Search - Loretta Goldberg :: Zygotones: Contemporary American Works By Kolb, Hays, Burt & Copland

Goldberg's Musical Offering

David H. Sachs | New York, NY | 08/22/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Loretta Goldberg enlarges our notion of genre by exploiting the possibilities of the piano, not only as a medium for live performances, but as a vehicle with extended potential as a recorded instrument. Zygotones offers three pieces for solo piano, and it also features a large-scale work for Yamaha Disklavier and sampler by Warren Burt, and a seven-movement work for three pianos by Sorrel Hays. "It's a sour piece," Copland said of his Piano Variations during a session in which he coached Goldberg in ways that allowed her to formulate a warm, varied conception of the work. Compared to other recorded performances, Goldberg maintains the work's crisp, angular edge, and yet reveals the longer line in a new light. Hers is, by far, the most romantic rendering to date of this resolutely thorny work. Warren Burt wrote A Book of Symetries for Goldberg. Composed for the Yamaha Grand Disklavier piano, whose MIDI output also controls a sampler, A Book of Symetries makes a new sound altogether. Samples of microtonally detuned piano sounds are on the sampler which plays through small loudspeakers placed on the soundboard of the grand piano, so that what the listener hears are piano tones but doubled, or tripled, and detuned. The result is a 33-minute work that both pleases and provokes. It is very much worth hearing.If there were enough music for three pianos to make it a standard format, I think Sorrel (Doris) Hays's M.O.M. 'N P.O.P might set the standard for virtuosity and sheer dazzling beauty. Goldberg's liner notes make a special point of the humor in these seven pieces, but above and beyond that humor is a set of gorgeous pieces that please me over and over again. Hays, I think, is among America's most undervalued composers. Her music has an identifiable voice, and an enormous range of expressive and technical styles. Sorrel Hays has been a musical force for many years. She is widely regarded as the definitive interpreter of the music of Henry Cowell (on Cowell's hundredth birthday in 1977, Townhall Records reissued her landmark recording Sorrel Doris Hays Plays Henry Cowell). I can't recommend M.O.M. `N P.O.P highly enough. It's on my short list of new works that are real masterpieces. Loretta Goldberg has a rock-solid technique and an innate musicality that allow her to brings intelligence and vitality to everything she plays. Luckily, she chooses some very interesting music to present on this disc. All of Zygotones is special and worthwhile; the Hays is in a class by itself."