Tyler Kline, Orchard, A Collection of 50 Short Piano Pieces

 

Tyler Kline is a composer of Modern-Tonal and Post-Tonal imagination. I cannot say I've had much exposure to his music--that is, until now and his Orchard: A Collection of 50 Short Piano Pieces (Neuma 2-CDs). My eyesight does not handle the modern graphic design trend of very small lettering so I cannot read the liners but wait, I have the press sheet. Fourteen pianists from around the world take part in performing the works, and they do a fine job I must say.

What is remarkable and in part transcends what words can express is the abundance of inventive pianisms, all inspired and thought-out, with a certain tenderness at times and other times a dynamic rugged quality that is both whimsical and serious at the same time? It has something of the playfulness of the Alt Moderns, I mean French Impressionists and Satie, a hint of Messaien, then too Cage, Feldman, Crumb, ritual suspensions and repetitions that say their say quickly then go. it is piano music to follow much beyond the folks we have lived with since, say, 1900 to the present, those folks, and an element I cannot quite wrap into words. And given that there are 50 miniatures it is not a simple thing to characterize. 

Given the short and quixotic flight of work-to-work, tones-to-tones, being-to-between-piece expectations, there is almost a compendium of Modern pianistic possibilities here. The idea that this is a kind of musical orchard makes sense, in that each fruit relates to all the other fruits yet none is exactly like the other.

The harvest of this piano work orchard gives you two full CDs or new and refreshing fare, very pianistic yet also unexpected in how there are journeys through original thoughtful key playfulness.

I must say that this extensive collection of piano musical moments brings me to a happy listening place. Anyone who sees the poetry in the piano solo will no doubt find it here as I did. A real boon to all inclined. Bravo!

Tanya Ekanayaka, Twelve Piano Prisms

What is written in our philosophies, to paraphrase Hamlet, does not always cover everything. When I audition the late Modern strains of New Music for piano, for example, these days one cannot expect every composer to adapt the same set of parameters. It might have always been like that, but nowadays it seems truly anything is possible. So I was not sure what I was going to be hearing when I received Tanya Ekanayaka's Twelve Piano Prisms (Grand Piano GP785). Ms Ekanayaka plays the compositions for us and she is a fine pianist.

This is very lyrical piano music in a kind of Neo-Romantic, sometimes a bit Neo-Impressionist mode. I hear Tchaikovsky, Liapinov, Schumann, Rachmaninov, and a wisp of Chopin maybe as the forebears of Ms. Ekanayaka clearly outlined and feelingful pianism. The back cover tells me that many of the themes are Sri Lankan, and at times I can hear that now that I know to listen for it. And the blurb says there are traces of other world musics; the classical tradition and popular music have some sway here as well, so they say. The rhapsodic treatment is crisp and not extraordinarily ornate, which gives a refreshment to it all. Each of the 12 Prisms is in a different key.

Oh, the liners say she is British-Sri Lankan. So that makes sense.She was precociously talented and began studying the piano with her mother, then others. By the time she was twelve she had made her recital debut, her first concerto in public was at age sixteen. She has her doctorate in Linguistic-Musicology from the University of Edinburgh, where she has been a part-time faculty member since 2007.

I very much am taken with what she does with the "Auld Lang Syne" theme on the fourth Prism, which is  entitled "D Flat--Intuition, Auld Lang Syne & an Asian Secret" (2017). Each of the Twelve Piano Prisms  has a distinctive character and mood. And after a few listens you begin to hear the Sri Lankan heritage as a sometimes scalular idiom that is extended and lyricized by Ms. Ekanayaka's special musical gifts. And listening in time her inspired originality comes more to the forefront as her treatment of themes becomes more clearly etched into the listening mind.

I come away from the initial listens to Twelve Piano Prisms quite impressed and moved by the music. I am sure I will happily return to this music often. And I will look forward to hearing more of her music. If you want something tonally wistful and lyrically inspired in new piano music, you will most certainly find it here. If Ms. Ekanayaka does not easily fit in to what other music is being done today, so much the better for us. For we hear an original musical mind at work. Definitely recommended.