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.

Organic, powerful Glass

Philip Glass: 20 Etudes for Piano, 2 CDs

Here we are again. Two releases of Philip Glass's great cycle of Etudes for Piano in November 2017: this Steinway & Sons album by Jenny Lin follows Jeroen Van Veen's for Brilliant Classics, which was released earlier this month. These two discs emphasize the stature of this composer and the importance of this music. Though the earliest Etudes began as studies to help Glass improve his technique as a pianist, the set as a whole now represents a landmark in 21st century music.

Lin's version is significantly faster than Van Veen's, cooler and lighter and more mercurial. This cuts against Glass's own focus on the emotional content of his music, but I find Lin's reading totally convincing. In Van Veen's more romantic approach, the emotion sweeps us up, while Lin's grows slowly in subtle shifts. As Glass says about his music from the late 60s and early 70s, "It was not meant to be mindless, but to be organic and powerful, and mindful, too."

The trick of that music was that it allowed the attention to form around a series of successive events that became almost unnoticeable - around the function of listening to something that seemed as if it were not changing, but was actually changing all the time. (Words Without Music)

Jenny Lin has been involved in the one-evening events where a number of pianists including Glass himself play all 20 Etudes. She'll join Glass, Aaron Diehl, Jason Moran and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes in this program at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in March of 2018.

This album will be released on November 17, 2017.

Mysticism and Modernism

From June 1, 2011:

Adventurous programmes and amazing technique are the hallmarks of Jenny Lin's recordings over the past decade. I really sat up and took notice when Hannsler Classics released her Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues in 2009. This was a fresh take on some of my favourite music; an outstanding disc with depth as well as fireworks.

So I was really pleased to see her new disc of Federico Mompou's Musica Callada - Silent Music - an important work from the 1960s. This music is without fireworks of any kind, but it requires a skilled pianist to put across this deceptively simple music. The third piece of the first book, "Placide" is an excellent example. It is indeed placid, and simple, almost child-like. It reminds one of some of Schumann's Kinderszenen, or the folk-like tunes of Villa-Lobos's Guia Pratico. It has a nostalgic sadness, and Lin plays it with restraint, almost reverence.

Musica Callada is Mompou's late masterpiece, written under the twin influences of mysticism and modernism. His literary inspiration was the 16th century Spanish poet St. John of the Cross, who provides Mompou's title. But the composer also makes reference to the French Symbolist poet Paul Valery, when he quotes the poem Le pas at the top of the score to the second piece in Book I, Lent.

Mompou's musical influences are Spanish and and French modernists. The great Catalan composers Albeniz and Granados share Mompou's interest in Ravel and Debussy, but I wonder if all three are channeling their own regional folk music as well. Mompou is especially interested in Erik Satie, though the pieces on this disc partake only of Satie's understatement and not his humour. This music is spare, but hardly light!

This disc is the first I've seen from the brand new Steinway & Sons label. The sound is lifelike, open, and resonant. Guess what kind of piano Lin is playing?