The early works of Lukas Foss are neoclassical in style, using controlled improvisation and chance procedures with the twelve-tone technique and serialism, while his later works are polystylistic.
The early works of Lukas Foss are neoclassical in style, using controlled improvisation and chance procedures with the twelve-tone technique and serialism, while his later works are polystylistic.
Foss's solo piano music forms a relatively small part of his compositional output. Still, it demonstrates, as a whole, his lighter, neoclassical stylistic practice and associated techniques. This repertoire spans a 50-year period from 1938 to 1988 and includes:
The piece that stands apart from this largely neoclassical repertoire is Solo (1981), a hybrid minimalist and twelve-tone work employing as a guiding technical principle the gradual transformation of several pitch collections. At the conclusion of Solo, these pitch collections change from serial to tonal, effecting a remarkable surprise. Of For Lenny, the opera composer Daniel Felsenfeld has written that Foss "is loving and careful with his treatment, avoiding vulgarity or navel gazing and offering instead a calm (yet not un-bouncy) treatment of this famous tune". [1]
The world-premiere recording of Foss's complete extant piano works was released in 2002 by the Sonatabop.com recording label based in Milwaukee. This recording was completed in honor of Foss's 80th birthday; the project was conceived by pianist Daniel Beliavsky (b. 1978), who in collaboration with producers Donald Sipe (the owner and head of Sonatabop.com as well as Omicronarts.com) and Yuri Beliavsky recorded the repertoire in the summer of 2002. [2] Naxos's release of Foss's complete piano works dates from early 2005, over two years after Sonatabop's recording. Despite this chronology, Naxos inserted a false claim into the CD materials that its release is the first. [3] Several reviews make note of this discrepancy, including one by John France on the British music site MusicWeb-International, [4] and one by Peter Grahame Woolf on another British site, Musical Pointers. [5]
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