Customer Reviews

Exposed on the Cliffs of the Heart

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Exposed" is a splendid recording, one that coaxes us to expand our capacity to listen. It is piano music which breathes with space and delicate choices -- tone, harmony, and phrasing. I didn't know what to expect when I bought it. Now after listening four or five times, I sense there is value in keeping that attitude of no expectations intact. It struck me that one could even be disturbed by some of this music, but I would recommend that listeners choose to accept it for what it is -- vivid sonic territory without a map. But there's no possibility of getting lost, because if you can listen as honestly as the composer wrote this music, you'll always know where you are.

As with most things special, the appearance of something rare and fine appeals to a more refined sensibility. This very much happens to be the case with this exquisitely recorded and beautifully performed collection piano works by the well-known composer Terry Winter Owens.

As virtuosically performed by the Portuguese pianist Francisco Monteiro, these works shimmer with a sparkle and radiance that illuminate for us an ethereal style of piano composition not often heard or recorded. Unlike many contemporary or avant-garde works that give the impression of being studies in distress, these newly recorded works of Terry Winter Owens are New Music that appeals to both the ear and the mind and bear relistening for their sheer atmospheric power.

A more perfect marriage of talents between composer and performer, as exemplified in this fine recording, would indeed be hard to find.

exposed on the clifs of the heart - one of the most exquisite recordings I've ever heard. The composition after which the CD is named is superb: it really takes to the ultimate expresion of sublime Rainer Marie Rilke's poem. The same sublimity which the performer accomplishes during his interpretation of Terry Winter Owens' compositions. Francisco Monteiro creates his own perception of music combined to a conceptual perspective of what a CD must be: something faithfull to the composer's work and also something faithfull to the performer's actionand knowlegde. The quality of the sound is just the right one to produce a superb work of art: the Terry Owens works performed by this brilliant pianist.

I've been following the music of Terry Winter Owens since 1996. There's a certain unifying resonance and sparkle to all of it that I've heard, a free evolution of ringing sounds more akin to gamelan music and, interestingly enough, to Cage than to traditional counterpoint, but with a solidly Western, post-Romantic harmonic pallette. She dances a dangerous dance, out on the outer edges of Uptown and Downtown and West and East, exploring her own end of the landscape at right angles to all of that.

Monteiro's performances are remarkable not only because they are virtuoso acts, but because he makes the virtuousity seem so effortless and lets the subtlety and drama of Owens's scores come through.

Francisco Monteiro is a superb pianist and with his incredible technique has delivered a marvelous performance. The composer, Terry Winter Owens, has written such mystical and hauntingly beautiful music. This CD is a joy to own and play again and again.

Words cannot be more than shadows of sound, and yet this beautifully-performed new CD easily inspired this listener to want to share some words with you who listen but also read. Monteiro seems to be just perfect in rendering the power and magic of these exquisite pieces, whose titles and conception conjure a rich variety of impressions. Here are just three examples.

In Ariadne's Crown, the astronomical reference is anything but extraneous. A cyclic and echo-like sound environment is realized, generated by the interweaving of two pianos -- Gemini voices that seem to occupy a fixed domain in space, like grouped stars in a constellation. Paradoxically, this music directs one's attention inwardly as if to mimic the outward journey in sound.

In Toccata, we experience an intensely atmospheric work that opens delicately with a recurring water-droplet-like motif. While its phraseology is seemingly cyclical and echoic, the piece gradually shifts its focus, becoming more clearly deliberate in its intensity. Then, returning to a more meditative mood, the work seems to survey a soundscape of icy brittleness in the piano's higher registers, a geography frozen in time, as if by falling snow, and animated now and then by occasional gusts and rushes of swirling and punctuating notes as if to suggest the tenuousness and changing nature of physical phenomena.

Finally, in Rendezvous With Hyakutake, terrestrial sounds pay tribute to an aberrant celestial body. Actually, it is as if the depicted rendezvous between planet and comet were being viewed from a great distance. And yet, in the hush of a universal silence, we hear the figurative, vibrant sounds of a sparkling body of gases hurtling through incalculable time and distance. In effect, we hear the comet's voice as an imagined soliloquy in space -- insistent and exotic.

Indeed, this is music that has power and suggestiveness, an experience worth having.

This music requires that I open my heart to hear it. I haven't done this yet, but I'm aware of the need, and expect a very sensitive reward.

....but what kind of ... are you smoking to get "a soundscape of icy brittleness in the piano's higher registers, a geography frozen in time, as if by falling snow?"

However, "the figurative, vibrant sounds of a sparkling body of gases" about sums it up! Plop plop fizz fizz anyone?