In Your Head: New Music for Piano Four Hands

Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt, piano
Navona 6190
Total Time:  70:46
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

There is something about the idea of two performers sitting down to perform on the same piano that makes for an exciting evening of music making.  It is slightly a different requirement from the two-piano literature in that both performers must sit closely together and work such that their hands stay out of one another’s way in the process.  A few of these such duos still keep this literature alive and Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt are among them having been bringing this music to audiences over a thirty-year career.  For the past ten years they have been presenting concerts at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  It was out of these programs that the present recording slowly evolved beginning with a commission of Lewis Spratlan’s Dreamworlds.  They subsequently sought out four other composers with the challenge of writing new pieces.  Also included is a work by John LaMontaine (1920-2013) which the couple has performed earlier.  While some of the visual flair may be lost, it does not take away from the results achieved here.

In Donald Wheelock’s five-movement piece Mind Games (2017), a more tonal musical language greets us from the start with a bit of high energy that dissipates into a more reflective exploration of the seven-note motive with its slight chromatic turns.  The first movement is a reworking of an orchestral miniature from the composer’s After-Images, but the rest of the movements then settle into exploring different aspects of anticipation and challenge.  From the opening “High Expectations” to the rapid passage work of “Panic” and the perpetual motion of the final Abandon, the music stays fairly traditional harmonically.  Moments of “Cogitation” and “Reflection” (with its almost Baroque-like intricacy) create their own more contemplative states in an overall engaging work.  It is rather fascinating to hear the intricate technical passages work so beautiful against some of the angular lines and harmonic syncopations.

Spratlan’s Dreamworlds (2015) is a three-movement work that explores the inner worlds of three quite different individuals: St. Francis of Assisi, Hitler, and a bureaucrat.  The music follows the dreams of these individuals allowing Spratlan to explore musical quotation and stylistic references.  The first movement creates a gauze-like haze that moves us into the first dream state with its semi-religious overtones and Gregorian chant quotations that serve to tie things together.  Bird-like flitting can also be heard along with a slight departure to suggest Arabic lands.  Beethoven and Wagner are obvious choices to flit into the more bizarre dreams of Hitler which alternate with the dark and intense dissonances depicting war, including a macabre rendition and deconstruction of Haydn’s Deutschland Uber Alles.  The finale features chilling vocalizations of the gas chambers.  A more salon like atmosphere creates a great contrast to the previous movement with a more episodic finale.  The first episode finds the protagonist repeating a task that does not always go as planned.  The central episode features a variety of repeated dissonant lines and harmonies that continue in an almost manic way.  This all gives way to a more romantic moment.  The piece is a fascinating listen that perfectly matches its attempt to create dream states for three diverse people.

LaMontaine’s Sonata for Piano 4-Hands (1965) represents an olio of musical diversity present in the composer’s works for piano.  The “Preamble” is in two sections and focuses on dotted rhythms with a more lyrical second subject exploring quartal writing.  More angular writing opens the “Scherzo” which shifts into a dark jazz ostinato pattern with syncopated material in the upper registers of the piano.  The final movement is a “Fugue” that continues the exploration of fourths but has a more serial quality to its intense writing that spans all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.  It is an intense but quite strong piece as well which hopefully will encourage others to explore the composer’s work.

Daniel Asia may be the most familiar contemporary American composer included here.  His five symphonies (recorded by James Sedares) received critical acclaim and his music is available on Summit, Albany, and the New World labels.  The three-movement Iris (2017) opens with a delightful sense of play and wit that gradually becomes more somber and is offset by a central lyrical section.  Bell sounds bookend the more reflective central movement which is followed by a more driving finale.

The last two pieces on the album are single-movement works.  First is Matthew St. Laurent’s Overture for a Lucid Dream (2017).  St Laurent was a piano student of the duo and currently works in Los Angeles as composer and orchestrator on television and film projects.  The music here is a more traditional one harmonically with a grand romantic quality with touches of melancholy as each thematic thread takes us on a journey for our imagination.  The final work, The Silent Hearth (2018) by composer David Sanford explores the history of the many students whom the duo has worked with as they spend all that time in rehearsals and practice rooms practicing and improving their musicianship.  This narrative informs Sanford’s work along with a harmonic and melodic underpinning of borrowed music from Schubert’s Overture to Fierrabras (D. 798), itself arranged for piano four-hands.  An ostinato line helps build energy to a fitting close.

Overall, Muller and Steigerwalt have been beyond fortunate to have such a great wealth of new works that help further enhance the piano four-hand repertoire.  These are equally fascinating pieces which stand on their own quite well.  The variety within these different explorations of this genre make this an important release of contemporary music.