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Piano Sonata

Composer: 
David Froom
  • "David Froom's sonata is a charged and clangorous work, intensely dramatic yet deeply formal. . . It has a truculent romanticism and a hard passion, and made a strong first impression.  It will be good to hear it again."  Tim Page, The New York Times, October 1, 1985
  • "It's a work that starts big, and stays big, almost without letup, throughout the excited first movement.  In the quiet, thoughtful second movement, dissonances are used in the service of exquisite feeling . . . The finale seems to be running as fast as it can, with a brief pause to hark back to the mood of the second movement before taking off again to a finish in climactic octaves, as if to recall the octaves with which the work began."  William Glackin, The Sacramento Bee, November 14, 1991
  • ". . . a late entry in the century's long list of big, rhetorical, dissonant Statements for piano . . . Froom has an inventive mind and a complete compositional arsenal, fully deployed in this piece.  Scott Wheeler, Fanfare Magazine, March/April 1992
 

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LOSS SONGS

Composer: 
Elizabeth Bell

Eight songs by recent and contemporary poets depicting various facets of loss: Sheep in Fog, Loss, Pyre, Amabile, Revisions, Looking at your Face, That Could Assuage Us (1 & 2). Plath, Berryman, composer, Levertov, Kinnell, Morley; All CLEARED.

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FOUR PRELUDES

Composer: 
John Lessard

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Symphony No. 4

Composer: 
Hubert Howe

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CELEBRATION for solo piano

Composer: 
Eleanor Cory

Celebration is in four movements which can be roughly described as animated, intense, abstract, and jazzy. Balance starts simply with short rocking gestures. These build up to a bass vamp overlaid with a right hand improvisation, and finally culminate in large chords and racing scales.  The end the piece slows to reminders of the simple rocking of the opening. The Innocence of the second movement is created by two hands moving naively in dyads to form tentative chords.  A fall from innocence plunges the music into grinding motion over an agitated low bass line.  A progression from the opening chords attempts to reclaim the innocence.  The struggle continues, before finally opening out into innocent dyads again. The music in Reverie, is ethereal.  Chords surround snatches of melodic material in the middle range which turn into closely voiced chords. The beginning is then repeated.

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A GATHERING: ELEVEN SONGS TO POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON

Composer: 
Frederic Goossen
1: When they come back- if blossoms do2: Like Rain it sounded till it curved3: There's a certain Slant of light4: Elijah's Wagon knew no thill5: These are the days when Birds come back6: Under the Light, yet under7: Death is the supple Suitor8: A Saucer holds a Cup9: I'll tell you how the Sun rose10: Wild Nights- Wild Nights!11: How happy is the little Stone

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BLUE TRACES

Composer: 
John Gibson

Kati Gleiser, the pianist for whom I wrote Blue Traces, told me about swimming in the ocean at night and marveling at the colorful glow cast from bioluminescent plankton. Moving your arm disturbs the plankton, and in response they set off a bluish trail of soft light. This image gave me the idea for the piece: the piano plays, and the computer creates gently glowing traces of sound. Near the end, everyone becomes more agitated, as if the swimmer were now splashing around and the plankton reacting with more excitement.

 

All the computer sound comes from live sampling of the piano performance, transformed by various kinds of granulation — a technique that can take a short sound and extend it into a long sustained note.

BLUES LOINTAINS for viola and piano

Composer: 
Quincy Porter

Introspective piece, sets the tessitura in the low C to low D string range producing the characteristic "woody" viola tone.

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MENAGERIE

Composer: 
Mark Zuckerman
About the Texts-Although virtually unknown in the United States, these poems for children are
celebrated in France, regarded in much the same way as Mother Goose Rhymes are
here. Almost all French schoolchildren are said to know La Fourmi.
While not all of the poems in this set portray their subjects with such fantastic traits as
a giant, multilingual ant, they all imagine an intricate, singular, and frequently ironic -
- sometimes dramatic – existence. There is the heroic seahorse that no one has been
able to ride or harness, the industrious grasshopper who rests only on Sundays, the
fearful leopard who sings duets with the nightingale, the frolicking zebra who wears
his own prison, the firefly that feeds on the moon as it sprinkles dreams on sleeping
children. All, too, present the kind of contrasting moods and the occasional internal
twist that make them very rich material as musical texts.

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