Michael Finnissy (Piano)
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MICHAEL FINNISSY (b. 1946) THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN SOUND CD1: 1 Le démon de l’analogie [28.29] 2 Le réveil de l’intraitable réalité [20.39] Total duration [49.11] CD2: 1 North American Spirituals [23.41] 2 My parents’ generation thought War meant something [35.49] Total duration [59.32] CD3: 1 Alkan-Paganini [13.37] 2 Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets [34.11] 3 Eadweard Muybridge-Edvard Munch [26.29] Total duration [74.18] CD4: 1 Kapitalistisch Realisme (met Sizilianische Männerakte en Bachsche Nachdichtungen) [67.42] CD5: 1 Wachtend op de volgende uitbarsting van repressie en censuur [17.00] 2 Unsere Afrikareise [30.35] 3 Etched bright with sunlight [28.40] Total duration [76.18] IAN PACE, piano IAN PACE Ian Pace is a pianist of long-established reputation, specialising in the farthest reaches of musical modernism and transcendental virtuosity, as well as a writer and musicologist focusing on issues of performance, music and society and the avant-garde. He was born in Hartlepool, England in 1968, and studied at Chetham's School of Music, The Queen's College, Oxford and, as a Fulbright Scholar, at the Juilliard School in New York. His main teacher, and a major influence upon his work, was the Hungarian pianist György Sándor, a student of Bartók. Based in London since 1993, he has pursued an active international career, performing in 24 countries and at most major European venues and festivals. His absolutely vast repertoire of all periods focuses particularly upon music of the 20th and 21st Century. He has given world premieres of over 150 pieces for solo piano, including works by Julian Anderson, Richard Barrett, James Clarke, James Dillon, Pascal Dusapin, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy (whose complete piano works he performed in a landmark 6- concert series in 1996), Christopher Fox, Volker Heyn, Hilda Paredes, Horatiu Radulescu, Frederic Rzewski, Howard Skempton, Gerhard Stäbler and Walter Zimmermann. He has presented cycles of works including Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I-X, and the piano works of Ferneyhough, Fox, Kagel, Ligeti, Lachenmann, Messiaen, Radulescu, Rihm, Rzewski and Skempton. He has played with orchestras including the Orchestre de Paris under Christoph Eschenbach (with whom he premiered and recorded Dusapin’s piano concerto À Quia), the SWF Orchestra in Stuttgart under Rupert Huber, and the Dortmund Philharmonic under Bernhard Kontarsky. He is Lecturer in Music and Head of Performance at City University, London, having previously held positions at the University of Southampton and Dartington College of Arts. His areas of academic expertise include 19th century performance practice (especially the work of Liszt and Brahms), issues of music and society (with particular reference to the work of Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School, and their followers), contemporary performance practice and issues, music and culture under fascism, and the post-1945 avant-garde, in particular in West Germany, upon which he is currently completing a large-scale research project. INTRODUCTION Note: A greatly extended version of this booklet with detailed essays on the work and musical examples may be found and downloaded as a free PDF file at www.divineartrecords.com/CD/HOPIS.htm For a period of over 20 years prior to writing the programme notes for this CD (in 2013), Michael Finnissy’s music has played a prominent role in my own life; its presence has sometimes been dangerously close to overwhelming, and my attempts to maintain my own distinct identity and priorities both when playing and writing about it have often been fraught, sometimes to the point of exasperation. But it is music whose importance I have never seriously doubted, nor has my continuing fascination with each new work (and not just those for solo piano) dimmed. I came across Finnissy’s work at a relatively advanced point in my own early musical development. Whilst in the sixth form at Chetham’s School of Music, I recall my then piano teacher, Peter Lawson, mentioning the names of both Finnissy and Brian Ferneyhough as two composers whose work operated on the boundaries of pianistic possibility, this very fact being tied into the nature of the musical experience. Soon afterwards, my then composition teacher Colin Touchin lent me a tape of Ferneyhough’s Second String Quartet; but it would not be until a year or two later I would first see or hear any music of Finnissy. This would be when I was a student at Oxford, where I spent many a happy hour investigating what were then extremely rare scores of works 19th and early 20th century composers for piano (Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein, Thalberg, Busoni, Godowsky and others) simultaneously with those of the post-1945 