David Earl : 75th Birthday Tribute - Œuvres pour piano

Description

SOMM Recordings is proud to celebrate the "stylish and powerful" (The Times) South African pianist-composer David Earl with a tribute for his 75th birthday. The release includes Oxymorons – 24 Preludes (1993) and Scenes from a South African Childhood – 9 pieces for solo piano (2013). Notably, the second of these childhood scenes, "Princess Rainbow," was included in the highly acclaimed release African Pianism [SOMMCD 0647] by pianist Rebeca Omordia. David Earl was born in Stellenbosch, in the Western Cape of South Africa, in 1951. He made his professional piano debut at 16 with the South African Broadcasting Corporation and performed Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto with the Cape Symphony Orchestra the following year. He moved to London at 19 to study at the Trinity College of Music, giving the first of a series of solo piano recitals at Wigmore Hall while still a student and broadcasting live on BBC Radio 3. Jeremy Nicholas, writing for Gramophone, stated: "For those who love their contemporary music tonal, substantial, and individual... David Earl is certainly a name to add to your list." Earl premiered his Suite for Piano No. 1 Mosaïques at Wigmore Hall in 1977. His first Piano Concerto and Che'ri, a ballet commissioned for The Scottish Ballet, quickly followed. His extensive catalog includes other ballet scores, operas, chamber music, choral and vocal works, film music, a wide range of concertos for various instruments, and works for solo piano. David Earl teaches at the University of Cambridge and, before settling there, spent seven years in Oxford. He describes the Oxymorons as miniature symphonic poems reflecting friends and places he encountered during his years in Oxford. The title also refers to the paradoxical idea that he was writing tonal music at a time when it was not considered de rigueur. Following the same order as the Preludes of Chopin and others, this set begins in C major and its relative A minor, and traverses all keys to F major and D minor. The nine works that make up Scenes from a South African Childhood are personal essays of a specific time and place, universally evocative in their very specificity. David Earl grew up in the small estate Old Nectar, in the Jonkershoek Valley north of Cape Town. The music evokes scenes of a young David wandering through the gardens of Old Nectar with his mother; fly-fishing with his father in the river that runs through the valley; on holiday at Groot Drakenstein and discovering there Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25, which becomes indelibly associated with that place. Then we moved to Cape Town, where its landmarks, beaches, trees, and warm Southern Hemisphere Christmases create their own nostalgia, expressed here through the music.