selected DISCOGRAPHY: 20th/21st century music

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Sample: Sonata No. 9, Op. 58 (1952)

Vincent Persichetti's (1915-1987) twelve piano sonatas  were written over a forty-three-year period. The first nine sonatas,  written between 1939 and 1950, are strong, integral and varied works  reflecting diverse approaches toward synthesizing a number of styles and  idioms. In these pieces, the voices of Schoenberg, Hindemith, Copland,  and Bartok and jazz are variously combined and distilled within  Persichetti's own developing compositional language, with an increasing  emergence of an original style that reaches a kind of initial  culmination in the expansive Sonata No. 4. The last three sonatas were  created over a much longer span of time than the first three, appearing  in 1955, 1965, and 1982, respectively. Each of these last three sonatas  represents dramatic culminations of Persichetti's musical universe.  Throughout his output, Persichetti employs a very wide stylistic  palette, embracing diatonic and modal tonalities, pandiatonicism,  polytonality, and atonal languages, as well as other diverse musical  approaches. Like all of his works, the piano sonatas are brilliantly  crafted, with the opening material usually serving as a unifying element  for the entire piece. There is a strong penchant for homophonic  textures, a great rhythmic vitality in the fast movements, and often a  sense of very affecting poignance in the slow movements. Persichetti  also uses scintillating registral contrasts and juxtapositions  brilliantly throughout all of his piano writing. This first-ever  integral recording of these works features six world premieres and is a  major addition to the Persichetti discography.

BBC Music Choice (5/5 stars): "Persichetti's 12 Sonatas for piano  come as something of a revelation. A single musical personality runs  through them all, revealed in consistently engaging invention, a strong  feeling for attractive keyboard colours, whether in lithe counterpoint,  limpid chords or sonorous climaxes, and a sense of form and proportion  which ensures that nothing outstays its welcome. Geoffrey Burleson's  outstanding performances have clearly been a labour of love, and they're  recorded with exceptional fidelity. An impressive achievement all  round."
- Anthony Burton, BBC Music Magazine

"Although Vincent Persichetti's 12 piano sonatas embrace a marked  stylistic evolution over four decades, each is skilfully crafted,  concise, assured and effectively though never garishly wrought for the  keyboard, reflecting the composer's considerable pianism. Even the  barest polyphonic writing is deployed with such registral care that it  never sounds thin or dry. Conversely, climactic chordal passages make a  clear, sonorous and clutter-free impact. Certainly Geoffrey Burleson not  only observes to a proverbial tee but also relishes the composer's  meticulous expressive and dynamic contrasts, elaborate pedal indication  and precisely worked-out metric modulations. In fact each sonata comes  alive by virtue of Burleson's intelligent virtuosity and caring  musicianship, qualities that also manifest in his annotations. It's good  finally to have all the sonatas brought together in a world-class,  excellently engineered reference edition that constitutes a major  addition to the catalog."
- Jed Distler, Gramophone

"A superlative recording. Burleson sails through the difficult  passages of the 10th and 11th sonatas as if they were child's play. More  important, though, he understands how the music breathes, understands  its essence. The interpretations are dramatic and vivid. In short, this  release is one of the truly great recordings of Persichetti's music  generally, and one of the finest recordings of American piano music that  I've ever heard."
- Rob Haskins, American Record Guide

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Sample: Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1928), IV. Postlude: Maestoso, con bravura

According to his own accounts, Roy Harris was born in a log cabin in the  Oklahoma panhandle in 1898. He went on to study composition with Nadia  Boulanger in Paris, and become one of the most important American  symphonists of the 20th century. His Symphony No. 3 brought him  worldwide fame, and has been performed and recorded by the New York  Philharmonic under Bernstein, and numerous other prominent orchestras  and conductors. He also wrote a significant body of piano music,  including his dynamic, virtuosic and highly distinctive Piano Sonata, Piano Suite and Toccata.  His wide-ranging stylistic ingredients include Medieval chant, Baroque  counterpoint, 20th century French music, jazz, American folk music, and  dramatic polytonal sonorities. This recording includes five unpublished  pieces, four of which receive their world premieres on this release.

