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 |  |  | | | | Track Listings | | | 1 Variations on a Hymn Tune (Koplow -1986) 6:50 | | | Sonata for Piano (Pond -1983) | | | 2 I 2:55 | | | 3 II 2:16 | | | 4 III 1:46 | | | 5 Modal Variations (Pond -1989) 9:05 | | | 6 Allegro for Violin and Piano (Hoose -1951) 8:31 | | | 7 Experience (Wishart -1990) 6:41 | | | On Course (Diehl -1984) | | | 8 I 2:58 | | | 9 II 2:45 | | | 10 III 2:43 | | | 11 IV 2:52 | | | 12 V 2:16 | | | String Quartet No. 2 ["In Memoriam Shostakovich"] (Funk -1993) | | | 13 I 8:55 | | | 14 II 1:57 | | | Total time: | 62:36 |
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| | | | | | MMC Chamber Music Series: Volume II | | | Our Price: $9.95  | | | | Item Number: MMC2030 | | Audio Format: DDD | | Genres: Chamber\Piano\String Quartet | | | | Description | | Excerpts from the Liner Notes (by Mark L. Lehman)
Variations on a Hymn Tune
Written in 1986 during a period of great emotional stress, Koplow’s Variations on a Hymn Tune (for solo cello) is among his most personal and deeply-felt works, and the music offers a kind of symbolic reflection of the composer’s spiritual crisis. Its eight-minute span puts the celebrated tune “Amazing Grace” through a series of defamiliarizing and virtuoso elaborations that include the use of pizzicato, flautando, tremulando, and especially the ghostly harmonics which begin and end the work.
Sonata for Piano
Pond completed his Sonata for Piano in 1983 on a commission from the Utah Music Teachers Association. The work is in three movements, following the traditional fast-slow-fast pattern. Though compact in size—a little under seven minutes long—this is a “big sounding” piece, replete with spacious sonorities and exciting bravura passagework. Chromatically enriched harmonies and a certain rhapsodic abandon suggest the highly-distilled influence of jazz on Pond’s musical language.
Modal Variations
The inspiration for Pond’s 1989 Modal Variations was pedagogical: this nine-minute-long set consists of a theme and six variations, each written in a different ancient mode. The idea was to create, in the composer’s words, a “musically-satisfying piece” which would also provide “an interesting analytical exercise” for his pupils. “In keeping with early modal theory, there are no key signatures and no accidentals anywhere in the work—everything is played on the white keys only, with the modal root shifting in each successive movement to a new finalis.”
Allegro for Violin and Piano
This duo was written in 1951, and is somewhat more neoclassic—in the sturdy, mid-century American manner epitomized by Walter Piston—than some of the composer’s later works. Though its single nine-minute movement comprises a series of episodes that interweave briskly-assertive and slower lyrical ideas, the Allegro is unified by the decisive four-note motive emphatically announced at the very beginning of the piece by the unaccompanied violin, and despite its compact size and sui generis structure, the work has the solidity and weight of a full-length sonata.
Experience
Cast in a single, seven-minute-long movement for string quintet, Experience arose from and reflects a deeply personal ordeal which the composer prefers to leave to the listener’s imagination. It is a slow, serious work of sustained intensity whose gradually unwinding melodic strands grow from a quiet opening into greater activity and energy—and a final climactic gesture of release—without ever fully abandoning the measured pulse established in the work’s opening.
On Course
Completed in 1984, On Course is fourteen minutes of music for string quartet in six linked sections. As might be expected from Diehl’s use of an idiosyncratic composition system, On Course has a distinctive and personal sound that only vaguely recalls certain devices of the minimalists (especially their pyramiding of rudimentary motives to generate complex rhythms) and some of the sophisticated primitivism and spare aloofness of John Cage.
String Quartet No. 2
(“In Memoriam Shostakovich”)
Funk’s Second String Quartet is an homage to and elegy for Dimitri Shostakovich, and proudly displays the imprint of that great modern Russian master’s idiom and spirit. The work is cast in two movements: a long adagio followed by a brief, furious presto finale. It opens with a quiet, forlorn melody in drooping dotted-rhythm suggesting C Minor as a tonal anchor. This idea is spun out polyphonically as the point of departure for a brooding threnody through which hints of a chorale try to bring some warmth; overcome by the grief-stricken eruptions of harsh, stabbing harmonies, and chilled by an otherworldly violin duet in which an aching melodic fragment glides far above icy sul ponticello arpeggios, however, the movement attenuates into a final pianississimo chord without escaping its heavy burden of sorrow. |
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