Nov 29th 2014

Bloody knuckles can sometimes inspire music

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

As any honest critic will tell you (if you can find one), writing about contemporary piano  is a long and thorny process requiring multiple hearings or multiple arguments with the composer. By definition, everything is new, and for those of us who play at the piano rather than on it, we sometimes never quite get our minds around the score.

Then along comes Carter Pann with a new CD of his keyboard music interpreted by Florida State University pianist Joel Hastings. It breaks new ground as music but also as a packaged product. In extensive program notes, Pann takes the trouble to elucidate his aims and methods behind the 16 varied, fascinating tracks on this disc, Carter Pann: The Piano’s 12 Sides (Naxos American Classics 8.559751).

Carter Pann 

Pann has found just the right technical level of analysis to render his music accessible to a broad range of listener – professional, wannabe or just music-loving. I have never seen such lucid explanatory notes. Instantly, upon reading him, one feels the contours of each piece, understands how he put his puzzle together and sometimes even grasps what inspired him to put pen to paper.

His titles can seem whimsical but actually are literal, as in The Cheese Grater, a delightful two-step piece triggered by a painful experience with a grater that left him with bloody knuckles. The bouncy structure evokes the composer hopping around the kitchen on one foot while looking for Band-Aids.

                

Pann is a composer of high repute in the United States, often performed in the Midwest, Southwest and West Coast but not so much elsewhere. His mastery of dissonance and complex Stravinskyesque rhythm places him firmly in contemporary realm. He is underexposed in Europe but I like to think he will make his way over here. His fresh approach would be welcome.

If I had to pigeon-hole him, I would call him the new Frederick Rzewski, another American composer of modernity, whimsy and originality.


Joel Hastings

On this CD, an unusual feature is Pann’s overt tribute to pianist Joel Hastings, described in the notes as possessing “huge helpings of raw piano talent, musical soul and world-class refinement in perfect combination”. The tile set, 12 Sides, was written for Hastings after a chat on the phone. These two musicians bring out the best in each other.

Perhaps the best way to show how Pann opens our mind to his work is to quote a few passages from his notes. 

Figurines --  “This piece is for the fearless musician – the pianist who is willing to control the instrument to serve his/her whim from start to finish. There is nothing elegant about the (embedded) perpetual march which serves as the centerpiece  for the work. You must push yourself to the other side (and your left hand had better be up to the task).”

Le Branle – “Composed in 12/8 time, this fast branle is a moto perpetuo wherein the direction to the performer is ‘more drive, less swagger’. As this weird motor piece pushes further and further ahead there is that sense of a brawl instead of a dance.” 

She Steals Me – “This song, subtitled intermezzo, owes some of its concepts to Schubert and Stravinski. The work is cast as a plaintive Appalachian waltz in A-flat major with occasional chorale-like proclamations.”

Grand Etude-Fantasy – “Every element of this piece is ambitious. Only a masterful pianist familiar with the quick juxtapositions found in more contemporary works can pull it off. I know I will never be able to perform this piece, and that fact fills me with frustration.”

Carter Pann and Joel Hastings have much more music in them. I look forward to further exploration of contemporary sounds from them.




For Carter Pann's web site, please click here.

For Joel Hastings web site, please click here.




     

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Feb 23rd 2014

Pierre Boulez’s brainchild from 1976, the renowned Ensemble Intercontemporain, is on the road again with a combination program of standards and some striking new sounds from the world of new music. Audiences are responding with rapture.

Jan 11th 2014
When Katia and Marielle Labèque, the French piano duo, brought their New York minimalist avant-garde show to Bordeaux recently (Jan. 10) I was afraid for them.
Jan 7th 2014

You would have to be quite a sure-footed composer to believe you could improve on something as perfect as the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.

Dec 30th 2013

Nothing clears the mind of overplayed Christmas season tunes – popularly known as earworms -- like an hour in the company of Keeril Makan’s music. His new CD, Afterglow, is as refreshing as a glass of cold Chablis.

Dec 23rd 2013

Dame Evelyn Glennie works wonders with her mallets, hammers and her bare hands in a new CD of John Corigliano’s percussion concerto – a piece that he initially hesitated to undertake for fear that it couldn’t be done. At least not to his exacting standards.

Dec 8th 2013

Alexander Tcherepnin’s piano music, just completed on last of four CDs, reflects his lifelong span of variegated composition, including his earliest creations at 15 years of age while on the run with his family from Russian revolutionaries. 

Dec 4th 2013

French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, a member of the Liszt-Chopin circle and one of the most respected piano virtuosos of his day, is back with us after decades of neglect.  The occasion for his return is the 200th anniversary of his birth, and two striking CDs o

Nov 30th 2013

The intensity of the relationship between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann has intrigued music historians for 150 years and now conductor/pianist John Axelrod has tackled the liaison with a new double CD set (Brahms Beloved, Telarc) linking them in words and music.

Nov 18th 2013

Nothing excites music lovers more than the discovery of a previously unknown composition by a dead master.  Such stories are even better if the score has been unearthed from detritus in some isolated farmhouse almost ready for the torch.

Oct 30th 2013

“Light and Shadow” at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall Saturday night was sponsored by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts, a worthy non-profit organization devoted mainly to boosting young Chinese musicians and artists.

Oct 21st 2013

The Korean-born, American-trained pianist Soyeon Kate Lee is developing rapidly as a seasoned performer with personal charm and musical intelligence, both of which were on display Sunday in a challenging program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Oct 1st 2013

Traditional classical music finally wore out its welcome with me a few years ago by endless repetition of the Top Twenty pieces on FM radio.

Sep 14th 2013

Renowned Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato makes stunning music from the simplest of instruments, stretching their sonorities to heights never previously heard on record.

Sep 6th 2013

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition ended with the results many observers had predicted, the gold medal going to a self-assured Vadym Kholodenko, 26, of Ukraine.

Sep 1st 2013

I recently became a “chance music” composer by accident – the best way. John Cage would have approved.

Jul 21st 2013

The late American composer Morton Feldman, an influential underground figure who was spurned by mainstream musicians in his lifetime, is enjoying a welcome, if belated, renaissance in the US and Europe.

Jul 19th 2013

Except for the lucky few who have the gift, students struggling to coax music out of a piano are in for a world of pain.

Jul 14th 2013

A young man from provincial Italy brought style back to the recent Van Cliburn Piano Competition with unbridled displays of joy at the keyboard and a mature artist’s mastery of the music.

Jul 3rd 2013

Alessandro Deljavan, the promising young Italian pianist who emerged as a major contender at the recent Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has decided to pull out of the Cleveland International Piano Competition just a month before it opens July 3O.

Jun 16th 2013

Young pianists who decide to go into major international competitions will need much more than musicianship from now on.