Sunday, December 22, 2013

Ten Classical Pieces You Don't Care About (Yet): #6



              The fifth piece of music that you don’t care about (yet) is Carl Vine’s Piano Sonata (1990). Considered one of Australia’s most versatile musicians, Vine composed dance scores for “Flederman,” a contemporary music ensemble he co-founded in Sydney. Once a modernist, Vine soon discovered a new idiom with help from the sonic possibilities of the piano and the simplicity of the triad. Huge success for his Piano Sonata, commissioned by the Sydney Dance Company and first performed at the Sydney Opera House, came when Michael Kieran Harvey (the piece’s dedicatee) won a prestigious piano competition with a lyrical and aggressive performance. Now, Vine’s Piano Sonata is widely heralded as the most important one since Elliot Carter’s.  
Harvey states that the piece “was exactly what I was looking for at the time – not high complexity, not minimalism, not transcribed jazz or pop, not world music, something unique which suited my predilection for condensed energetic music with a dash of lyricism.” Here’s the first movement:



           Like Elliott Carter, Vine built his sonata around a rhythmic scheme of metric modulations, the relationships between disparate tempi serving as structural pillars. Motoric rhythms and resonances build up layer by layer in mounting tension, finally bouncing into new speeds and sounds. Passages oscillate from labyrinthine pointillism to granite-like density, which “propel the music irresistibly towards its climax." You can hear kinetic textures coupled with austere lyricism in the second movement: 



          For Vine, extreme virtuosity comes with a feeling for narrative and the fun of human life. This Piano Sonata feels that way not because it is interestingly crafted (Bacewicz) or in spite of itself (Bono), but simply because it is fun to listen to. After all, "what [Vine] wants to do is write…pieces at the end of which people feel better" (Michael Oliver). If you appreciate virtuosity, dense textures that are quick on their feet, and pop/jazz harmonies in the concert hall, you might feel much better after the Piano Sonata. If Jim Svejda is right in saying that Vine defines his own unique musical world, Kui Min is even more correct: Carl Vine is “one of the most articulate composers Australia has produced."

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