| marilyn
nonken _ repertoire | 2006-2007
Milton Babbitt
Partitions (1957) Post-Partitions (1966) Allegro
Penseroso (1999)
Chris Bailey Out of (2006)
National
Anthem (2006)
written for Marilyn Nonken
written for Marilyn Nonken
Tom Beyer New Work (2008)
Notations (1945)
One5 (1990) 4'33" (1952)
written for Marilyn Nonken
written for Marilyn Nonken
US premiere performed by Marilyn Nonken
written for Marilyn Nonken
Echoes'
White Veil (1996)
A Glimpse Retraced (1999) Trespass (2005)
reviews "The Seeds
of Love" [from English Country-Tunes] (1976)
Terrekeme (1981/90)
My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose (1990) Folklore II
(1994)
More Gershwin
(1998)
North
American Spirituals: Chapter 2, Book 2, The History
of Photography in Sound (1998)
Verdi Transcriptions,
Book III (2005)
with tape
written for Marilyn Nonken The Persistence of Light (2006)
Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators (1993)
Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings (1995)
recording on New World Records 80535-2
Mode de valeurs et d'intensites (1949) Catalogue d’Oiseaux, v. VII Complete Piano Works
US premiere performed by Marilyn Nonken Estuaire (1972) Territoires de l'oubli (1977) Cloches d'adieu, et un sourire (in memoriam O. Messiaen) (1992) La Mandragore
(1993)
Les travaux
et les jours (2003)
recording on Metier MSVCD9209
written for Marilyn Nonken
written for Marilyn Nonken recording on New World Records (formerly CRI 877 - order) mp3 | real audio | reviews
with orchestra written for Marilyn Nonken Etudes: E-machines
(1988)*
click on titles for sound files * recording
on New World Records (formerly
CRI 820)
with chamber orchestra, 6-channel computer processed sound
German Premiere performed by Marilyn Nonken
written for Marilyn Nonken
Three Pieces
(1894)
Study in Mixed Accents (1930) Morton Subotnick
for piano and live electronics
Beth Wiemann
for piano, electronics, and video
Milton Babbitt: Allegro Penseroso Mr. Babbitt was represented by...the premiere of a work that Ms. Nonken commissioned for the concert, 'Allegro Penseroso' (1999). [It is a] witty, nuanced work that makes extreme technical demands. Ms. Nonken was not only equal to them, but more crucially, she clarified the conversational flow within these abstract works. In Mr. Babbitt's music, that single element makes the difference between an involving performance and a distantly abstract one. [ complete review ]
10-20-99 The program began with [Barraque's] Sonata for piano, played by Marilyn Nonken in a performance that was unusually but persuasively light in texture and skipping in motion. Perhaps too much has been made of what is heavy and oppressed in the work's three-quarter-hour progress. For Ms. Nonken, it is also fantastical, and it's just as intense that way, with a sharp glint in its staccato chords, a clear sense of the churning harmony in the most strictly determined sections and a nice scaling of tempos, so that one section bounces out of another. The silences of the latter part were duly ominous, but the music maintained the possibility of new adventure. The last note, instead of being the final nail in the coffin, was a bright point of light and promise.
11-22-00
11-16-00
11-21-00 Ms. Nonken, a noted advocate of 20th-century music, has been on tour with two programs of formidably complex atonal and 12-tone music: the complete solo piano works of Arnold Schoenberg and the complete solo piano works of Pierre Boulez.... Hearing her perform these works in concert is inspiring.... Mr. Boulez's music must at least seem authentic, gnarly and awesome. From the first work, "12 Notations" (1945), Ms. Nonken captured those qualities, as well as the music's delicacy and refinement.... Achieving continuity is a challenge in the Sonata No. 1 (1946) and the daunting 30-minute Sonata No. 2 (1947-48). Both works evolve in fits and starts in which splattering volleys of pitches and steely chords are followed by flickering, ethereal figurations. Ms. Nonken brought impressive dramatic cogency to these works, as well as to the Sonata No. 3 (1955-57), which can seem like a series of disconnected, meterless gestures.... When she concluded the program with the short "Incises" (1994), a sort of Boulezian answer to the Prokofiev Toccata, it was as if we were hearing some favorite old thing.
3-20-02
2-21-05 The Dallapiccola, written for his daughter's eighth birthday, is formally precise, more related to Baroque composers (as Nonken describes in her helpfully to-the-point program notes). Its eleven sections use twelve-tone technique, somehow more chastely deployed, and in interesting contrast to the Schoenberg of forty years earlier. (Perhaps he didn't want to go overboard on his daughter’s special day.) Again, Nonken’s technique was clean, yet warmly inviting. [ complete review ]
4-04
4-17-91
2-22-91
Dench's "passing bells: night" (2005) was described as a musical response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which should not be held against it. This is neither anguished threnody nor jingoistic march, and while it may have been inspired by horrors, it does not exploit them. Rather "passing bells: night" is a sustained meditation, throughout which a deep, moist tintinnabulation resounds. Nonken made the most of its dark poetry. [ complete review ]
2-21-05
1-24-05 "Spleen" is an electrifying piece that uses the extremes of the keyboard, often splashily, and demands the kind of energy and assurance that has become Ms. Nonken's trademark.
