| marilyn
nonken _ american spiritual
new piano music written for marilyn nonken
ORDERING INFORMATION: CRI’s catalog has been taken over by New World Records. During the transfer process, American Spiritual may be ordered directly by making a $14 check out to Ensemble 21, Inc. and mailing it to Ensemble 21, 500 W. 111th St, #3E, New York, NY 10025. "Nonken's performances are marvels of keyboard mastery and musical command; she also brings an extraordinary quality of exploration to the music, which remains as fresh and surprising to her as it is does to us." - The Boston Globe [ entire review ] "This release is as fresh and invigorating as anything I have heard in many a moon." - Fanfare [ entire review ] "A perfect programme of late-1990s piano music.... Nonken's style, forceful and passionate but with a meticulous attention to detail, is well-served by excellent sound quality." - International Record Review [ entire review ] "Certainly Ms. Nonken is introducing a new level of performance practice into [Babbitt's] hazardous pianistic world. This piece is played with pearly tone and given elegant and secure shape without a trace of bombast. All told, this is a formidable recital by an imposing young virtuoso." - American Record Guide [ entire review ] "Hooray, modernism is not dead. Good old Milton Babbitt leads the charge, along with three young acolytes, in music that has been labeled "the new complexity." Incredible playing by Nonken." - Philadelphia City Paper (Top 10 CD of 2001) "Rare is the album that makes such strenuous demands upon the performer; rare, indeed, is the music in which the sheer physicality of effort becomes part of its raison d'etre. Nonken however, seems adept at conquering these dangerous slopes, and her performances are awe-inspiring." - Commerical Appeal [ entire review ] "Simply put, the pieces and the performance kick major butt." - Amazon.com [ entire review ] "Marilyn Nonken plays all these pieces with a remarkable technical assurance and a fine musicianship. Her technique is never in doubt and her grasp of the music is really overwhelming. This release provides for a superb anthology of recent, difficult piano works which are all well worth hearing and which repay repeated hearings" - Musicweb UK [ entire review ] "Nonken's impressive CD... pays elaborate homage...to the long and gloriously cussed history of the American avant-garde." (Performance: * * * * *, Sound: * * * *)" - BBC Music Magazine [ entire review ] "Nonken's virtuosity, unflagging energy, graceful way even with violent gestures, and utter sympathy with the uncompromising composers make the music convincing." - Milwaukee Journal Sentinal [ entire review ] "[Nonken] makes this ferociously difficult music sound fresh, alive and decidedly lyrical" - Paris Transatlantic [ entire review ] "...a triumph of interpretation.... Jason Eckardt's Echoes' White Veil requires a virtuosity and capacity to shift moods Nonken flat-out aces." - La Folia, Best of the Year [ entire review ] "Nonken plays throughout with superb clarity and accuracy." - Music & Vision [ entire review ] "Pianist Marilyn Nonken commissioned and performs these four works for solo piano, and she plays them with a great sense of touch, fluidity, and timbral control." - CDe Music [ entire review ] "...hands flying across the keyboard, Nonken follows a bewildering flurry of seemingly random notes, which fall away just as suddenly into pools of quiet introspection." - Splendid [ entire review ] "Satisfying and stimulating." - Records International [ entire review ] What the Critics Say About the Works "Jason
Eckardt's 'Echoes' White Veil' [was] played by Marilyn Nonken with virtuosity
and address. Here the first half was composed of darting, exuberant decorations
of static harmonies somewhere between Szymanowski and Luciano Berio....The
impressive second part of the piece provided a progressive stilling of
the activity, in blocks separated by silences."
"Marilyn
Nonken's annual Boston recital has become a highlight of the concert calendar;
one of New York's leading new-music pianists is now one of ours. CRI has
recently issued a fascinating recording with four major piano works that
were composed for and premiered by her. Jason Eckardt's 'Echoes' White
Veil' was written in response to a poem by W.S. Merwin; the music is characterized
by restlessness and chamelonic change -- and extreme technical difficulty.
Jeff Nichols's 'Chelsea Square' is a study in simultaneous contrasts, disjunctions,
and unexpected parallels. Michael Finnissy's 'North American Spirituals'
are reimaginings and recontextualzations of four African-American spirituals
that Sir Michael Tippett used in his oratorio 'A Child of Our Time' --
and part of what is probably the largest work written for piano, 'The History
of Photography in Sound.' 'Allegro penseroso' demonstrates that Milton
Babbitt remains as inventive in his 80s as he was in the decades before.
