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It came as no surprise for me to discover that composer Mathieu Karsenti is also a visual artist, whose abstract work reflects the movement, layers, counterpoint and rhythm of music.

His music is often multi-layered and contrapuntal, abstract yet tonal, exploring sonic colours, timbres and textures to create atmospheric, evocative pieces. His new EP, Under Piano Skies, offers the listener a selection of “internal musical landscapes” inspired by weather and the sky. Performed by pianist Marie Awadis, the four pieces on this album reference clouds, weather and sky while taking the listener to abstract realms and places for reflection and pause.

Throughout Karsenti, capitalises on the piano’s resonance and sustaining abilities to create atmospheric washes of sound and colour, the edges between notes and chords often blurred, like a watercolour painting.  In some instances, echo and sound effects are added to enhance the piano sound, but in general the instrument’s own sonic capabilities are sufficient to achieve the composer’s intentions.  ‘Virga’, a piece which starts simply, with two voices, grows increasingly florid with the introduction of repetitive semi-quaver triplet figures over low, sustained chords. With generous use of the pedal, a dramatic resonance and vibration is created, redolent of Somei Satoh’s extraordinary ‘Incarnation II’, before reverting to the simplicity of the opening. 

‘Cerulean’, by contrast, uses a minimal amount of notes, carefully chosen and meticulously organised, to create a work of meditative qualities, its serenity only occasionally disturbed by unexpected harmonies or piquant note blends. 

‘Petrichor’, named after the word for that special smell of pavements after rain and including sound effects of rainfall at the opening and close of the piece, is similarly reflective, impressionistic in character with one or two nods to Debussy and Satie in its melody and harmony. 

‘Nimbus’, marked “dreamy, head in the clouds”, seems to owe something to Morton Feldman in its gentle dynamics, ethereal, ‘floating’ sounds and use of silence; as the final piece on the EP it may end definitively on a long, sustained chord, yet its timbres and mood continue to resonate long after the piano sound has died away. 

The music is elegantly, sensitively played by pianist Marie Awadis, who is able to bring clarity to the sound, especially in the higher range of the piano, while also appreciating the particular effects the composer intends. The result is an album of exquisitely measured, absorbing and atmospheric piano music

Mathieu Karsenti has made the score of the pieces available and this music will certainly appeal to those who enjoy minimalist/post-classical repertoire and exploring the sonic possibilities of the piano (ability level Grade 5-7). 

‘Under Piano Skies’ is available to download or stream and the scores are available to purchase from the composer’s website

Meet the Artist interview with Mathieu Karsenti

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Philip Glass

As a string player who can make a claim to only the most rudimentary pianistic ability (accompanying On the Dodgems in a pupil’s ABRSM preparatory test really did make me go cross-eyed), I embarked on this Pianist’s Alphabet entry on Philip Glass with the fitting trepidation of the interloper.

Why do I want to write about Philip Glass’s piano music? The answer is envy. There are many marvellous tricks that we string players can execute – vibrato, portamento, flying staccato – but one thing that is harder for us is the motoric or raindrop ostinato which is so integral to Philip Glass’s music. We can try, in pieces like Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, but various physical impediments stand in the way of pellucid purity, the bow being the major one; therefore, in Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, we are far better suited to the long notes, which can be made expressive with different bow pressure, or judicious vibrato No doubt there are also many difficulties inherent in Glass’s piano music, which require the same attention to the voicing and spinning out of its long harmonic lines as a piece of Bach, but the results are marvellous: mesmeric, crystalline, resonant, and eloquent, despite the ‘limitations’ Glass places on his musical palette.

Like many people – I assume – I first became properly acquainted with Glass’s music through film scores (specifically The Hours and Notes on a Scandal) and when I came to know more of his music, I began to wonder how it was that his minimalism possessed such rhetorical power. I also wondered why so many people, hearing similar styles of music, by composers less aesthetically adept than Glass would tut ‘Sounds like Philip Glass’ with a dismissive, mirthless laugh.

In Tristian Evans’s Music, Multimedia, and Postminimalism (Ashgate: 2015), the author’s more positive and open-minded analyses explore why Glass’s music possesses such infinite adaptability, moving between the spheres of absolute music and ‘film music’ with ease – an ease which, as Edward Strickland writes in New Grove, has led to Glass becoming ‘one of the most commercially successful, and critically reviled, composers of his generation.’ You can read an example of such criticism by Justin Davidson, in the New York magazine. However, the ways that Davidson, amongst others, censures Glass, are precisely the reasons why I like his piano music: Glass is famous for his musical intertextuality (mainly quotations of his own ideas) and references to other music. In his Etude No. 2, there’s a clear referential link to the first Prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and it is pursuing the twisted paths of motivic reference – through the repetition that Davidson finds so distasteful – that I love.

Finally, performance. As an encore to Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos in E-flat at the 2015 Proms, the Labèque sisters played the fourth of Glass’s Four Movements for Two Pianos. Witnessing the intricacy of their interaction, the delicacy required to balance the musical texture, and extract its essential melodic trajectory, was a masterclass in communicative, rhapsodic piano playing.

Corrina Connor

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Pianist Ivan Ilic has already featured music by American minimalist composer Morton Feldman on his previous disc The Transcendentalist. His new disc (released 16 October) is devoted to a single work by Feldman, ‘For Bunita Marcus’, dedicated Feldman’s student who studied with him from 1975-1981. For seven years until Feldman’s death in 1987, he and Bunita Marcus were inseparable (though she refused his marriage proposal), composing side by side and sharing ideas.

The work typifies Feldman’s style: comprising small clusters and units of notes, mainly consisting of 3/8, 5/16 and 2/2 bars – tiny ideas which together form a vast and musical landscape, it is curiously absorbing music. What it lacks in texture, it makes up for in its meticulously placed sounds, and its intensity comes from its repetitive and reiterative qualities, with figures varied but not developed.

As Feldman himself said of this music “It can only work if you go along with the material and see how it is turning out.” There is an exploratory quality to Ilic’s playing, a sense of the music being wrought in the moment, spontaneous and unprepared. His touch is assured yet sensitive. Sounds chime, resonate and glow, and the work’s 22 sections unfold with a subtle and graceful expansiveness.

The disc comes with comprehensive notes to guide the listener through the work, but you, like me, may prefer to simply allow the sounds to drift over you.

‘For Bunita Marcus’ (1985) is released on the French label Paraty, distributed worldwide by Harmonia Mundi. The album is the final installment in Ivan’s Morton Feldman Trilogy, alongside the CD The Transcendentalist (2014) and the Art Book/CD/DVD Detours Which Have To Be Investigated (2014).  

Further information here

Meet the Artist……Ivan Ilic