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Monday, April 18, 2005
A piano cycle in progress, and a classical podcast

Florida audiences in St. Petersburg and Boca Raton have heard in the past few days parts of a new cycle of piano pieces by composer Thomas L. McKinley, a theory/composition professor at Lynn University.

Two pieces of the "five or six" McKinley said he hopes to finish by the summer in the collection he is calling Fantasy Pieces were played Sunday in Boca Raton by the pianist for whom they were written, Roberta Rust.

"Invocation," inspired by the repetitive chanting of Tibetan Buddhist ceremony, uses two repeated notes (B and E-flat) as signposts around which McKinley has written bursts of color: Fast, short complex runs, and a tasty series of spicy staccato chords that dissolve into single notes that vanish into silence while the drone of a single note continues to the end.

The second piece, "Fearful Symmetry," its title and structure inspired by William Blake's legendary tyger, offered a solemn, slow procession of unison notes several octaves apart in both hands, broken by hushed, small-chord commentaries from time to time.

Both pieces, well-played by Rust, had something of an attractive jazz flavor about them. Their concision in the working out of the basic ideas reminded me of Prokofiev's Visions fugitives; perhaps McKinley's Fantasy Pieces will prove useful for pianists wanting to offer contemporary character sketches on their programs.

I should also mention that Lynn University recently announced the launch of a podcast featuring free downloadable performances from its classical concert archive. Lynn claims it's the first one in the country they know of. A visit to the site will show that it's a work in progress, but I downloaded some decent renditions of songs by Faure, Bellini and Puccini and found the sound quality to be rather good.

One hopes the school will make its contemporary performances, such as the McKinley pieces, available soon.
posted by Greg Stepanich 4/18/2005



 
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