Nonken's performances are marvels of keyboard mastery and musical command;
she also brings an extraordinary quality of exploration to the music, which
remains as fresh and surprising to her as it is does to us."
All this needs to be said because
any of these mistaken impressions might cause you to pass this disc over
in favour of something else. Please don't. Despite its undemonstrative
and matter-of-fact presentation, this selection of four works is a perfect
programme of late-1990s piano music. Its perfection is attributable to
several factors. The works themselves are contrasting and elegantly compatible,
neatly displaying their diverse influences. As the pianist points out in
her booklet notes (they're good, too), despite his post-rock pedigree,
Eckardt's rolling and tumbling style reflects the New Complexity of Ferneyhough,
Finnissy, and Dillon, while Finnissy's own contribution here is doubly
circuitous in its derivation, in that the spiritual songs which inspired
it (and which occasionally emerge from it) were also used by Tippett in
A Child of Our Time. Anyone who has heard Finnissy's refreshingly lateral
take on Gershwin (which I reviewed on page 64 of the April 2000 issue)
will know what to expect. The other two works are equally effective, Babbitt
in particular needing no introduction.
Nonken's style, forceful and passionate
but with meticulous attention to detail, is well served by the excellent
sound quality. A nice piece of work."
In describing Jason Eckardt's "Echoes'
White Veil," Nonken refers to composers of the "New Complexity," which
is a new term to me. What an invigorating concept! Just as, in architecture,
postmodernism has evolved into a generic, suburban mess, and echt-modernism
is being reexamined by serious observers, this music of complexity appeals
more and more to those us of bored by the pabulum of so many of the neotonalists.
This is not a debate of isms. For thoughtful listeners, there is good stuff
being written in a variety of styles. But it is very refreshing to hear
new music written in a polytonal, serial framework, albeit not in a doctrinaire,
Schoenbergian manner.
Eckardt certainly does write in a
complex way, throwing out furious washes of notes, now exploding in knuckle-full
blasts of energy, then subsiding into mysterious cascades of quiet polytonality.
Jeff Nichols may use a smaller volume of notes within a given period of
time, but his music is scarcely less complex. The title of the piece "Chelsea
Square" is from a poem by Douglas Crase celebrating the unique confluence
of energies that is Manhattan. Nichols uses a variety of languages to describe
the urban polyglot, from brash, crashing flows of notes to more contemplative
washes of Impressionistic sound. His vision of urbanity is intellectual
and contemplative, but not without a measure of grit. Michael Finnissy,
in the title work, may include recognizable signposts in the form of spirituals,
including "Steal Away," "Nobody Knows the Trouble I See," "Go Down, Moses,"
and "Oh, By and By," but does so in a way that finds strength in the simple
as well as the intricate. These melodies are an embedded element of the
American voice, and Finnissy seems to acknowledge this truth by blending
his own brand of complexity with the spirituals, which flow in and out
of the polytonal fabric he has stretched over his canvas.
Milton Babbitt has been doing the
complexity thing for quite some time, and his inclusion in this youthful
grouping serves to anchor him as the godfather of the movement. This 1999
work displays the thoughtful rivers of sound that characterize Babbitt's
late style. It may be the accumulation of experience on the part of this
listener, but I found this latest piece by the American master to be a
somewhat smoother ride down the river than usual, if no less invigorating
and delightful, as Babbitt's expression becomes more concise and allows
for patterns that seem to defy the serial mode.
It is impossible to know to what
extent Nonken is faithful to the intentions of the composers. Even if I
had access to the scores, I must admit that I probably do not have the
technical ability, or patience, to judge much beyond tempo and dynamic
values. The fact that these are all new commissions bodes well for the
authenticity of the technique, of course, and there can be no question
about the stunning dexterity and deep feeling of this playing, despite
the highly advanced nature of the language. This release is as fresh and
invigorating as anything I have heard in many a moon."
Jason Eckardt (b. 1971) is the youngest
composer here who relates to the so-called "New Complexity school", and
his music has many affinities with that of Ferneyhough, Finnissy or Dillon.