"Roy Harris painted with a broad brush in his orchestral works and it's a  fascinating experience to hear how he translates his hyperoriginal  musical language to the piano. He was married to an excellent pianist,  Johana Harris, who played his music with verve. So does Geoffrey  Burleson on this new CD, which is a sample of Harris's headstrong and  brilliant music. Discover Roy Harris."
Performance: *****
Recording: *****
- Thomas Roth, OPUS Magazine (Sweden) 

"Trained by Nadia Boulanger, Roy Harris had a quite different slant from  Charles Ives on what American music might be. Burleson's playing, like  the music itself, is truthful, unshowy yet carefully wrought - the  punchy contrapuntal dialogue of the Sonata's Scherzo pungently etched."
- Paul Riley, BBC Music Magazine

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Works of Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, David Sanford and Augusta Read Thomas

Sample: Elliott Carter: Sonata for Cello & Piano (1948), IV. Allegro

Odd Couple Celebrates  Elliott Carter's 100th birthday with a new recording of one of his most  popular and loved works, the Sonata for Cello and Piano. David Sanford's  jazz and funk-inspired 22 Part I takes up where the distinctively  American sound of early Carter leaves off, and Samuel Barber's Cello  Sonata Op 6 contrasts a European romanticism to Augusta Read Thomas\'  more modern Cantos for Slava, dedicated to the memory of Mstislav  Rostropovich (1927-2007) Thomas's work was commissioned for Haimovitz by  ASCAP as part of Haimovitz's 2006 Concert Music Award for outstanding  contribution to the performance of American Music.

From the liner notes:
If  the piano and cello were to fill out a dating survey, answering all of  those intimate questions honestly (innate timbres, favorite textures,  pitch and dynamic range, general musical preferences) it is highly  unlikely that they would have hooked up on a first date, let alone hoped  for a long-term (two-hundred year!) relationship...

"The virtuoso team of cellist Matt Haimovitz, who teaches at McGill  University, and his pianist friend Geoffrey Burleson, who's at  Princeton, just released an aptly named CD called Odd Couple on  the Oxingale label. It features an intriguing array of American works  for piano and cello, from Samuel Barber's 1932 sonata to Augusta Read  Thomas's exquisite Cantos for Slava, composed this year in  honour of Mistislav Rostropovich. Listening to it conjured up the  thought of how great it would be to hear some of this live.  Well,  Thursday night, at Pollack Hall at McGill's Schulich School of Music,  Haimovitz and Burleson paired up with DJ Olive on turntables and sundry  electronics for a fabulous recital.  You clearly sense the joy that  Haimovitz and Burleson have playing together.  The complicity between  the two performers couldn't have been more perfect.  Burleson then  played a "prepared piano" improv, plucking and strumming the strings  with horsehair, to take us into Elliot Carter's 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano.  The piano and cello are fiercely independent in this piece, yet sustain  a dialogue whose resolution makes perfect sense. Along the way the ride  is stimulating and uplifting.   At its end, it all seemed too short.  The audience roared and the three gentle music giants returned for a  rocking, rhythmic trio performance."
-Alan Conter, The Toronto Globe and Mail

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David Krakauer, clarinet
Matt Haimovitz, cello
Jonathan Crow, violin
Geoffrey Burleson, piano
Socalled, electronics

Nominated for a 2015 JUNO Award:  Classical Album Of The Year - Solo Or Chamber

Sample: David Krakauer: Akoka

"This brilliantly inventive recording pays tribute to Henri Akoka,  the Algerian-born clarinetist who egged on Messiaen to compose when both  were prisoners of war in a German camp during World War II. Framing a  vivid rendition of the Quartet for the End of Time are two musical  flights of fancy, an improvisation by the extraordinary clarinetist  David Krakauer, and an electronic remix of the quartet by Socalled."
-Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times

In a rare live recording, AKOKA bookmarks the complete Messiaen  masterwork Quartet for the End of Time between David Krakauer's own  composition/improvisation for the quartet, entitled "Akoka", and  Meanwhile... by sound artist Socalled.  The album lifts Messiaen's  original work out of the polite context of a chamber music performance  and places it in a dramatic setting that drives home its gravity and  impact, while bringing it into the 21st century. As the forces of  fundamentalism, intolerance and violence intensify in today's world,  this particular mounting of the great work seems all the more timely.   AKOKA was inspired by the wartime experience of clarinetist Henri Akoka,  who premiered the Quartet for the End of Time with Olivier Messiaen in  Stalag VIII A, the German prisoner-of-war camp in which they were both  interred.  Henri Akoka's vibrant personality and the story of his  survival, with all its twists and turns, is the inspiration for this  recording.  The album positions the Quartet between two original  compositions inspired by Messiaen's famous work: the opening track,  Akoka, conceived by the Klezmer and classical clarinetist David  Krakauer, is almost entirely improvised by the ensemble; and the closing  track, Meanwhile..., by the beat architect (pianist, composer,  arranger, singer, rapper, and more) Socalled (a.k.a. Josh Dolgin),  merges live samples of the musicians with old radio broadcasts, hiphop,  cantorial singing, and markers of time...

