Search - Nikolai Roslavets, Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly :: Piano XX, Vol. 2

Great playing but with some indulgences and weak pieces

Rachel Abbinanti (tusai1@aol.com) | Chicago | 07/26/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Massimiliano Damerini is a premiere Italian pianist who has devoted his creativity toward the modern. There was a time when you could count on one hand pianist willing to brave the world of avant-garde music, with its penchant for complexity and conceptual freedom. This is a great compendium of the 20th Century including long forgotten works. Like the Roslavets "Prelude" from 1915. Roslavets was part of the progressive arts community that welcomed the overthrow of the Czar,and the 1917 Revolution. His music is tailored quite well for the piano,with a generous use of colour as here. The Kodaly "Piano piece #7" is also a neglected work,but I don't know why, Kodaly had a keen interest in instrumental colour as exhibited here with fast quips into all the piano's registers. The Berg "Sonata" is takened extremely slow, and I don't like it this way. The work is neurotic and morose to begin with,if played fast, Damerini seems to have some indulgent wishes he desires fulfilled. The Berio "Sequenza" is one of his uninspired of the lot, with contrasting idea of block chords to arpeggiated. Berio had Stockhausen in mind,after experiencing the latters 11 "klavierstuck" it is easy to find your own voice within this coldly abstracted language. This is Ferneyhough's mature work for the piano, he has an early "Three Pieces" but "Lemma-Icon-Epigram" is a tour de force,ferocious discipline is necessary. Its musical argument however is quite tame,where Ferneyhough resorts to quite conservative means to his materials,as when he simple transforms a register to claer the field for subsequent events or moments. You feel the vigours of modernity hovering in this piece,as if the argument of 12-Tone serialism refuses to spend itself. Like an old ancient voice still wanting the things that are modern. Still Ferneyhough has a consummate compositional technique that always finds a link toward the next piece. Damerini could have made his selections from a greater pool of resources."