The third in a series of winter piano concerts from John Tilbury performing lesser known repertoire. Following on from his previous performances of pieces by Samuel Beckett, Dave Smith, Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons, Tilbury presents works from Russian composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin, and English experimental composer John White.
JOHN WHITE
9 Sonatas: 110
127
84
116
140 (the well-tempered cyclist)
117
176 (first performance)
165
75
JOHN TILBURY / piano
British pianist John Tilbury is renowned for his remarkable touch and in constant demand as an interpreter of piano pieces by composers such as Morton Feldman and John Cage. During the 1960s, Tibury was closely associated with the composer Cornelius Cardew, whose music he has interpreted and recorded and a member of the Scratch Orchestra. He is also an incredible improvisor, most famously as a member of legendary British group AMM.
Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist. Scriabin's early work is characterised by a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language influenced by Frédéric Chopin. Later in his career, independently of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a substantially atonal and much more dissonant musical system, accorded to mysticism. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia, and associated colors with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale, while his color-coded circle of fifths was also influenced by theosophy. He is considered by some to be the main Russian Symbolist composer.
Scriabin was one of the most innovative and most controversial of early modern composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that, "No composer has had more scorn heaped or greater love bestowed..." Leo Tolstoy once described Scriabin's music as "a sincere expression of genius." Scriabin had a major impact on the music world over time, and influenced composers like Roy Agnew, Nikolai Roslavets, Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky. Scriabin's importance in the Soviet musical scene, and internationally, drastically declined. "No one was more famous during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after death." In the 1970s, for instance, there were only three recordings of his complete (published) sonatas. Yet Scriabin's work has steadily regained popularity in recent years.
JOHN WHITE
John White is an English experimental composer and musical performer. He invented the early British form of minimalism known as Systems music, with his early Machines.
White's style is informed by what Dave Smith called an 'apparently disparate collection of composers from the world of "alternative" musical history', including Satie, Alkan, Schumann, Reger, Szymanowski, Busoni and Medtner. These composers have influenced his piano sonatas, which White has been writing since 1956, but other influences on his wider work include Messiaen, Rachmaninoff, and the electronic pop ensembles Kraftwerk, and The Residents. Although it is so eclectic as to cover a wide range of styles, White's work has been called ironic, 'experimental', and even 'avant postmodern'. Although White had worked in what could be called an 'experimental' style since 1962, he composed music using indeterminate means after 1966. His work today includes music having numerical or other systems processes.
As of 2010, White has written 172 piano sonatas, 25 symphonies, 30 ballets, and much incidental music for the stage, all in a highly eclectic style (or, more accurately, range of styles). His stage music includes commissions by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. His recent projects include a set of song cycles, one of which consists of settings of friends' addresses.