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~Pianist and featured soloist on this recording~

~Jazz Times pick as No. 7 among the top 40 Jazz Albums of 2021~

Sample: V-Reel

"When I listen to this album I get the feeling that it’s a soundtrack to a cool movie I wish I were starring in (but in which Denzel got the part because he looks cooler in a fedora). Each song has its own mood, its own approach. Some songs are energetic, like “popit",” some are homages to big bands, like “Dizzy Atmosphere,” and others have an avant garde edge, like “V-Reel.” You don’t just listen to this album, you inhabit it."

-Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Kareem's Weekend Boost)

"Ensconced in academia since the late 1990s, composer/arranger David Sanford was long better known in new-music circles than in jazz. This glorious album should go a long way in changing that. Inspired by the AACM and infused with rock & roll squall, Sanford's orchestra is an unpredictable beast, lurching, lunging, and leaping. Ragin's pungent trumpet work, too little heard in recent years, is worth the price of admission alone, especially on his title-track tribute"

-Andrew Gilbert, Jazz Times

“The album is a glorious hodgepodge of large-ensemble synchronicity and wah-wah-drenched blazes, with plenty of time devoted to featuring Hugh Ragin, a Chicago trumpeter like Bowie, whose rough and gleaming sound bespeaks a mix of pride and lament.”
– Giovanni Russonello, New York Times

Sanford’s compositions have been commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Speculum Musicae, Meridian Arts Ensemble, and star cello soloist Matt Haimovitz, along with also being performed by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chicago Symphony Chamber Players, and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Sanford has led his own big band, a group with a resolutely contemporary spirit (and formerly known as the Pittsburgh Collective), for some 18 years. His pieces for the ensemble on A Prayer For Lester Bowie were inspired by a characteristic array of influences, musical and extra-musical: “The Soldier and the CEO” by scenes from films (including David Fincher’s The Game), with an expansive six-string solo by Fabris a highpoint; the dynamic “Full Immersion” by both a fountain in Rome and the New Orleans funk band Galactic; and the dark-hued ballad “Women in Shadows” from Luke Swank photos that reveal what the composer calls “the intoxicating dichotomy of beauty and grace in an environment of urban decay and extreme air pollution that was Pittsburgh of the 1930s.”

Two tracks were inspired by Sanford’s beloved rollercoasters. “V-Reel” references the Virginia Reel, a ride at New Jersey’s old Palisades Park (which went up in flames in 1944, fatally – suggesting to the composer a kinship with a plot point in David Foster Wallace’s epic novel Infinite Jest). Critic Paul Griffiths described the composition this way: “ ‘V-Reel’ communicates the proximity of joy and terrifying power in these images from life and literature… The contrapuntal section pays homage to Bach and Bernstein, and other musical memories are bound up in the piece, from Miles Davis’s ‘Prelude to Agharta’ to Jesus Christ Superstar, from The Rite of Spring to Louis Andriessen and the rock band Soul Coughing.” The other track with the essence of a thrill ride is “popit.” Sanford explains: “That was actually the misheard phrase ‘all clear’ spoken by the ride operators at Virginia’s Kings Dominion amusement park right before the dispatch of trains on the now-defunct Volcano: The Blast Coaster, which began with two sudden launches that reached 70 miles per hour. Its more concrete musical influences are The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ and late-’80s Boston hardcore band Hullaballoo, whose songs sometimes included improvised trumpet and sax solos.”

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Lockdown Fantasies, for piano & electronics, performed by Geoffrey Burleson

Journey's End, for piano & electronics, performed by Kathleen Supové

"Geoffrey Burleson, an immense talent on piano, capable of everything from Rachmaninoff showbaoting to rollicking jazz to ambient tonal clusters, performed Lockdown Fantasies at the Other Minds Festival. The programme suggests Rolnick alone will manipulate Burleson's sounds, but it's clear from the pedals beneath the piano that Burleson too plays a role in the digital processing. The various segments he performs are so varied that they take on a postmodernist affect, more quotation than composition. The effects do neat tricks, like echoing arpeggios and shifting pitches."

-The Wire (U.K.)

