Ramon Lazkano, Piano Works, Alfonso Gomez, Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, Ernest Martinez Izquierdo, Marta Zabaleta

Based on the CD at hand today Ramon Lazkano writes High-Modernist Piano Works (Kairos 0015041KAI) of an aborbing depth and dimension. Six works grace the program. Alfonso Gomez is the principal pianist throughout and shows a concentrated focus and sure-handedness that is essential to this music. The composer and Marta Zabaleta join in on the piano works that require additional hands. The Bilbao Symphony under Ernest Martinez Izquierdo effectively and dynamically expand the sonic scope of Lazkano for the piano & orchestra work "Hitzaurre Bi" while laying down a convincing impression in their own right.

There is a quasi-Messiaen feeling of mystery in this sixteen-minute opening "Hitzaurre Bi." The density, the intensity is poetic and rewarding to hear. The second movement assumes an insistent pulsation that lucidly sets up open unfoldings in piano and orchestra. It is exciting music, exciting to hear.

What follows in the rest of the program is equally captivating at the same time as it stakes out a poetic atonality that at times follows the rhythmic drip-drop clustering of Modern Seriality,  at other times assumes a more post-Minimalist sense of repetition and at still other times a slightly folksy yet abstracted rhythmic unfolding or a heightened sense of additive density that Messiaen made use of in his middle period and Lazkano breathes new life into today. Two brief pieces for four and six hands spell an otherwise solo piano universe in the second half of the program. He explores with musical brilliance what more can be done with the performative solo presence today. Each work is a world in its own terms. Each adds something to how Lazkano views the piano and its possibilities for us.

I come away from this music with a very refreshed sense of where we are going now. Lazkano is a voice to hear, a new contemporary vision of pianism and meaningful musical utterance. You should spend some time with this music if you can. It rewards patient listening with enlightened tone-spinning. Very recommended.

Arvo Pärt, Fur Anna Maria, Complete Piano Music, Jeroen van Veen

When someone has established a style of indubitable originality, it seems less critical to try and define the style category he or she works in. It involves a category of one. Still, one can see variously in the mature music of Arvo Pärt a looking backward at times, as a new music exponent of early music, a practitioner of "radical tonality," a minimalist, or perhaps at times a later follower of Erik Satie. The idea that you could fit him in a number of camps in part has to do with his originality. Beginning in the '70s he followed his own muse. Categories are applicable after the fact but do not explain away his music in any concrete sense.

So when we turn to a two-CD set just out, Jeroen van Veen playing Fur Anna Maria, Complete Piano Music (Brilliant 95053) we hear the composer as Arvo Pärt, not as a set of labels. The set covers his contemporary style period for the entire first disk and about half of the second. The second also gives you four earlier works from 1956-1959. The latter are brilliant in their own way, in a more conventional modern style that adds to our appreciation of the composer in his totality. They are pianistic and memorable.

But the later Pärt is what the bulk of this set covers. Jeroen van Veen (who we have covered earlier this autumn [September 17th] doing the music of Jacob TV) has the right personality for the music and delivers performances in every way worthy. Ralph van Raat did a disk of Pärt for Naxos some years ago (see October 20, 2011 posting) which has some overlap but then includes music for piano and orchestra. It is excellent as well. Both are different enough that one should probably have both.

Van Veen gives us two short and two long readings of "Fur Alina," which like some Satie works calls for repetition of a fairly short compositional sequence. We also get a bonus with the inclusion of "Fratres" and "Spiegel im Spiegel," which includes Douw Fonda's cello. Two pieces are for two pianos; Sandra van Veen joins Jeroen on these and sounds good.

The piano music universe of Pärt does not have much in the early-music influenced category. That's more what the vocal music covers. What his piano music is about in the mature period is singing diatonics, lyrical, reflective music that has some relation to Satie yet inimitably shows the very original melodic stamp of Arvo--deceptively simple yet unexpected in syntax so that it gives the listener much to ponder and never grows tiresome.

This is a central disk. Taken along with the van Raat Naxos it covers the pianistic totality of the composer and does so with all the sensitivity and deliberateness that is essential to bring his special world alive.

Strongly recommended.