photos and video

David Greilsammer Talks About Cage And Scarlatti

May

15

David GreilsammerPianist David Greilsammer has recently released an interesting recording via Sony called Scarlatti:Cage:Sonatas. He’ll bring work from that recording to the Le Poisson Rouge stage on May 27.
 
Greilsammer brings together two composers who he identifies as outside of their own time. He identifies them as “not composers, but in fact, inventors.” The recording brings the sonatas of John Cage and Domenico Scarlatti together beautifully. He illuminates that in the below video where he’s seen discussing the composers and why he selected them. He performs in the video as well.
 

Here’s a bit more from Greilsammer about the composers and the recording:

Music from a different planet. This is the feeling that has always taken over me when listening to the Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and John Cage. Music from an invisible, distant, and mysterious world. The works of these composers do not resemble in any way those of their contemporaries: is it, perhaps, because the two men were not composers, but in fact, inventors? Inventors of sounds, magicians of rhythm, creators of new languages, that had never been heard before. As true visionaries, ahead of their time, they treated the Sonata not as a rigid and extensive form, but rather as a miraculous space designed for conception and experimentation. More than two hundred years separate the two composers, but their Sonatas seem so much alike: short, provocative, passionate, full of wild colors, and bursting with sensual rhythms. Light years away from the traditional Sonata that ruled during the two centuries that went by between Scarlatti and Cage, the two artists treated this form as a free, agile and dazzling entity: like an Unidentified Flying Object, passing in the sky, brief, remote and solitary. Searching in their feverish imagination, Scarlatti and Cage conceived these pieces to be the messengers of a yet unknown world. Embracing the future and its freedoms, the Sonatas seem to be staring at us from their far, distant planet.


 
Program for the May 27 performance at Le Poisson Rouge:
Scarlatti: Sonata in D minor K. 213
Cage: Sonata no. 14
Scarlatti: Sonata in D Minor K.141
Cage: Sonata no. 13
Scarlatti: Sonata in E Major K.381
Cage: Sonata no. 12
Scarlatti: Sonata in B Minor K. 87
Cage: Sonata no.1
Scarlatti: Sonata in B Minor K. 27
Cage: Sonata no. 16
Scarlatti: Sonata in A minor K. 175
Cage: Sonata no.11
Scarlatti: Sonata in E major K. 531
Cage: Sonata no. 5
Scarlatti: Sonata in D Major K.492


posted by Dustin

SHARE THIS