avant-garde, all facilitated by Peter McMullin, pianist, flautist, and all-purpose encyclopedia of information, who worked at Blackwell’s Music Shop. At this time, I was equally enthusiastically sharing information and perspectives (and rare scores) of such earlier piano repertoire with friends such as pianist and musicologist Kenneth Hamilton (now one of the world’s leading authorities on Liszt) and composer Francis Pott (now Chair of Composition at the University of West London), and on avant-garde music with fellow students, such as conductor Mikel Toms and composers and musicologists Pwyll Ap Sîon and David Maw. McMullin, familiar with my interests, lent me copies of scores of Finnissy’s Jazz (1976) and all.fall.down (1977), which I found quite incredible from the outset, and seemed to bring together both my pianistic and avant-garde interests. Soon afterwards, I purchased the score of English Country-Tunes (1977, rev. 1982-85), which more than any music I had previously encountered seemed to epitomise an ‘England’ which I could recognise – a ravaged post-industrial landscape and a modern culture still predicated upon visions of some idealised Arcadian past, a long way from conventional English pastoralism. I dreamed of playing this some day (this would not occur until some eight years later, since when it has become a staple of my repertoire). I also met Finnissy for the first time in 1988 when he came to give a presentation on his work at Oxford, playing some of the Gershwin Arrangements. Playing any of Finnissy’s work (and that of other composers who have been associated with the so-called ‘New Complexity’) remained however a daunting prospect at this stage; it was not until several years later, when studying in New York at the Juilliard School, that I finally decided to find the resolve to do so. The first work I played was the first volume of the Verdi Transcriptions, of which I gave the US premiere. I led from this to shorter pieces, each one continuously fascinating, and after settling in London in 1993 played several recitals featuring a range of Finnissy’s music. Eventually I felt an urge to tackle the totality of Finnissy’s pianistic output, and presented a series of six long recitals in London in 1996 featuring his then complete piano works to celebrate his 50th birthday year (at the time of writing, in 2013, I know that an equivalent series today would be between two and three times the length of that in 1996). Since then Finnissy’s work has played a central role in my own work as a performer, though my approaches to it have hopefully developed and matured in the intervening period. Some early ideas for the History of Photography in Sound were first conceived in 1995, the year before my complete piano works series, but composition of the work began properly in 1997, perhaps in part motivated by the sort of self-awareness that could be engendered through hearing his complete output up until that time, perceiving its boundaries, and thus being able to apprehend clearly areas for future development. It was first conceived as a somewhat smaller work than eventually resulted, originally to be in nine chapters; it appears as such – in projected form – in the work list of Uncommon Ground, the monograph on Finnissy’s work published in 1998 1. These were structured in five books: Book 1: Le démon de l’analogie Book 2: Landscapes 2.1 The wakening of intractable reality 2.2 North American Spirtuals Book 3: Portraiture 3.1 Alkan-Paganini 3.2 Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets 3.3 Eadweard Muybridge – Edvard Munch Book 4: Documentation 4.1 Unsere Afrikareise 4.2 Click! Book 5: Etched bright with sunlight Chapter 2.1 was also at one point to be entitled Canada: From its origins to the present day, but this title was soon dropped. It was to be a Canadian counterpart to North American Spirituals, featuring a wide range of materials collected by the Canadian pianist Marc Couroux. In the end few of these were used, only appearing in the final section of Le réveil, and buried within North American Spirituals. The piece Click! only ever existed as an idea, which probably did not really correspond to either Kapitalistisch Realisme or Wachtend. Finnissy first composed all the pieces in Book 3 in 1997 (in order Poets, Alkan-Paganini, Muybridge-Munch), followed by the Spirituals in the same year. I premiered the Poets in the British Music Information Centre on May 1st, 1997 (the same day as the General Election which ushered in a landslide Labour victory after 18 years of Conservative rule), having earlier in the year performed excerpted sections of the work. Unsere Afrikareise, which I also premiered in a concert in Cheltenham, followed in 1998. It was at this point that Finnissy decided to add an extra two chapters, stemming from the motivation to compose My parents’ generation in 1999, which necessitated a long counterpart later on in the cycle.