Customer Reviews

Derus Simples

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this is the first I've heard of another pianist delving into Flynn's music, and the invitation is a powerful one. Madge as well has a special affinity with multi-textural interplaying traversing the keyboard,an elegant sense of balance proportion,shape,design from so multifarious,multi-dimensional music as Flynn.Madge seems more at home with Flynn less with his Wolpe or Krenek where it was a bit cautious, tedious and labored. If you've scoured Flynn's magnum opus to the world,his Trinity, Derus Simples is very much more fragmented,sparce and transparent not in a derogatory way either,more SIMPLE particles of piano sound, deeply elegant and evocative. With Trinity, and American Rest, it seemed Flynn's creativity inhabited a tunnel, a myopia waiting to break out of itself,which it eventually did with the advent of Salvage,which I've heard more than four times myself live,Derus Simples however still retains a music powerfully wrought, treacherously focused, well proportioned,with a classical beauty even if a varigated,thorny,asymmetrical one. There is much less extroverted passion here in Derus Simples,no seemingly uncontrolled furies of roaring piano textures,no unstoppable blizzards and cascades of tones,fistfulls of tones, all tightly controlled by Flynn looking from on high above. Derus Simples has more an abstract rarefied beauty, something I've yet to encounter with Flynn's dynamic multi-dimensional music. However you never sense the presence of deep physical models,geometric arborecences,or like configurations of ice frozen to a window pane through the morning light,no deeply engrained set theoretical lines as one would fine in Babbitt or Xenakis,or Ferneyhough. Flynn's music directed from the outside in,his subjectivity is always at the heart the center of the pianistic discourse. Again he has returned the piano its profound voice something lossed with the advent the eclipse of modernity and the post-war avant-garde.

Chicago-based composer/pianist George Flynn has created a work unified with the "Complex of Simples", small tonal units of great potential. In something like a "self-reflective Bell-curve" Flynn takes the tiny tritone through a fantastic journey of harmonic, rhythmic, and magnificent (yet often subliminal) counterpoint, utilizing the "middle - sostenuto - pedal", that which holds both played and unplayed notes, while a massive mid-section propells through enthralling virtuosic hurdles, gradually returning to the base-Simples, that pay wonderful homage to Mr. Derus and Mr. Sorabji, to whom the work is dedicated.

Pianist Geoffery D. Madge, a pioneer of the music of Sorabji and many others, makes a potent, empowering statement with his performance of this most complex of "Simples".