E.m.foster

The opera Otello by Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito not only represents the outstanding result of an intensely fruitful creative collaboration between composer and librettist, but also one of the most important core works in the opera repertoire. With his musical setting of Shakespeare’s play, the composition of which took him several years, Verdi also achieved a new level of quality within the framework of his operatic oeuvre. His path was resolute and consistent, leading him away from structured numbers of arias, recitatives and ensembles, and towards the through-composed, large-scale dramatic form. All this based on the timeless literary foundation of Shakespeare's play.

The early '70s were rife with political and racial conflicts, indicative of the pressures surrounding the scandal of Watergate and Richard Nixon, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the painful continuation of the Vietnam War. As explosive as the times were, Frank Foster's The Loud Minority reflected all of those mounting tensions while remaining hopeful in a self-determining way that gave rise to the "I'm Black and I'm Proud" sentiment. Foster assembled a giant of a big band featuring dual instrumentation all around, including keyboards, basses, and drummers to power a horn section chock-full of the best mainstream jazz and progressive players of the day.

Sidney Foster, 1917-1977, was undoubtedly one of the greatest pianists of his time, but he is all but unknown today, and made almost no commercial recordings. In 1993, the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland issued a two-CD set of Foster performances taken from live concerts. This year Marston is celebrating Foster’s centenary by issuing a seven-CD set of solo and concerto performances from live concerts, never before issued. Foster’s breath-taking virtuosity, the volcanic intensity he was capable of unleashing, and his beautiful sound, are immediately apparent, but it is his gift of supreme music-making that places him solidly in the top rank of twentieth century pianists.