American Handstands

Albany's awkwardly titled American Handstands features pianist Jeanne Golan in six contemporary piano pieces that she has helped to foster and one historic work she has revived. Golan teaches at SUNY Nassau Community College and has enjoyed a long relationship with the Albany label; the "handstands" featured here, composed by David Del Tredici, Eric Moe, Tom Cipullo, and Leo Ornstein, all have in common a strong orientation toward a post-romantic or impressionistic sentiment and all have a relationship, in varying degrees, to so-called conventional tonality. The longest and most ambitious of these pieces is the Sonata for Two Pianos (1925) by Leo Ornstein, in which Golan is joined by pianist Christopher Oldfather. This is an adaptation, by Ornstein himself, of his piano concerto, a benchmark work for Ornstein that was heard under Stokowski's baton in Philadelphia in 1923; at the time, Ornstein was serving as a professor at the Curtis Institute of Music. Neither Ornstein's concerto nor this sonata has been revived with any frequency since, and one is automatically grateful to Golan and Oldfather for recording it, especially in such a fine performance as this. It is a seamless blend of exoticism, driving rhythm, what used to be called "Orientalism," and Ornstein's trademark futurist piano style stated in a late-romantic vein and format; at times the sonata represents such a heady mixture of elements that one can easily understand why listeners in the 1920s might have found it confusing. It is by turns reminiscent of futurism, Sorabji's early music and Scriabin's late works but in the big picture resembles none of them; there is also some of Rimsky-Korsakov's DNA in here, in addition to flashes of distinctly "big city" Americanism of a kind barely emergent at this point in time. It is a very handsome work.
Of the newer works, Tom Cipullo's Two Meditations (2006-2008) are exceptionally fine, reveling in a kind of renewed impressionism that's both expressive and demonstrative of a distinct musical personality. The earlier Water Lilies (1995) echo the nineteenth-century piano etude, but is a little bogged down in the use of sequences, though not to the extent of wearing out its welcome; it manages to be both graceful and catchy. Del Tredici's worklist is not heavily invested in solo piano music, and his Three Gymnopedies (2003) is certainly one of Del Tredici's best contributions to the medium. Ultimately departing from the stately gymnastic movement implied in Erik Satie's original series of similarly titled pieces, Del Tredici's suite is reflective, personal, and more variable in mood. The least immediate work on the program is Moe's ballade Legend of the Sad Triad (2004), which is sort of a haphazard toccata in mixed modes punctuated with frequent interruptions of the texture. The recording, made at Mechanic's Hall in Worcester, MA, is a little quiet, but clear with a pleasant ambience, and overall Jeanne Golan's American Handstands is a thoughtful program that draws a useful parallel between early twenty first century music and neglected, pre-serial early modernist American music, even if we can't quite seem to get what the title is supposed to mean.