This Bridge album brings together reissues of three important works by American composer Peter Lieberson and a first recording of his 2003 Piano Quintet. The earliest and latest works on the CD, Bagatelles for piano (1985) and the Piano Quintet, are surprisingly the most similar. Lieberson was never a doctrinaire modernist, but the music from much of his career, and including these two pieces, tends toward linear angularity and harmonic astringency. Even at its most abstract, though, his music has such alert intelligence ...
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This Bridge album brings together reissues of three important works by American composer Peter Lieberson and a first recording of his 2003 Piano Quintet. The earliest and latest works on the CD, Bagatelles for piano (1985) and the Piano Quintet, are surprisingly the most similar. Lieberson was never a doctrinaire modernist, but the music from much of his career, and including these two pieces, tends toward linear angularity and harmonic astringency. Even at its most abstract, though, his music has such alert intelligence and fresh inventiveness that it stands out from much of the "difficult" serious music of the end of the 20th century. In the mid-'90s his music took on a more lyrical character, which, combined with his formidable technique and innate expressiveness, resulted in works of astonishing communicative power and depth. (His Neruda Songs, written for his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in 2005, won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award.) Lieberson described the more overtly emotional...
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