Preludes & fugues, from a musician who writes novels

Anthony Burgess: The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard: 24 Preludes and Fugues; Finale, Natale

Anthony Burgess was always just on the brink of breaking through as a musician, but his day job as a writer always pulled him back into a more prosaic life. He began life in a musical family; his father played the piano for the silent cinemas, while his mother was "the Beautiful Belle Burgess", a music-hall star singer/dancer of the day. As a musician he always had a foot in both the popular and the classical worlds. He played piano and wrote dance-band arrangements during his time in the British Army in World War II, and wrote quite a few classical pieces after the war, without any special success or recognition until later in his life when he was famous as a man of letters. Looked at from that period one might think of his music in the tradition of the great British "amateur", but he was actually more of a working musician, and considering his problems in getting his music heard, a very typical one at that.  As Burgess wrote in his 1986 book But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?, "If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered." This is grounded music, it's well-crafted and real, if not always especially inspired.

In 1985 Burgess purchased a Casio Synthesizer, an early home keyboard called the Casiotone 701. At the same time he was writing his prose on a new Apple computer, he took advantage of the instrument to write The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard: 24 Preludes and Fugues. Of course he didn't have the same capabilities available to him that Wendy Carlos had when she put together the synthesized score for Stanley Kubrick's movie of his own A Clockwork Orange fifteen years earlier, but this was still at the beginning of a revolution for electronic music in the home.



There are certainly some banal passages amongst these 48 short pieces, but there are also some charming ones as well. They're perhaps the most charming when they're the most Bachian:



Actually, the music isn't "electronic" in anything more than name; it actually sounds as if designed for no instrument at all, but rather for the mind to play, though at times the music becomes quite pianistic. After Bach its primary model is Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues, op. 87, written in 1950/51. Burgess's simplified version is stripped down, with not so many fugal devices, and with the odd music-hall turn or jazz flavour in place of the awe-inspiring emotional content of the Russian master. But there are similarities in tone and the same heart-felt nods to the genius of Bach. "I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels," Burgess once said,  "instead of a novelist who writes music on the side." Thanks to Naxos's Grand Piano label for their excellent package, including well-recorded, non-Casiotone sound and well-written, informative liner notes; and to the fine pianist Stephane Ginsburgh for providing the best possible way for us to think of Anthony Burgess in this way. Kudos should also go to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for their support; learn much more about the musician/author at www.anthonyburgess.org.

A triumphant close to a magisterial piano series

Almeida Prado: Cartas Celestes 13, 16, 17, 18

The great Cartas Celestes series of the Brazilian composer Almeida Prado comes to a triumphant close with this fourth release by Aleyson Scopel. The series reminds me of the 15 Choros Villa-Lobos wrote between 1920 and 1929 (13 numbered works, an Introduction, and the Choros bis) in their combination of an avant garde musical language and folkloric influences, but most importantly in the intellectual and emotional scope of their vast canvases. Though nearly all of these works focus on the piano, the fact that three do not (#7 is for two pianos and symphonic band, #8 for violin and orchestra, and #11 for piano, marimba and vibraphone) makes one think of Villa's Choros series as well. It would be great if Naxos could record these three works to complete the series.

But not to worry, Aleyson Scopel has everything well in hand on the piano side. If anything there is more virtuosity on display here, especially in #16-18, which Almeida Prado wrote in his last year, 2010. The whole series comes to a fitting end with a reference to Macunaíma, the elemental, larger than life character from Mario de Andrade's great modernist novel of 1928. And there are musical echoes of the elemental Villa-Lobos himself, especially Rudepoema and the two books of Prole do Bebe, along with the Choros series. Villa-Lobos famously said "This is my conservatory," pointing to a map of Brazil. To that map Almeida Prado has appended the great Celestial Map of the sky above Brazil, and Aleyson Scopel is the astronomer and astrologer who makes interprets this beautiful and awesome music.

This disc will be released on April 13, 2018.

Fun for four hands and a piano keyboard

Bach's Brandenburg Concertos arranged for piano duet

Back in 2003 Sony released a great Bach album, one of my all-time favourites, by Murray Perahia. It included an electrifying performance of the 5th Brandenburg Concerto:



That's great piano playing in the cadenza, but I love the piano/orchestra textures throughout the concerto. It points the way to this new arrangement of the Brandenburg Concertos for piano duet. I know I was ready for this! Eleonor Bindman's arrangement is outstanding, at once freer and closer to the spirit of the original music, and with more interesting textures than the one by Max Reger. Bindman and Jenny Lin (who was so great in this year's release of Philip Glass Etudes) really lean in to this freedom, swinging when Bach allows, and never staid or boring when things get more thoughtful or academic.

