Jonathan Powell (born 1969) is a British pianist and self-taught composer.
Jonathan Powell (born 1969) is a British pianist and self-taught composer.
Powell studied with Denis Matthews and Sulamita Aronovsky. He made his performing debut at the age of 20 in the Purcell Room in London.
His repertoire ranges from Bach to contemporary works, including composers as varied as Michael Finnissy, John White, Marco Ambrosini, Johannes Maria Staud and Christophe Sirodeau. He specialises in the works of the late Romantic era, including Russian music and Alexander Scriabin, on whose impact on Russian composers he wrote a dissertation at Cambridge University. Powell also contributed several articles to the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , including the one on Scriabin, and has published articles on various Soviet and Russian composers. [1] [2]
Powell is best known for his advocacy of Sorabji's music, which he began performing regularly in the early 2000s. He has given 10 public performances of Sorabji's four-hour Opus clavicembalisticum (1929–30) and both performed and premiered other works by Sorabji, including the substantial Fourth Piano Sonata (1928–29) and the four-and-a-half-hour Piano Symphony No. 6, Symphonia claviensis (1975–76). [2] [3] Most notably, in 2020, he released the premiere recording of Sorabji's eight-hour Sequentia cyclica super "Dies irae" ex Missa pro defunctis (1948–49), [3] which was met with considerable critical acclaim [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] and was recognised by the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics' Award) as the best piano recording in its "Quarterly Critics' Choice" for the second quarter of 2020. [12] Music writer Jed Distler said that Powell's performance has "a level of specificity and tonal application that gives new meaning to the word 'painstaking'" and makes "a compelling and standard-setting case for SC that will be hard to equal, let alone surpass", [4] and composer Christian B. Carey wrote that "Powell's dedicated work on behalf of Sorabji makes the composer's legacy seem assured." [10]
Powell's discography includes CDs for the Altarus, [3] Largo, Toccata, ASV, Danacord and Piano Classics labels, featuring works by Alexander Goldenweiser, Joseph Marx, Alexander Krein, Konstantin Eiges, and others.
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy. He is often considered the main Russian Symbolist composer and a major representative of the Russian Silver Age.
The Piano Sonata No. 7, Op. 64, subtitled Messe Blanche, was written by Alexander Scriabin in 1911. As one of the late piano sonatas of Scriabin's career, the music is highly chromatic and almost atonal. George Perle says that, "the primary set upon which the Seventh Sonata is based," is, in linear order as spelled by Scriabin, E, F♯, G, A, B♭, C, D♭, and that the mystic chord may be derived from the quartal spelling of this set.
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose music, written over a period of seventy years, ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano pieces, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and had a lifelong tendency to seclusion.
Lowell Liebermann is an American composer, pianist and conductor.
John Andrew Howard Ogdon was an English pianist and composer.
Opus clavicembalisticum is a work for solo piano, notable for its length and difficulty, composed by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and completed on 25 June 1930.
Boris Vadimovich Berezovsky is a Russian pianist.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Sofronitsky was a Soviet-Russian classical pianist, best known as an interpreter of Alexander Scriabin and Frédéric Chopin. His daughter is the Canadian pianist Viviana Sofronitsky.
Ruth Laredo was an American classical pianist.
Alexander Markovich Melnikov is a Russian pianist. His grandmother was the Soviet pianist and composer Zara Levina.
While a concerto is generally a piece for an instrument or instruments with orchestral accompaniment, some works for piano alone have been written with the seemingly contradictory designation concerto for solo piano.
Yuja Wang is a Chinese pianist. Born in Beijing, she began learning the piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. By the age of 21, she was already an internationally recognized concert pianist and signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. She has since established herself as one of the leading artists of her generation. Wang currently lives in New York.
Brilliant Classics is a classical music label based in the Dutch town of Leeuwarden. It is renowned for releasing super-budget-priced editions on CD of the complete works of J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and many other composers. The label also specialises in new recordings of early music, chamber, organ and piano music.
A piano symphony is a piece for solo piano in one or more movements. It is a symphonic genre by virtue of imitating orchestral tone colour, texture, and symphonic development.
Alistair Richard Hinton is a Scottish composer and musicologist with a focus on the works of his friend Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. He is the curator of the Sorabji Archive.
Sequentia cyclica super "Dies irae" ex Missa pro defunctis, commonly known as Sequentia cyclica, is a piano composition by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. Written between 1948 and 1949, it is a set of 27 variations on the medieval sequence Dies irae and is widely considered one of Sorabji's greatest works. With a duration of about eight hours, it is one of the longest piano pieces of all time.
"Gulistān"—Nocturne for Piano, commonly known as Gulistan, is a piano piece by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji written in 1940. Its title refers to Golestan, a collection of poems and stories by 13th-century Persian poet and writer Sa'di. The piece lasts about 30 minutes in performance and is often considered one of Sorabji's greatest works.
Markus Becker is a German pianist and academic teacher. He is focused on chamber music, and on piano concertos from the time around 1900. His recording of the complete piano works by Max Reger earned him awards. He is also a jazz pianist, and has been professor of piano and chamber music at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover since 1993.
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