“Mark Anderson brings a compelling grandeur and eloquent fervour to Copland’s imposing Sonata of 1939-41 (apparently Leonard Bernstein’s favourite work), achieving a splendid concentration and unforced gravitas in the riveting concluding Andante sostenuto in particular. …the sound is eminently truthful and the audience impeccably behaved (and, I should add, rightly appreciative)”— ANDREW ACHENBACH, GRAMOPHONE
“Mark Anderson plays Copland to the manner born. His granitic sonority, propulsive rhythm, and lyrical reserve are exactly what this music needs, from the wistful Four Piano Blues, to the terse grandeur characterizing the Sonata’s outer movements. Anderson’s Gershwin, though, is another story. He fusses and musses with the rhythms to the point where the composer’s trademark syncopations hardly register on the “swing” scale. As a result, the phrasing and accentuation of the tunes are thrown askew. Try to sing along with Anderson, and you’re guaranteed to have a hard time. Stick with Richard Rodney Bennett or Dick Hyman for the Songbook, and Earl Wild’s debonair Preludes. Nimbus’ soft-focus, resonant sonics will not appeal to all listeners, but Mark Anderson’s virile Copland holds its own with Leo Smit’s composer-supervised survey of the piano music.” — JED DISTLER, CLASSICS TODAY (.COM)
Author: Kurth, Richard Publication details: Proceedings of ISAMA 99: First Interdisciplinary Conference of The International Society of The Arts, Mathematics and Architecture, ed. Nathaniel Friedman and Javier Barrallo. San Sebastian, Spain: University of the Basque Country, 311-318 Download:PDF
Summary: “I know from experience that sanity … lies in applying the conscious mind objectively and allowing the ‘unconscious’ – ‘inspiration’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ … to look, as an adult, after itself.” This remark, made early in her career by the British composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83), is echoed in her insistence throughout her life that art was “a precision instrument.” Nowhere in the corpus of Lutyens’s work is this philosophy more apparent than in her twelve-tone Motet, op. 27 (1953), based on the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921), the landmark treatise by the Austrian-born English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). One intriguing aspect of this beautifully constructed work is the relationship between its text and musical structure, and it is on this relationship that the main, analytical body of this paper will focus. But first, given Lutyens’s relative obscurity in North America, some biographical context is in order.