Lockdown Fantasies features two new works for piano and electronics written for and performed by Geoffrey Burleson and Kathleen Supové. Both works are dense and thoughtful with an emotional edge, much like the oeuvre that Rolnick has built up over his 40 year career as a composer.

The album opens with its titular piece, “Lockdown Fantasies,” performed by Geoffrey Burleson. The piece was written in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdowns as the composer was traversing an empty Manhattan by bicycle and a new romantic relationship. Rolnick intentionally avoids the fear, isolation, and loss typical of COVID-centric work in favor of a hopefulness and wonder in the strangeness of the situation. There are moments of entanglement and anxiety, but the openness and hope dominates. In each of the piece’s five movements, the composer introduces a theme that is looped and brought back in subsequent movements.

The emotional album closer is “Journey’s End,” reflecting on the battle with cancer of the composer’s wife of 45 years, Wendy. The piece is commissioned and performed by Kathleen Supové who, as a personal friend of the couple, witnessed Wendy’s heroic fight with the disease and Rolnick’s role in caring for her throughout her illness. The piece opens with unaccompanied piano and as it goes on, electronic elements slowly ebb and flow, occasionally obscuring the acoustic sound. As the electronics overtake the piano, the performer loses control over the sound. This delicate balance between the acoustic and electronic is a touching and emotional tribute.

Rolnick excels at this emotionally vulnerable approach to composition. Lockdown Fantasies, while documenting a specific tumultuous period of the composer’s life, is a deeply personal expression of universal experiences.

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Sample: Partita (1947)

Released in honor of Berger's 90th birthday year, this is the first CD  to unite all solo piano music of the venerated American composer on one release, and includes premiere recordings of several works written over  the last 70 years. Berger's music projects a strikingly original  synthesis of his own sonic and aesthetic vision with a multiplicity of  influences, including jazz, Stravinsky, Copland, and Schoenberg. This  project received support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

“It's too bad the composer Arthur Berger had to wait till he turned  90 last year to see a recording of his complete works for solo piano. The Centaur label has filled that gap with a CD featuring Geoffrey  Burleson, a top-notch pianist, and it was worth the wait, both for Mr.  Berger and for anyone interested in vibrant contemporary piano music.  The earliest works are products of a Bronx-born composer who has deftly  fashioned an urbane voice from diverse enthusiasms. You hear traces of  the Second Viennese School, pungent Coplandesque tonality and plenty of  streets-of-New York jazziness. But just as these Neo-Classical works  have some astringent atonal elements, the Five Pieces for Piano (1969), a  rigorously 12-tone work, has Neo-Classical lucidity and shimmering  harmonic radiance. Mr. Burleson brings rhythmic brio, rich  colorings and a resourceful technique to his accounts of these works.  But what really draws you in is his palpable excitement over Mr.  Berger's music.”
- Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

“In its rhythmic cunning and unpredictability, Arthur Berger's music  holds one's attention, with a restless fragmented style, tempi and  metres constantly upturned...Berger's precise rhythmic pointing and  independence of voices are singular. Geoffrey Burleson's agile, incisive  performances make the strongest possible case for this music, and the  disc gains by the pianist's own informed and comprehensive notes.”
- Lawrence A Johnson, Gramophone

“Berger’s piano music is a major strand in his work...it is written  in several techniques, and sometimes styles as diverse as German  Baroque, cheeky French charm, and advanced New York jazz coexist in  different layers within the same piece. But all of it bears the  unmistakable mark of the same quirky and indispensable personality, and  all exhibits an elevated level of craftsmanship. None of his music  outlives its welcome; it’s sparse but not austere because it has so many  implications. Burleson plays this music with assurance, color,  character and devotion. His extensive experience in all kinds of music,  including jazz, comes in handy here, and so does the precision of his  ear. Burleson’s performances are full of playful insight, offered in  tribute to the composer’s richly lived 90 years.”
- Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

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Sample: Hanns Eisler: Second Sonata for Piano, Op. 6 (1924)

An evocative survey of vocal and solo piano music by two of the leading  musical forces of Weimar Berlin. The CD opens with Arnold Schoenberg's  alternately seductive and satirical Brettl-Lieder, written for the  Über-Brettl Cabaret in Berlin. Schoenberg's student Hanns Eisler is  represented by his dynamic and forceful song collaborations with Bertolt  Brecht, as well as his Piano Sonata No. 2 and other solo piano music.  American composer Ed Harsh's "be not the slave of words/i fear  loquacious odes" concludes the CD, brilliantly recasting, colliding and  synthesizing Weimar styles with modern popular idioms.