Modern Tonality in Music

Even though Angela Hewitt's repertoire is quite extensive and diverse, encompassing the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and modern eras, her true specialty is the music of J.S. Bach, which she has recorded almost exclusively for Hyperion since the 1980s. With this recording of The Art of Fugue, Hewitt completes her long-running series of piano renditions of the solo keyboard works, and while not everyone is convinced that Bach composed this study of fugal techniques for the keyboard, Hewitt's performance is credible and satisfying. She controls the often unwieldy counterpoint by regarding the lines as if they were vocal parts, and her phrases are shaped by natural breathing points, as well as the different emotional qualities she brings to each fugue and canon. The Art of Fugue can be daunting for both performer and listener because its persistent tonality of D minor and monothematic material can be quite tedious in the wrong hands.

Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) has stated that his works have an "abstract plot" driving his music from behind the scenes. His series of (so far) eleven symphonies certainly testifies to this statement; each of his symphonies seems to set out from a fixed point, always to confront the impassable, and always trying to reconcile that conflict in the most poignant and personal of ways.

"After having worked on several pieces for bandoneon and orchestra in recent years, I felt the urge to present some of my chamber music. All music featuring the bandoneon inevitably conjures up associations with tango, and yes, my music is no exception, most apparent here in my works for bandoneon and string quartet, 'Violent Tenderness' and 'Polaco'."

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, murderer in 1590 of his guilty wife and her lover, later took a wife from the d’Este family, rulers of Ferrara, whose musical interests coincided with his own. He wrote a quantity of sacred and secular vocal music and a relatively small number of instrumental pieces. In style his music is unusual in its sudden changes of tonality, its harmony and its intensity of feeling, qualities that have found particular favour among some modern theorists.

Keith Jarrett - In The Light (1974) {2CD Set, ECM 1033/34 rel 2000}
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© 1974, 2000 ECM Records | ECM 1033/34 / 835 011-2
Classical / Jazz / Modern Creative / Piano / Harpsichord

Even before his solo concerts became popular successes, Keith Jarrett was clearly getting a free hand from ECM founder Manfred Eicher, as this ambitious double album of classical compositions proves. In this compendium of eight works for all kinds of ensembles, the then-28-year old Jarrett adamantly refuses to be classified, flitting back and forth through the centuries from the baroque to contemporary dissonance, from exuberant counterpoint for brass quintet to homophonic writing for a string section.

Liszt, according to the great British pianist John Ogdon, was responsible for ‘breaking the Germanic stranglehold on nineteenth-century composers, and scattering the seeds of modern music almost literally to the four winds. His music shows an avant-garde attitude to the problems of composing which was without parallel in the nineteenth century.’