The music of Catalan composer Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is difficult to pigeonhole, in much the same way as Erik Satie's, which it sometimes resembles. Mompou saw himself as existing outside the musical mainstream and admitted to no influence from other composers. The aesthetic of his early music understandably sounds like it grew out of Impressionism, since he studied in Paris from 1911 until the beginning of the First World War, but the piano pieces for which he is best known are mercurial enough to set them apart as ...
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The music of Catalan composer Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is difficult to pigeonhole, in much the same way as Erik Satie's, which it sometimes resembles. Mompou saw himself as existing outside the musical mainstream and admitted to no influence from other composers. The aesthetic of his early music understandably sounds like it grew out of Impressionism, since he studied in Paris from 1911 until the beginning of the First World War, but the piano pieces for which he is best known are mercurial enough to set them apart as the work of a composer genuinely indifferent to musical trends. The charge of Impressionist influence is given more weight by the very Impressionist orchestrations of two of his collections of evocative piano pieces written between 1915 and 1918. Manuel Rosenthal orchestrated Suburbis in 1936, the same year that Alexandre Tansman made an orchestration of four of the five movements of Scènes d'enfants. The orchestrations inevitably soften the piano's percussiveness, which gives the...
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