New York Variations [Import]

John Corigliano (Composer), Aaron Copland (Composer), Ben [2] Weber (Composer), George Tsontakis (Composer), Stephen Hough (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Stephen Hough
• Composer: John Corigliano, Aaron Copland, Ben [2] Weber, George Tsontakis
• Audio CD (May 12, 1998)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Hyperion UK
• ASIN: B000007NEC
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #120,599 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #47 in Music > Classical > Historical Periods > Modern, 20th, & 21st Century > Instruments > Keyboard > Piano

Track Listings

1. Etude Fantasy: Etude 1: For The Left Hand Alone

2. Etude Fantasy: Etude 2: Legato

3. Etude Fantasy: Etude 3: Fifths To Thirds

4. Etude Fantasy: Etude 4: Ornaments

5. Etude Fantasy: Etude 5: Melody

6. Piano Variations

7. Fantasia (Variations)

8. Ghost Variations: (Ad libitum - Strictly - Languid -Tempo 1 - Mozart Variations)

9. Ghost Variations: Scherzo I

10. Ghost Variations: Scherzo II

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Tsontakis is a masterpiece, March 7, 2000

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: New York Variations (Audio CD)

How wonderful it is that British pianist, Stephen Hough, has made a recording on a British label, Hyperion, of recent American solo piano music. Well, the Copland isn't recent but it certainly is an important piece. For me the big discovery was the Tsontakis Ghost Variations. A big, eclectic piece with the 'ghost' of Beethoven and Mozart hiding behind modern compositional techniques; Hough has championed this piece all over the world, with good reason: it's a masterpiece. The Corigliano is an ambitious work that is just a notch below the Tsontakis in effect. Don't hesitate to plunk down your money for this disc.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent survey of modern American composers, April 2, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Los Alamitos, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: New York Variations (Audio CD)

This recent disc by the already-legendary Stephen Hough will go down as a landmark recording of 20th century piano music. It introduces a very fine work: George Tsontakis' Ghost Variations, and features fabulous performances of Copland's Piano Variations as well as the world premiere of John Corigliano's long-neglected Etude-Fantasy. For anyone with an interest in modern American piano music, this is a wonderful disc to have.

3 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deeply probing piano playing of densely wrought pieces., December 30, 2000

By 

scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: New York Variations (Audio CD)

you can never argue with superb inspired performance, and that's what Hough brings to these one-dimensional-in-conception pieces. All seem cut from the same emotive fabric,a deeply dark sense and brooding quality with a new languages to exploit in retrogressive order, For the older generation Copland, and Weber it was looking forward for the youngsters Tsontakis, and Corigliano it is a matter of looking backward to another time to re-recapture yet again openly romantic gestures that reduce musical experience to a common currency.

Copland's Piano Variations was quite an achievement for its time 1930,with thepolitical,cultural disturbances in the world the unthinkable not yet even thought of yet of Europe.Written after Copland had returned from a summer in Europe absorbing creative notions of a truly unique American music. The work is built from cells,and major-minor sonorities reduced at times to single tones C and C# which rock the foundations of the works deeply sonoric constitution.E major trying to reconstitute or proclaim itself. You can hear the entire literature of serious American music in this piece, the young Bernstein had learned great profundities here. I've heard this piece played with a bit more restraint taking fully the gentle emotive ways of what we now know as Copland's musical signature,i.e. the thin orchestration, the sparce musical statements projected through livily dance,folk rhythms reoccuring and repeating. The final Allegro con brio has a jazzy way as well yet not giving up its original creative premise.

Corigliano as well reveals a compactedness of structural design, a density here, perhaps the lifeworld of New York City renders this. The musical ideas are deeply romantic with quiet reflections after roaring arrogant statements ripping through the entire keyboard. The Ben Weber as well could have been written yesterday who can tell with the emotive plurality and time-hopping postmodernity we have been subjected to and allow ourselves within today's concert repertoire. It seems as if time has stopped nothing "wears" their unique durational frame anymore. Weber largely self-taught has a romantic experience to portray as well with the entire keyboard of broken chordal sequences containing his thoughts.

I don't know what the fuss is over the Tsontakis,"Ghost Variations" if it a masterpeice? well it is a very weak and transparent one. It is simply a good inspired piece that relies quite heavily on dance-like and toccata-like rhythms to keep its argument high in the air. I can safely see its accessible appeal, it rolls off the keyboard quite nicely without any deeper inner reflections except magical ones(its tremoli chords) to halt the pent-up passages. It reminded me of the "Fantastique" persona of Hector Berlioz actually or the self-indulgent(yet provocative) chordal excursions of the recluse Charles Alkan. It had that phantasmagoric quality of trancedence toward another world.