Here's a short taste of the music, and some interesting comments about the arrangement by Bindman. Though she may have started with purely pedagogical reasons for bringing this music to four hands and a piano keyboard, which I'm sure are very close to Max Reger's own, Bindman and Lin are obviously having too much fun here for it to be just that. And that makes it even more pleasurable for us to listen to.

THE BRANDENBURG DUETS: Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos arranged for piano duet by Eleonor Bindman from Grand Piano Records on Vimeo.

Eleonor Bindman has a fabulous section on her website exploring this project more fully. I highly recommend checking it out!

The Brandenburg Duets disc will be released on March 9, 2018.

Delicacy and intricacy in a vast expanse

Almeida Prado: Cartas Celestes 9, 10, 12 and 14

As Brazilian pianist Aleyson Scopel continues his traversal of Almeida Prado's huge work for piano, Cartas Celestes, we can begin to see the delicacy of its parts and the intricacy of the relationships within a vast expanse. Stars look to us like points of white light, but this is a multi-coloured canvas; we should think of these star charts as being more like NASA's amazing Hubble Space Telescope photographs than the (admittedly gorgeous) cover art by Tony Price featured on this disc.

Globular Cluster Messier 79 (M79, NGC 1904)

In the first two volumes of this series I often heard the sound of Heitor Villa-Lobos's piano music, most especially the two books of Prole do Bebe, Rudepoema and As Tres Marias. Almeida Prado, of course, has a much more avant garde palette, which is natural considering his teachers included György Ligeti and Lukas Foss. The four works included here date from around the turn of the century; all but the 14th are World Premiere Recordings, and they're indeed welcome.

The Cartas Celestes no. 9 is constructed as a kind of Four Seasons. The episode entitled The summer sky as seen from Brazil includes a shout-out to Villa-Lobos's Three Maries from 1939. Each of the sections has its own atmosphere, though they all share the composer's characteristic clusters and the harmonic language he termed "transtonality". At times this music seems like it must be fiendishly difficult to play, but Scopel handles it all with aplomb, and indeed pushes back in the virtuoso passages to exploit their colour and emotional content rather than just flaunting the razzle-dazzle glitter. Almeida Prado has some fun in the 10th work, The Constellations of the Mystical Animals, and Scopel ensures that we do too, with a light touch in the presentation of this heavenly menagerie enacting scenes from the life of Christ. If these animals are mystical they're closer to St. Francis than anything more abstruse. The 11th work is more arcane, making reference to two paintings by the symbolist painter Nicholas Roerich, including this 1932 work Saint Sophia the Almighty Wisdom, in the Roerich Museum in New York. Almeida Prado doesn't let the extra-musical happenings interfere too much with his musical agenda. When I saw the Roerich connection I listened for Scriabin, but couldn't hear any. Perhaps I don't know the Russian master well enough!

The 14th work is, in my opinion, one of the strongest of the whole series so far. It uses a variety of structures from the piano literature, from a Bachian toccata to a disemboweled waltz, a kind of Darmstadt Ravel. It's witty and strange, but also a bit scary. Scopel is really moving along here, at a disc every year; I'm hoping we see the fourth volume before 2018 is done!

Volume 3 in this series will be released on February 3, 2018. Here are my reviews of Volume 2 and Volume 1.  Both of the previous discs made by Top 10 lists for 2017 and 2016.

Modernism & the Avant Garde in Brazilian piano music

Aleyson Scopel's complete series of Cartas Celestes by José Antônio Rezende de Almeida Prado is of great importance in terms of both Brazilian music and piano repertoire. Volume 2 continues the series with three meaty but by no means unmusical pieces that use a multitude of piano sonorities and compositional techniques. Almeida Prado began his multi-year opus after returning from studies in Paris (with, among others, Olivier Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger) and Darmstadt (with both György Ligeti and Lukas Foss). But as I discussed in it my review of Volume 1, one hears just as much the modernist works of Heitor Villa-Lobos in this fierce and complex music for piano. The ground-breaking Rudepoema which Villa-Lobos wrote in the early 1920s is like a presence just behind much of Cartas Celestes 4-6. Nor does Almeida Prado neglect, in this avant garde music, the folklore and dance rhythms that give life to Villa-Lobos and indeed all the music of Brazil.

