Search - Jason Eckardt, Michael Finnissy, Milton Babbitt Jeff Nichols, piano Marilyn Nonken :: Marilyn Nonken: American Spiritual

Jason Eckardt, Michael Finnissy, Milton Babbitt Jeff Nichols, piano Marilyn Nonken
Marilyn Nonken: American Spiritual
Genre: Classical

Track Listings (4) - Disc #1
1. Chelsea Square
2. Echoes' White Veil
3. North American Spirituals
4. Allegro Peneroso

CD Details

All Artists: Jason Eckardt, Michael Finnissy, Milton Babbitt Jeff Nichols, piano Marilyn Nonken
Title: Marilyn Nonken: American Spiritual
Members Wishing: 0
Total Copies: 0
Label: Composers Recordings
Original Release Date: 3/1/2001
Release Date: 3/1/2001
Album Type: Import
Genre: Classical
Styles: Chamber Music, Historical Periods, Classical (c.1770-1830)
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPC: 090438087728

Synopsis

Album Description

"Ms. Nonken is a pianist from music?s leading edge, associated with new works and with pieces whose challenges have withstood the last half century?Her dominant qualities would be advantages in any music: lightness in attack, clarity of texture, singing lines (and singing chords), variety of nuance, certainty in defining climaxes and in moving toward or away from them, a sense that the end of a movement must matter." ?Paul Griffiths, New York Times

CD Reviews

I don't know of a better piano piece by Babbitt

Peter Heddon | 09/28/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The pivotal works on this lovingly planned disc (all the music was especially written for Nonken)are the Babbitt and Finnissy items.

Allegro Peneroso by Babbitt bubbles over with chirpy melodic motifs ingeniously scattered around the entire keyboard and one is left wondering how all this warmth of spirit could possibly derive from a serial system of any kind.I'm eagerly awaiting the chance to hear the 2nd Piano Concerto which Nonken infectiously refers in her programme notes.

Finnissy's discursive North American Spirituals might've collapsed in less imaginative hands than Nonken but she invests color and nuance where others might simply have forged ahead.

An almost Baroque like clarity peeps through the murky ruminations and wrongly harmonised hymn tunes though the abrupt ending is paradoxiacally less startling than had things resolved more neatly."