New Classics

This features contemporary music for three pianos by composers from Turkey, Brazil, Spain and Italy. Exploring modern techniques, the music is predominantly tonal, remarkably light and clear-textured, though never facile or shallow. The composers use three keyboards to explore richer melodic lines and counterpoints while avoiding the temptation to create overwhelming walls of sound. The piece by Luigi Dallapiccola (Musica per tre pianoforti) in particular is open-textured and quite traditional, predating his adoption of serialism. The album also includes the world premiere recording of Poem, a major work completed in 1986 by Ahmet Adnan Saygun, ‘The grand old man of Turkish music.’

—John Pitt