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Complete Piano Music Vol.3 (Preview)

Music by Douglas Lilburn | Piano

FOREWORD Douglas Lilburn

FOREWORD Douglas Lilburn occupies a pre-eminent position in New Zealand music, with a legacy extending well beyond his compositional output. As a composer, teacher and mentor he presided in innumerable ways over the artistic growth of New Zealand from 1940 onwards. From the early works redolent of the influence of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, to the electro-acoustic pieces of his later years, his works have been instrumental in establishing a genuinely vernacular voice in New Zealand classical music. In 2005 Trust Records launched the first volume in the award-winning recording series showcasing all of Lilburn’s piano music, receiving ‘Best Classical Album’ in the 2005 Recording Industry of New Zealand Music Awards and in the same year, Gramophone acclaimed that ‘[These] performances and recordings are unobtrusively excellent.’ This edition is the third of eight companion volumes to accompany the recorded series and draws on the expertise of Dr. Robert Hoskins of Massey University and Rod Biss, formerly of Schott London, Faber Music and Price Milburn Music, who was instrumental in first publishing Lilburn’s piano music in the 1970s. Having worked with Lilburn directly on these early publications, Biss has now revisited original source materials in the preparation for this series. Together, the editors have carefully considered and clarified Lilburn’s manuscripts and early publications in preparing these volumes as both scholarly and practical editions for performance, and presented with the exacting and elegant house style of Promethean Editions. This collection does not generally include juvenilia, trivia, incomplete or rejected pieces/movements. Exceptions are specified in the notes. Biography Douglas Lilburn (1915–2001) grew up on ‘Drysdale’, a hill–country farm bordering the mountainous region at the centre of New Zealand’s North Island. He often described his boyhood home as ‘paradise’ and his first major orchestral work, Drysdale Overture (1937), written while a student under the aegis of Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in London, conjures up the hills, bush and stream as primal sites of imaginative wonder. Recalling the impression of Drysdale Overture, Lilburn wrote: ‘I’m left with that lovely Mark Twain image of Jim and Huckleberry drifting their barge down that great river, looking up at the stars and wondering “whether they was made, or only just happened.”’ At this time Lilburn wrote his Festival Overture and the Sonata 1939, together with other works that expressed national pride: a cantata entitled Prodigal Country (1939), and the Aotearoa Overture (1940), which has become a New Zealand classic. Although these works were written in his student years, their content, style and general confidence reveal Lilburn as an achieved artist. Returning to Christchurch, Lilburn banded together with an innovative group of painters, poets and publishers who were to prove influential. Settings of Allen Curnow and Denis Glover, for instance, resulted in two iconic works: Landfall in Unknown Seas (1942), a voyage of spiritual discovery for narrator and string orchestra, and the song cycle Sings Harry (1953), the musings of a middle-aged bachelor who, returning to the mountains where he grew up, begins to reassess and evaluate the course his life has taken. Two more works, an orchestral tone poem A Song of Islands (1946) and the PEL03 – iv

Chaconne for piano (1946), find their parallel in the regional paintings of Rita Angus. In 1947 Lilburn joined the staff at Victoria University College in Wellington and completed several works that received high critical acclaim, including two symphonies, two piano sonatas, and the Alistair Campbell song cycle Elegy (1951) – a vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Lilburn composed the Symphony No.3 (1961), along with Sonatina No.2 (1962) and Nine Short Pieces for Piano (1965–66), in response to a stimulating period of sabbatical leave. Masterpieces of concentrated form, these works explore the boundaries of his instrumental writing. From this point until his retirement, Lilburn chose to take on the new territory of electroacoustic composition. Lilburn’s final years were spent quietly at home in Thorndon, Wellington, tending to his garden and, until the onset of arthritis, playing his beloved August Förster piano. He received the Order of New Zealand in 1988. Nine Short Pieces for Piano (1965-66) In 1967 Lilburn presented pianist, friend and colleague Margaret Nielsen with a folder of piano pieces labelled ‘Crotchety at 51!’ The composer asked Nielsen to ‘please see what you can make of these.’ The result is this quite extraordinary sequence that can be conceived as an extension of the Sings Harry settings of Denis Glover’s poems. Both speak of a bittersweet point of balance at a moment between youth-just-past and age-about-to-come, and each communicates awareness that all human experience is finally put into context against the power and beauty of the natural world. Nor is it difficult to hear the thrum of Harry’s guitar from the outset and the dry tone of his voice. Space and distance and large tracts of time are part of the landscape: there is a perceivable tidal flow to No. 5 while No. 6 may reflect starlight; the transparency of No. 7 suggests a tranquil pool of clear water while the central pedalled passage of No. 9 breathes the air of Bartók’s summer-night music. A particular fascination is how each piece brings out specific qualities of sonority and timbre within a precise shape to hold it in place, thus anticipating Lilburn’s electro-acoustic music. Three Sea Changes (1945-81) Steeped in memory and washed in brine, these pieces celebrate a passionate engagement with the natural world and a continuity of human effort in the trace of transition – in the face of love and loss. The title derives from Ariel’s song ‘Full fathom five’ in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In a letter to William Norris Rogers (1985), Lilburn says that the inspiration of the first piece was Brighton Beach, near Christchurch, ‘exuberant and sunlit but with a tolling undertone’, that the second was directly ‘from Paekakariki – a more expansive view’, and that the third was ‘quiet as befits an evening piece … its rhythms have a timeless quality of plainchant.’ The Three Sea Changes were written at different periods of Lilburn’s life: No. 1 in 1945 (initially the only one called ‘Sea Change’ and recorded as such by Margaret Nielsen in 1945), No. 2 (a Prelude) in 1950, and No. 3 in 1972. By 1981 the composer had entered a period of looking back at earlier works and revising them. It was then that he gathered the three pieces together under the collective title Three Sea Changes. Margaret Nielsen prepared them for performance and the first of them was recopied and revised by the composer. PEL03 – v

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