Search - Cowell, Litwin, Stern :: American Piano Concertos

Cowell's unique approach to the piano - and more: an essenti

Discophage | France | 07/26/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I love the piano music of Henry Cowell, and I can't get enough of it. Not that there is much of it on CD: a collector of Cowell's piano music can easily be a completist these days. My actual discovery of Cowell's piano music is recent. I had read the name in the textbooks, as one of the great American mavericks and experimenters in sound, and I had heard of few compositions which had failed to make an impression - they were from his later, more conservative period. Then I chanced upon the Smithsonian CD reissuing Cowell's 1962 recording of his own piano music, and it was a reveleation (see my review of Henry Cowell plays his own Piano Music). Since then I've caught up, and bought about everything I could get my hands on (see my review of Sorrel Doris Hays Plays the Piano Music of Henry Cowell for further references).



What I find so unique and extraordinary with Cowell's piano music is that he invented his own brand of modernism, far removed from what Schoenberg and the European modernists were doing across the ocean, one that reconciled experimentation and accessibility. Since those times we have so much associated modernism in music with the notion of a music that is difficult to grasp and that requires from the listener special intellectual effort and ear training, that it has been all too easy to dismiss Cowell's music as naïve, inconsequential or what not. It is not my intention to disparage the music of Schoenberg and the likes: it is highly rewarding, once you find the keys to enter; but it is not a wide-open house. Cowell is both a cutting-edge experimenter in sound - with hardly any precedent he invented piano playing techniques that went radically against what had been done since the invention of the keyboard (striking the keys with one's fingers to produce the sound), and opened up a world of novel and mesmerizing sounds - and a precursor of today's world music, writing engaging tunes inspired by Irish or other folk music. It makes his music fascinating (for is mesmerizing sound world) and enchanting (for the seductiveness of its melodies).



So this disc was the logical next step.



The three concertante works for piano and orchestra lie at its core. The Piano Concerto from 1928 is an extraordinary composition, angrily pounding and dissonant, with a dazzingly pyrotechnic and percussive piano in the style of the composer's "Advertisement". In the second movement (titled "Tone cluster") the piano alternates between pounding episodes and atmospheric, octave-embracing clusters developing to fantastic power - one of Cowell's special trademarks, along with playing directly on the strings (which he doesn't use here). I don't know what to compare it with from that time. It is way beyond Prokofiev and Bartok. The liner notes appropriately mention Mossolov, but Cowell's is even more pounding and dissonant. It is the kind of Piano Concerto Leo Ornstein in the mid 1910s or George Antheil between 1920 and 1925 might have written - but they didn't. It is unique. Composer Peter Dickinson commented somewhere that it may well be a precursor of Xenakis' Keqrops - yes, that's as advanced it sounds. In the syncopations of the third movement (titled "Counter Rhythm"), besides Stravinsky's Danses sacrale (the finale of the Rite of Spring), it is also Ligeti who comes to mind. The liner notes say nothing unfortunately of the circumstances of the Concerto's premiere, and even wheter it even got one at all at the time of its composition : apparently it did, in Havana on Dec 28, 1930, with the Havana Philharmonic under Petro Sanjuan and the composer at the piano. I can imagine the kind of uproar it must have produced. Col Legno also doesn't boast this recording as being a premiere, although I am aware of no earlier one. Incredible - and sad - that this major American concerto isn't recorded more often.



The Four Irish Tales are in fact the orchestration, made in 1940 for piano and orchestra at the suggestion of Stokowski, of four of Cowell's early and most typical piano pieces: The Tides of Manaunaun, Exultation, The Harp of Life and The lilt of the Reel. It's fun to hear those familiar pieces (to me) in this new orchestral guise, but, to be entirely honest, I find that it somewhat waters down their innovative textures. Cowell and Stokowski made a recording in 1941 with the All-American Youth Orchestra, apparently never reissued on CD.



Concerto Piccolo is a later composition, originating in 1941 as a suite for piano and string orchestra and reorchestrated in the present form in 1945. By then Cowell had become more conservative in his musical outlook. In the outer movements the cluster-pounding piano part recalls the earlier Cowell, but the orchestra has the tritest cowboy music. The second movement has the pianist harping the strings, but now against sentimental melodies passed on from instrument to instrument. And when the pianist returns to traditional playing, it sounds like a muzak imitation of the slow movement from a Chopin Concerto. Cowell once recounted an anecdote which had him playing in old people's homes, and one of the old ladies asking if he knew anything by Burt Bacharach (once a student of his, in fact). He might have satisfied her by playing Concerto Piccolo.



The scherzo from the Sinfonietta (1928) was conducted by Webern in Vienna, about a year after the (complete) composition's premiere in Boston under Nicolas Slonimsky. One understands why: with its use of dissonant counterpoint (a preoccupation shared in those years with Cowell's mentor, Charles Seeger), it is one of its composers' most Schoenbergian compositions: Schoenberg's 1st Chamber Symphony comes to mind. It is austere and imposing, but ultimately rewarding. .



Litwin rounds off this abundant program (TT 73:48) with five solo piano pieces, including the same Tides of Maunaunan that forms the first Irish Tale, and one (Domnu) that despite all my Cowell listening I encounter for the first time. Litwin plays them well, developping awesome power.

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