12-14-01 The performers, all excellent, included painist Marilyn Nonken, the soloist in Mr. Eckardt's ["A Glimpse Retraced"].
4-14-99 Ms. Nonken gave this music, which is difficult in every way that music can be difficult, every possible advantage. Her strong technique made even the knottiest rhythms and chords clear.
1-30-01
5-15-98 Not just in length but also in beauteous accessibility, "Triadic Memories" is a less daunting piece than the big quartet. That doesn't mean it's less important; beauty can be its own reward. Ms. Nonken played it with a relaxed, almost rubber-wristed calm, caressing the keys without losing rhythmic definition. A lovely performance of a lovely piece.
10-29-03
11-03 Nonken's performances, which stressed lyricism, abounded in color and nuance, made convincing contextual and rhythmic sense of the sudden storms of sound and the prolonged buffers of silence, and brought clarity and direction to the sometimes self-obfuscating complexity of Finnissy's textures. [ complete review ]
10-31-00
10-17-00 In ''Kemp's Morris,'' the composer has the pianist wear bells on the wrist, a variant of the Morris dancing tradition of wearing them on the legs. Nonken's attention to the choreography of her hands added that extra measure of control that elevated it beyond mere effect or affectation. [ complete review ]
10-31-00
10-17-00 Marilyn Nonken, the pianist, furthered the impression of grace, playing [Finnissy's music] so smoothly that even when the music fragmented it remained essentially lyrical, and never, to use an adjective too often applied to contemporary music, "spiky." In "Kemp's Morris," she strapped bells to her hands (echoing those on the legs of a Morris dancer) and ended with gentle tinkling circlings of her hands above the keyboard, moving into the realm of choreography.
10-12-04
10-31-04 "Tombeau de Messiaen" [was] played by the splendid young pianist Marilyn Nonken.
11-17-99
4-00 You
could tolerate not hearing Ives's "Concord" Sonata too often -- oddly few
pianists offer it -- if every performance were as fresh, as inviting, as
cogent and as delectable in sound and gesture as Marilyn Nonken's at Miller
Theater on Thursday evening.
Ms. Nonken
is a pianist from music's leading edge, associated with new works and with
pieces whose challenges have withstood the last half century.... "Concord,"
for her, is an old friend and a classic, and she made it sound as fluent
as Schubert if, like Schubert, prone to eddies and strangenesses in the
musical flow. Her dominant
qualities would be advantages in any music: lightness in attack, clarity
of texture, singing lines (and singing chords), variety of nuance, certainty
in defining climaxes and in moving toward or away from them, a sense that
the end of a movement must matter, as witness her deft conclusion to a
brilliant account, at once fantastical and purposeful, of the "Hawthorne"
movement, or her way of making the disintegration at the end of "Thoreau"
secure and affirmative. That last moment,
where the music drifts away (or, one might say after this performance,
drifts here), was special partly because its previous history had been
persuasively outlined in the appearances of its underlying hymn tune in
each of the previous movements. In the "Alcotts" the culminating entry
of the hymn had been exalted. [ complete
review ]
10-17-00 All that said, and many faults of construction forgiven, there is genuine majesty in the "Concord" Sonata, and nobody else, in my experience, has brought it out so convincingly as Nonken. Her secret, I think, lies in her steadfast refusal to italicize Ives's modernism. Other pianists, impressed by the fact that the composer was messing around with tone clusters, polytonality and long passages of unremitting dissonance early on, treat these innovations as the central fact in Ives, belaboring them with the single-mindedness of a dog with a squirrel in its mouth. Nonken recognizes Ives's experiments as part of a whole, and not necessarily the most interesting part, either. On a purely artistic level, invention is much overrated: If it were all that mattered, Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Edison would be ranked as great filmmakers. What Nonken emphasized in the "Concord" were lyricism, continuity and organic structure, and for once, the piece held together as a work of art, rather than as a mere glossary of effects. In her hands, the close of the "Emerson" movement, in particular, sounded like great music by anyone's standards. [ complete review ]
2-21-05
3-9-05
10-31-00 Making short work of this complexity, Nonken more than proved her mettle by playing expert tour guide, and the results were scintillating. She was especially effective in the contrasts between crunchingly dense pages that abruptly disappear and in their wake are replaced by wispy soliloquies. As she raced around the keyboard, occasionally pausing for a hymn here and there, some might say this is Ives at his most maddeningly disorganized, but I find this piece exhilarating. It is also exhilarating watching a star pianist perform it, since it is horrendously difficult to play -- not only for "getting all the notes" but also in the stamina required. I especially loved watching Nonken's athletic agility in the second and third movements, Hawthorne and The Alcotts. And she did a beautiful job with Ives' lone special effect: a wooden block used to depress a group of keys simultaneously ? no doubt avant garde in 1911. The result, a softly shimmering pulse in the right hand as the left offered a fluid counterpoint, was mesmerizing and at just the right volume level. [ complete review ]
4-04 The sonata is divided into four movements named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amos Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau, all major figures in the American Transcendental movement. Ives wove bits of hymn tunes and folk melodies into the piece, along with a little Beethoven and a pealing church bell. Nonken brought lovely ringing, warm sounds to the hymn tunes embedded in the piece, spinning off in a heartbeat into strident, surging lines. She brought a rhythmic discipline to the piece that underscored how tied Ives was to the conventions of meter, despite his stretches away from conventional tonality.
