
Divine Art’s new-music imprint, Métier, signed up American pianist James W. Iman in 2021 for a three-album deal, the first of which, featuring Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez and Amy, appeared in the spring of 2022 (MSV 28637) to high praise: “The pianism, is top-notch” (Infodad); “Outstanding and imaginative” (Art Music Lounge). Post-production work on the second recording is well underway and the album is likely to see release in the summer.
The pianist explains the ethos of the disc:
“This album has been nearly four years in the making. The repertoire was chosen in the summer of 2019, with the first performance of the program taking place in January of 2020, with plans to record in April of that year.
I first discovered the music of Donald Martino in graduate school through his infamous Pianississimo–a monstrous work expressly requested by Easley Blackwood to be as difficult as possible. As ferocious as it is, Martino still manages to craft a remarkably beautiful work. Indeed, beauty and lyricism are the hallmarks of Martino’s mature compositions, which are as romantic as they are modern. While Pianississimo is something of a spectacle, his masterwork for the piano is his Fantasies and Impromptus from 1981.
The title immediately evokes the work of Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms–composers who were important influences on Martino’s aesthetic ideology, and their fingerprints can be seen throughout the work. The work is not, it should be noted, in a Neo-romantic style. Instead, Martino retains the melody-driven, emotional intensity of Romanticism through his unique approach to twelve-tone composition.
When I first started learning Martino’s Fantasies and Impromptus, I knew immediately that Debussy would be the perfect contrast. I knew I wanted something that would have a similar stature, to balance the intensity and fire of Martino’s work, which naturally led to selecting Debussy’s two books of Images.
Debussy had been absent from my repertoire since 2009, when I performed his Estampes. It was important to me, in taking up these pieces, to rediscover what Debussy means to me and what I wanted to say through his music. My interpretations grew out of a study of Debussy’s letters and his own recordings.
I have played Stand Still Here more times than any other work in my repertoire. Each of the five pieces that comprise the work are brief–the longest is four minutes–but Jenny Beck achieves a depth of introspection and emotional sweep that is absolutely magnetic. How she achieves this is nothing short of miraculous–the pieces are collections of terse motives and static harmonies that hover rather than move. In some ways, these pieces feel like a painting by Mark Rothko–where color alone elicits the emotional response.
This program, and this album, are deeply personal to me, not just because of my connection to the music, but also because it was the last program my mother heard me perform before her passing in 2021.”
Pianist James W. Iman plays the usual and the unusual, by composers known and unknown. As a specialist in music written since 1900—with an emphasis on music written since 1945—his repertoire spans many stylistic developments since Debussy.
Iman: Album II (Métier)
- Fantasies and Impromptus (by Donald Martino)
- Images, Books 1 and 2 (by Claude Debussy)
- Stand Still Here (by Jenny Beck)