “Although there are no direct quotations”, she writes in the excellent notes, “I felt as though I was still getting something for free.” Lots of composers have don’t this, of course, particularly the ones she refers to; despite the fetish for originality in the 20th Century, music is full of “unticketed” gestures; its what keeps the art flowing and alive.
Sullivan
American Record Guide, July/August 2009
This is mostly interesting new piano music by composers connected to the American Midwest, superbly played and recorded. Some of it – Joseph Dangerfield’s Two Geometric Etudes and Luke Dahn’s Downward Courses, for example – sound forbiddingly abstract in concept, but the actual sounds are enticing. The collection opens with David Karl Gompper’s 2001 Homage to WA (William Albright), an appropriately varied tribute to an eclectic composer that opens somberly with bell-like sonorities and ends rowdily with a “bluesy riff.” David Maki’s Lake Sonata is a vivid piece of tone painting, with two languid, introspective movements called ‘flowing’ and ‘floating, lonely’ followed by two aggressive romps called ‘driving, with intensity’ and ‘violent.’ Even more meditative than Maki’s opening sections, John Allemeier’s Quiet Music is an exercise in rapturous attenuation.
Stacey Barelos, a DMA student in piano and composition at the University of Wisconsin, plays with authority and poetic nuance, her beautiful tone captured vividly in this warm recording made at the University of Iowa. One of her own works, Free and Unticketed is an inventive homage to Debussy, Cowell, and other 20th Century masters yet has its own personality. “Although there are no direct quotations”, she writes in the excellent notes, “I felt as though I was still getting something for free.” Lots of composers have don’t this, of course, particularly the ones she refers to; despite the fetish for originality in the 20th Century, music is full of “unticketed” gestures; its what keeps the art flowing and alive.
Sullivan