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Piano Sonata
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Piano Sonata (1982)
Piano Sonata was composed between April and June 1982 in response to a
commission from the Brisbane based American pianist Eugene Gienger. Initially,
the planned performance of the work had to be indefinitely postponed and
the piece remained unperformed until 1989.
The most striking feature of the work is in its contrast between the two
movements, which are nonetheless played without pause. A number of works
since then have carried through this idea of two distinctive movements
giving the work its total shape.
The first movement is rhapsodic and freely developmental whilst the second
is brief, aggressive and structurally more rigid. Where the first movement
seems constantly to be in a state of unresolved change and fluid motion
the second is more deliberate and uncompromising. This dichotomy is stressed
in other ways: the range of the piano used in the first movment is high
and in the second low, the predominant volume is different, and rhythmic
articulation is soft then hard.
Preoccupations at the time of composition were with creating intertwining
and evolving colors and textures cast within a motivic and intensely virtuousic
and quite passionate idiom. The technical ability required to play the
piece is itself a reflection of the prodigious skills of the commissioner,
Eugene Gienger. The divisions of tonality, atonality and non-tonality
seemed irrelevant in the process of this work's composition; instead,
piano sonority and brilliance are the compositional rule of thumb.
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