Brazil has a glorious tradition of great pianists, from Guiomar Novaes to Nelson Freire, and from the evidence of these two discs we can now add the young Aleyson Scopel to the rolls. His technique is outstanding, but he also has the intellectual and emotional discipline to communicate Almeida Prado's massive structures as something more than clever mathematical constructs. Volume 2 will be released on February 10, 2017.

José Antônio Rezende de Almeida Prado

Colours, Light, Darkness

Back in 1939 Heitor Villa-Lobos, encouraged by Edgard Varese, mapped the pattern of the constellation Orion onto musical staves, and, in the chance-enhances-music process of millimetrization, wrote a work for piano about the three stars - As Três Marias - that make up "Orion's belt": Alnitak, Mintaka and Alnilam. These three pieces, which Paul Bowles praised as "brief, birdlike, butterfly-like things", are a modernist throwback for Villa-Lobos, who was entering his "national" stage, based more on folklore and Brasilidade than experiments that focussed on newness.

Fast forward to 1974. The 31-year-old Brazilian composer José Antônio Rezende de Almeida Prado had just returned to Brazil after finishing his studies with Olivier Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and with György Ligeti and Lukas Foss in Darmstadt. He was of a generation in Brazil twice removed from Villa-Lobos. So though the musical world had changed since Villa's death in 1959, there wasn't quite the same reaction to (or rebellion against) the larger-than-life figure who then and now looms so large over Brazil and its music, as there was with older composers in Brazil. When Almeida Prado was offered a commission for the dedication of a new Municipal Planetarium, I'm sure he thought first of As Três Marias. In his preface to the first part of Cartas Celestes, the composer describes his plan:

Galaxies, Constellation of Stars, Nebulae, Shower of Meteors; for all this I created a sound pattern. I coordinated the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, for each star of the constellation another chord… I intentional chose the piano as medium for this composition; it has a large spectrum of overtones, is capable of quick figurations, its percussive possibilities and its enormous resonances met my intention. Eternity reproduced by music: a ground presumption! But doesn’t music also offer us a magical and eternal universe? Therefore imagination may dare what reason hesitates to do…

A portion of the score of part 1 of Cartas Celestes.

For such a large scale work there may be another Villa-Lobos piano piece in the back of Almeida Prado's mind: the massive Rudepoema, written in the early 1920s. But Marlos Nobre, who was four years older, feels that he had a role in the development of Cartas Celestes as well:

If there is a work that redirected the future of Brazilian music, definitely this work is my Concerto Breve. An interesting and historic fact is that while I was still composing the work, I received in my home the young composer José Antonio de Almeida Prado, to whom I played the final movement of my Concerto Breve, with a gush of clusters at the piano.... After hearing all those abundant and violent clusters absolutely predominant in my Concerto Breve, Almeida Prado and all other composers started to write differently from this day on, opening new ways for the music that was being created in Brazil. *

This would have been in 1969, before Almeida Prado went to Europe.

Almeida Prado added to the first part of Cartas Celestes in the early 1980s. This new Grand Piano disc by the young Brazilian pianist Aleyson Scopel includes parts 1, 2, 3, and 15 of Cartas Celestes; I trust (and very much hope) that the rest will be released in the near future. Part 15, by the way, was dedicated by the composer to Scopel, and it receives its recording premiere here. Only portions of this music have been recorded before and it's hard to track down the Brazilian recordings. In 2010 Aleyson Scopel released a live recording of Part 1, in a disc that's up on Spotify. I'll embed it here to give you an idea of this music, as we wait for the Grand Piano disc to go up in April 2016.




Scopel has the measure of this music in the live recording, but it's especially in the recording studio that he presents the full scale of this music. It's quite an achievement, a tour de force of virtuosity, control, musicianship, and pure stamina. Most importantly, the pianist manages to hint at Almeida Prado's mystical world, what Scopel describes as "colours, light, darkness and an almost mythological understanding and approach to the universe." I hope this disc will bring more attention to both the piano playing of Aleyson Scopel, who seems to have a bright career ahead of him, and to the music of Almeida Prado, who died much too young, but who was one of the most important and original Brazilian composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

* Bernardo Scarambone and Marlos Nobre, "Interview with Marlos Nobre (Entrevista de Marlos Nobre)", Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011), pp. 135-150.