Originally recorded in 1998 and issued on the Gasparo label the following year, this album was acquired by Naxos and reissued as the kickoff to an apparently complete cycle of George Rochberg's piano music. The entire album is devoted to a single 70-minute work, Circles of Fire, and it's something of a summation of the life's work of this American composer, who stirred outrage when he bucked the serialist orthodoxy and returned to tonality with his String Quartet No. 3 in 1972. He never completely abandoned atonal ...
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Originally recorded in 1998 and issued on the Gasparo label the following year, this album was acquired by Naxos and reissued as the kickoff to an apparently complete cycle of George Rochberg's piano music. The entire album is devoted to a single 70-minute work, Circles of Fire, and it's something of a summation of the life's work of this American composer, who stirred outrage when he bucked the serialist orthodoxy and returned to tonality with his String Quartet No. 3 in 1972. He never completely abandoned atonal procedures, often using them in contrast with tonal passages, and he favored stylistic collages. Circles of Fire for two pianos, commissioned by the Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo heard here, develops these ideas on a large scale. The work's 15 movements include techniques ranging from twelve-tone music (in the "Canonic Variations," track 3) to quotation (the "Fuga a sei voci," track 13, is closely based on a Bach fugue), to aleatoric devices (in the "Nebulae," track 7, and "The Infinite Ricercar,"...
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