His Echoes' White Veil is a fairly complex and technically taxing piece
of music. It falls roughly into two sections : the opening section is,
to say the least, hyperactive and ends with a long-reverberating chord
followed by a long pause. The second section is somewhat calmer, the music
more rarefied with many silences though with huge dynamic contrasts. The
piece is written without bar-lines and has some improvisatory character,
the whole giving the impression of a restless, sometimes violent burst
of creative energy. The music is again very taxing and Marilyn Nonken rightly
remarks that "the effort required to play the piece is an integral part
of its aesthetic". Quite an impressive achievement in its own right.
Michael Finnissy is probably one
of the best known composers in this collection. A brilliant pianist, he
has written quite extensively for his instrument, both short pieces and
large-scale ones. North American Spirituals written in 1998 for Marilyn
Nonken is the second chapter of the second book of his huge piano work
(or should I say cycle) The History of Photography in Sound which lasts
five hours and a half in performance and of which a complete performance
took place in London a few months ago. This is by far the most substantial
work here. The basic material for Finnissy's explorations consists in four
negro spirituals which were used by Michael Tippett in his oratorio A Child
of Our Time. Those who already know Finnissy's English Country Tunes or
his more recent Verdi and Gershwin arrangements will know what to expect
from the present piece. The tunes of the spirituals are deeply imbedded
in the complex, busy piano textures. Finnissy uses the original tunes as
material to be transformed in countless ways according to his own fancy.
"They dissolve into each other, are clear one moment and blurred the next,
in the distance or in close-up etc." (Geoff Hannan in Tempo No.216 April
2001). Indeed you will hardly recognize the tunes, well known as they are.
Finnissy delights in transforming them beyond recognition by splitting
them into pieces, focusing on a tiny detail and emphasizing it, by blurring
the melodic and rhythmic contours, by adding allusions to Billings and
Ives, by exploiting the full dynamic and tonal range of the piano. This
is a really impressive piece, though a quite difficult one.
Milton Babbitt is the "Grand Old
Man" here though his Allegro Penseroso, written as recently as 1999, is
a brilliant, youthful piece "concise and articulate, yet exuding boundless
energy and invention" (Marilyn Nonken). This fine work provides for a brilliant
conclusion to this absorbing recital.
Marilyn Nonken plays all these pieces
with a remarkable technical assurance and a fine musicianship. Her technique
is never in doubt and her grasp of the music is really overwhelming. This
release provides for a superb anthology of recent, difficult piano works
which are all well worth hearing and which repay repeated hearings, though
some may find that this is too much for their stomachs. I would then suggest
not to listen to this CD in one sitting but rather to hear each piece separately
several times before sitting once again through it all."
The composers, of whom Babbitt, born
in 1916, is by far the oldest, share a set of assumptions and devices:
Jagged rhythms, random and sometimes brutalizing dynamics, abrupt transitions,
extreme concision and fragmentation, submerged thematic material, enfolding
structures, a sense of improvisation and, perhaps not least as far as the
performer is concerned, extraordinary claims on the pianist's physical
abilities and mental concentration. The result is music that sounds much
alike until repeated listening reveals crucial differences.
Certainly the seemingly immortal
Babbitt proves that even in his mid-80s he is capable of turning out fresh,
vigorous, extravagantly detailed and frankly bewildering music that will
match that of any younger composer.
The piece on the album that conveys
most strenuously a quality of immediacy and improvisation is Eckardt's
Echoes' White Veil, whose title implies some of its dream-like, tentative
and mystical nature, but none of its athletic jumpiness and palpable intricacies.
Chelsea Square is "about" the juxtaposition
of a tempestuous, gestural stance and a lyrical yet dramatic mode and the
rapidly shifting alignment (or lack thereof) between them. Perhaps in this
puzzling and fruitful collaboration of effect we see the uncompassable
aura of New York. In North American Spirituals Finnissy draws on four familiar
black American tunes - Steal Away, Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Go Down,
Moses and Oh, By and By - and rings changes upon them that inspect, deconstruct,
distort and radically reassemble, all within the measures of curiosity,
respect and renewal.
