Divine Art Recordings will soon be releasing an album featuring the first ever recordings of Sam Hayden’s complete music for solo piano, performed by well-known contemporary music specialist Ian Pace. The album includes the monumental virtuosic 7-movement cycle Becomings, the most recent work from which the album takes its name, and some earlier shorter works reflecting diverse modernist and experimentalist influences. Although Hayden’s output for solo piano spans three decades, he has tended to use the instrument much more often in ensemble, chamber or electronic music contexts, often focusing on the percussive and resonance characteristics of the piano. During the fewer occasions when he has engaged with the piano as a solo acoustic instrument, the medium is always pushed to its sonic, spatial and physical limits. These solo pieces have in common constant transformation, existing at the extremes of gesture, polyphony, density, register, dynamics and textual juxtaposition.

Sam Hayden is a composer whose work contains much diversity and variety in its modernism; he teaches at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London, and Pianist Ian Pace is one of the UK’s primary exponents of contemporary music as well as being head of music at City, University of London. His previous recordings for Metier over several years include highly praised albums of music by Michael Finnissy including the gigantic 5-CD long History of Photography in Sound.

The new Hayden album “Becomings”  is scheduled for release in November.

“Becomings” – piano music by Sam Hayden (MSV 28611)

All World Premiere Recordings

• Becomings (Das Werden), nos 1-7
• …still time…
• Fragment (After Losses)

Recorded at City University London in April and May 2020