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Complete Piano Music Vol.4 (Preview)

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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 fourth of eight companion volumes to accompany the recorded series and draws on the expertise of Dr. Robert Hoskins, an Associate Professor at 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 PEL04 – iv

course his life has taken. Two more works, an orchestral tone poem A Song of Islands (1946) and the 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. Sonatina No.1 (1946) In an interview with Owen Jensen (1965), Lilburn said how struck he was by the painter Toss Woollaston’s remark that ‘international influences are what give our work manner, but environment should give it character.’ This sonatina combines geometric patterning of classical forms with the distinctive simplicity of colour and line that the composer so admired in the work of the regionalist painters. The first movement hymns a fundamental vitality – a fresh start in the morning land that is New Zealand; an almost geological majesty pervades the second movement and a three-note motive sets the finale in motion. Lilburn composed an earlier second movement (possibly replaced after consultation with pianist Owen Jensen), included as an appendix to this volume: it reveals the influence of Bartók, perhaps directly stimulated by the Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus’s Bartók performances during her 1946 concert tour of New Zealand. Owen Jensen, to whom the work is dedicated, gave a broadcast performance of the sonatina from IYA Auckland on 15 January 1947. Lili Kraus subsequently performed it in recital (with live broadcasts) in Christchurch (repeating it as an encore) and Wellington on 8 and 12 April 1947; in November 1948 Colin Horsley played it in London’s Wigmore Hall; Margaret Nielsen first recorded it in 1985. Prelude (1948) This piece demonstrates Lilburn’s fascination with the songful melancholia of Schubert’s voice: we can almost trace the lonely lover in Winterreise trudging through the snow. ‘Short Piece’ (1965) Interweaving linear formations feature in this study, which belongs to the same folder as the collections of nine and seven short pieces. Lilburn gives mm of Œ = 160 but performers may prefer to use a quaver equivalent. PEL04 – v

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