One hopes that during the recording
of these pieces Nonken visited her gym, ate well, took vitamins and slept
eight hours a night. Rare is the album that makes such strenuous demands
upon the performer; rare, indeed, is the music in which the sheer physicality
of effort becomes part of its raison d'etre. Nonken however, seems adept
at conquering these dangerous slopes, and her performances are awe-inspiring."
The program opens with 'Chelsea Square'
(1999) by Jeff Nichols (b. 1957), who currently teaches at Harvard. This
is a ruminative piece that seems to develop myriad shapes out of its moody
opening phrase. Next is 'Echoes' White Veil' by Jason Eckardt (b. 1971).
Eckardt was a rock guitarist until he heard Webern. This piece could easily
be the result, pitting out-of-control frenzy with single quiet gestures
separated by long empty spaces.
Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is not
an American. His North American Spirituals (1998) is the second chapter
of the second book of his five-hour cycle, The History of Photography in
Sound. Finnissy is also a virtuoso pianist and has been associated with
the New Complexity movement in England since its inception. This work turns
out to be a stream-of-consciousness take on four well-known spirituals:
'Steal Away', 'Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen', 'Go Down, Moses', and
'Oh, By and By'. These also show up in Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child
of Our Time, so perhaps this is meant to be an homage to that influential
composer. The effect is obviously Ivesian, and I found this less interesting
and more tedious than the music of the younger composers. I'd be interested
in hearing this in the context of the entire cycle.
The program closes with a new work
by the irrepressible Milton Babbitt, 'Allegro Penseroso'. This jovial self-portrait
takes its title from John Milton's poems L'Allegro (The Cheerful Man) and
Il Penseroso (The Pensive Man) (Milton -- get it?). It's not too hard to
hear the composer himself in this spastic caricature -- the jazzy riffs,
the pompous fanfares, the breezy passes at what is left of the Chord of
Nature, the near-tunes, and the valedictory trailing-off in the highest
registral ozone. Certainly Ms Nonken is introducing a new level of performance
practice into this composer's hazardous pianistic world. This piece is
played with a pearly tone and given elegant and secure shape without a
trace of bombast.
All told, this is a formidable recital
by an imposing young virtuoso. Listeners new to this repertoire will find
Ms Nonken's notes engaging and approachable, but they should also be aware
that this music carries with it the demand for extended analytical contemplation.
Whether or not you accept that, there's no denying that it is an essential
part of the experience. One problem in the booklet: notes for the works
were given in permuted order. Serial procedures do not belong in the presentation
of program notes."
Nonken has made a notable career
of taking on the most technically and conceptually difficult music being
composed today. Her "American Spiritual" disc includes Jeff Nichols' "Chelsea
Square" (1999), Jason Eckardt's "Echoes' White Veil" (1996), Michael Finnissy's
"North American Spirituals" (1998) and Milton Babbitt's "Allegro penseroso"
(1999). All four were composed for Nonken; she is married to Eckardt.
This is difficult music, prone to
systematic obscurity on the one hand and bangy, disordered expressionism
on the other. But Nonken's virtuosity, unflagging energy, graceful way
even with violent gestures, and utter sympathy with the uncompromising
composers make the music convincing."
Chelsea Square (1999) by Jeff Nichols
(born 1957) takes its name from a poem by Douglas Crase which conjures
up an image of millennial Manhattan. The music is rather lyrical, and has
a certain stillness. Nonken, writing her own CD notes, describes it as
having a 'quirky, riddle-like structure' and says that it rewards multiple
hearings.
Jason Eckardt's Echoes' White Veil
(1996) sounds chaotic, jazzy and fragmented. It was apparently written
without barlines, and, inspired by Echoes, a prose poem by W S Merwin,
beginning 'Everything we hear is an echo', it explores the relationships
between the past, the present and the future.
In North American Spirituals (1998),
Finnissy uses the songs that Tippett featured in A Child of Our Time. These
recognisable melodies appear in fragmentary form, in an Ivesian work which
pays homage to experimentalism and black tradition in American culture.
Allegro penseroso (1999) by the ever-controversial
Milton Babbitt (born 1916) is again complex and full of energy, offering
a bewildering array of inventive ideas.
Nonken plays throughout with superb
clarity and accuracy. "
Copies may also be purchased from
Qualiton
Imports (718-937-8515). As of 12 August 2003, the following retailers
list American Spiritual as available: amazon.com,
CDe
music.
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