Sowerby - Selected Works for Solo and Duo Piano | Cedille Records CDR7006

Sowerby - Selected Works for Solo and Duo Piano

£13.25

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Label: Cedille Records

Cat No: CDR7006

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 13th December 2019

Contents

About

This album of world-premiere recordings features solo and duo piano music spanning nearly the entire career of Prix de Rome and Pulitzer Prize winning composer Leo Sowerby (1895–1968), one of the most distinctive American voices of the early and mid-20th century.

Recorded in 1997 in Chicago, where Sowerby spent the bulk of his student and professional life, the album is being released at mid-price with support from the Leo Sowerby Foundation.

Pianists Gail Quillman and Julia Tsien share a direct musical lineage to Sowerby. Quillman, who established the Leo Sowerby Foundation, studied with Sowerby, and has performed more of his solo piano and chamber music than anyone else. Tsien, an active performer and teacher, was a Quillman student.

The album’s earliest work, Three Summer Beach Sketches, for solo piano, from 1915, shows the influence of composer-pianist Percy Grainger, with whom Sowerby studied. It’s also one of the earliest serious compositions to use jazz and blue harmonies. Composed in 1959, Suite for Piano (four-hands) shares a kinship with the music of Samuel Barber, whom Sowerby championed, and the music of Sowerby’s former student Ned Rorem. Passacaglia, Interlude and Fugue for solo piano (1931) is a dreamy, French Impressionist take on classic forms. Prelude for Two Pianos (1932) is more Delius than Debussy, more English austerity than French sensuality. Sowerby’s brief Fisherman’s Tune is an homage to Grainger. The overture-length sonata movement Synconata, arranged for two pianos, was originally composed in 1924 as a curtain-raiser for American bandleader Paul Whiteman’s “symphonic jazz” concerts.

Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians calls Sowerby “a remarkable American composer ... eclectic in the positive sense of the word.” Encyclopaedia Britannica credits Sowerby with combining “a fine melodic talent with a use of modern harmonies.” In 1938, the Musical Quarterly observed, “This 20th century American composes for the present as a part of it, and for the future perhaps even more than he realizes.”

Cedille Records revived Sowerby’s orchestral music with a series of two well-received full-price albums in the late 1990s with maestro Paul Freeman conducting the Chicago Sinfonietta and Czech National Symphony Orchestra. A Fanfare magazine review of the album Prairie: Tone Poems by Leo Sowerby proclaimed it “one of the most important contributions to American discography in recent years.... Not to be missed.” Cedille has also released the world-premiere recordings of Sowerby’s sonically dazzling Concertpiece for Organ and Orchestra and Pulitzer Prize-winning cantata, The Canticle of the Sun.

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