Category: piano
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- "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
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.
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.
Linda Larson, soprano
Chris Trakas as Benjamin Button
Dominic Inferrera as young Benjamin Button
Last scene
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
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.
Introspective piece, sets the tessitura in the low C to low D string range producing the characteristic "woody" viola tone.
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.
