Format : Part
The Great Western is as title suggests, an evocation of trains. It is another fun piece, with much emphasis on triplets and chromatics: Music Teacher Magazine / Ensemble A Cordes
SKU: HL.48025366
UPC: 196288194279.
Hans Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, lived through almost the entire period of the 20th century and was influenced as a composer by its most important artistic innovations. Already a brilliant pianist as an adolescent, he studied with Alois Hába and Alexander von Zemlinsky in Prague. Both his life and his music reflect the Austrian-Czech-Jewish cultural symbiosis; he saw himself as a bridge builder between Western and Eastern, i.e. Slavic, cultures. Owing to his Jewish ancestry, he was deported to the Terezin concentration camp after the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany. He was the only Jewish representative of the Czech musical avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s to survive the Shoah and, in 1947, followed his non-Jewish wife and their daughter to the FRG in the course of the expulsion of the German-speaking population from Czechoslovakia. Winterberg's fascinating oeuvre, which was kept under lock and key in a German music archive for years after his death, is now being made accessible in first editions due to a cooperation between the Exilarte Center for Banned Music at the University of Music in Vienna and Boosey & Hawkes. The first printed edition is Winterberg's Cello Sonata, composed in 1951, in which all the characteristics of his unmistakable personal style come to the fore: dance-like energy, polyrhythm, intimate yet unsentimental melos, subtle handling of folkloristic material, and an unerring sense of form and balance. This work is of medium technical and great interpretative difficulty.
SKU: PE.EP73479
ISBN 9790577019888. 297 x 210mm inches. English.
At First Light was commissioned by Eric Bruskin, a resident of Philadelphia, USA, in memory of his mother. Eric had a longstanding enthusiasm for my work, and I was touched to be the person he approached for a task which is both a privilege and a daunting responsibility. In a sense, no music can ever measure up to the weight of love or the hope of consolation vested in it under such circumstances - but in memory I carry the deaths of both my own parents, and I was able to draw upon that. Eric's fondness for my Cello Sonata (itself written in memoriam) led him to ask that I include a solo 'cello part in the new work - but his attachment also to my polyphonic sacred choral writing meant that he wanted a centrepiece which would be both a showcase of that approach and the celebration of a life well lived. Therefore, the seven movements of At First Light arrange themselves as a series of slow meditations surrounding an exuberant 9-minute motet in which the lamenting cello falls temporarily silent.Eric's Jewish faith meant that approaching an agnostic humanist brought up within the Anglican tradition was hardly free of problems! Gradually, though, I was able to win his approval for a collated mosaic of texts. This embraces some liturgical Latin (necessary for the motet) as the shared preserve of broad western culture in general, but balances it with a secular approach to loss, celebration, remembrance and the many shades of our mourning those whom we see no longer. Eric was adamant that he did not want the title Requiem; but what has emerged is still a form of semi-secular Requiem in all but name, taking its title instead from a phrase in the poem by Thomas Blackburn set as the third movement. This seemed to suggest succinctly how the loss of one very close to us is an awakening into an unfamiliar world where everything is changed. Following the exuberant central movement, the texts by the Lebanese-born Kahlil Gibran and the US, Kentuckian poet Wendell Berry first address the departed loved one directly, then place us within an imaginary funeral cortege, where the perennial and universal in human experience become personal without subscribing explicitly to any particular faith (or lack of it). The final text of all is a translation of a Hebraic prayer, requested and provided by Eric Bruskin, which serves to mirror its Latin counterpart heard at the outset.Throughout, the lamenting cello represents a commentary on the experience articulated in the text. It evokes and, in a sense, tries to embrace and sanctify the individual existential journeys of the bereft, as they in turn seek to make their own sense of what the short-lived Second World War poet Alun Lewis called 'the unbearable beauty of the dead' (movement 5).In a modern world hostage to ever greater menace, displacement, bloodshed and anguish, I hope fervently that this music not only brings a measure of solace to the person who commissioned it, but also makes its own small contribution to bailing out the sinking ship of humanity.
SKU: HL.49019602
ISBN 9790001192767. UPC: 884088924126. 9.0x12.0x0.15 inches.
While Western polyphonic music achieved its pinnacle in the fugue, rhythmic polyphony of great complexity evolved in Cuba. It is particularly the 'bata' (drumming music originating in the Afro-Cuban 'Santeria' cult), the 'rumba' and the 'son' (ancestor of the famous 'salsa') which have provided me with my inspiration. I employ the quartet in the manner of a drumming ensemble and each individual string corresponds to the sound of a particular drum. The quartet plays on scordatura open strings employing a rich palette of percussive playing techniques recreating the different types of drumming attacks. Thierry Pecou.