10-31-04 Jarvinen's "Four Rosicrucian Preludes" proved a set of lovely, straightforward proclamations, in what the composer described as the style of Erik Satie. Their musical language is mostly consonant, their rhythms stately, their mood alternately teasing and genuinely touching. [ complete review ]
2-21-05 In the very different world of Lucier, Ms. Nonken was thoroughly absorbing. His piece depends on interactions between the piano's sound and two pure electronic tones, which move very slowly away from the middle of the keyboard in opposite directions and back again. As they track across what the pianist has just played, they seem to pick up the sound and bend it or create acoustic beats with it. The piano changes in front of your ears, as much as it does when this excellent performer sweeps through Schoenberg. [ complete review ]
7-22-98 Marilyn Nonken played the piano with remarkable clarity...[and] gave an assured, crystalline account...a pointillistic abstract essay full of extremes in range, dynamics, and timbre.
4-14-94
Summer 2000
4-04 [Ms.
Nonken's] program opened with Tristan Murail's "Les Travaux et les Jours,"
written in 2003. Constructed in nine vignettes, the piece is free of the
restrictions of tonality and meter.
The piece's
second vignette, or miniature, for instance, plays with the decay of sound.
Chords are struck and held, the sound diminishing and thinning to nearly
nothing before another chord is struck. The movement becomes increasingly
urgent and emphatic. The piece demands
pointed dissonant chords, ethereal, transparent sounds and a wealth of
colors in between - all of which Nonken supplied with complete technical
command and musical conviction.
10-31-04 was her luminous recital Sunday of Murail works.... Here, delicacy and urgency are juxtaposed with rare drama and hypnotic power.... Nonken's crystalline command of sonority and detail clarified the haunting elements in Murail's music. She is a supreme interpreter of new music who blends audacity with sensitivity.
11-18-03
03-03 Mr. Nichols's "Chelsea Square" flirts with tonality but keeps its distance, it nevertheless allowed Ms. Nonken to paint in more gentle, rounded hues. [ complete review ]
10-20-99 [Ms. Nonken] played music that demanded the agile, speedy fingerwork that has become her calling card.... Mr. Rakowski, whose relentlessly virtuosic "E-machines" (1988) and "Bam!" (1991) opened the program, is an unusually accomplished eclectic. Even as a listener notes a parade of influences, from Minimalism to jazz, the music somehow maintains a sense of consistency. [ complete review ]
10-20-99
10-19-99
7-99 "The People United" draws from a Chilean protest song by Sergio Ortega, a recording of which introduced Thursday's performance by Marilyn Nonken. Mr. Rzewski's music is relentless, dense, theatrical in its mood swings, fiercely difficult and long (about 50 minutes). Its language can be harmonically simple, or it can flee tonality along complex paths. On the other hand, its 36 variations are arranged in a viselike symmetry. "The People United" is like a battlefield - a place where the listener observes both exhausting violence and the cool hand of a strategist. Ms. Nonken's playing, which included Ethan Iverson's racing, wriggling cadenza, was the victory of a survivor who had met every mood and outburst head on and with style, outlasting every obstacle.
10-22-05 The Schoenberg was a canny pairing with the Ives, since compositionally they are separated by only a few years. It is difficult to imagine how a 1909 audience would have responded to these passionate unmoorings of tonality, and Nonken's illuminating reading brought out a quiet urgency. It also made a great beginning to a very well thought-out program. [ complete review ]
4-04
11-11-01
11-14-01
11-6-01
4-30-94
10-19-99 The start of the third piece certainly had a good Viennese-waltz swing, but in general Nonken seemed most committed to the music's novelty and left some of the most Romantic gestures sounding pale and lost. This was interesting. So was her intelligent underlining of motivic links that made these pieces belong together. [ complete review ]
7-22-98 Marilyn Nonken...ended the program brilliantly with the Sonata III (1987) by the Italian modernist Salvatore Sciarrino, a work that had just as much cerebral integrity as Mr. Wuorinen's [third] sonata but more fantasy and elegance. Ms. Nonken's performance also earned her whoops and cheers. It was a very encouraging night for contemporary music.
4-8-04 Marilyn Nonken gave a luminous account of [Klavierstück IX], showing how the extremes of regularity and irregularity dovetail. The chord repetitions were tense and lifted as much as they thudded; the surreptitious detail of changes in balance and resonance came through, partly thanks to the use of moderate amplification, as Mr. Stockhausen prefers. Ms. Nonken also captured the marvel of the moment when monotony gives way to the first melody, and maintained a sense of purpose through all the beautiful, wavering music that results, right up to an extraordinarily quiet but intense close that clinched the whole piece.
2-28-01
3-19-01 |