John Corigliano is such an accomplished orchestrator that you might be surprised at how well his piano music sounds. The truth is, he simply has a gift for finding brilliant sonorities no matter what instrument he happens to be writing for. He uses the full range of the piano, often turning to extremes of register, but always to good musical and expressive purpose. The works here are highly varied in style and conception, but are invariably enjoyable.
Winging It, subtitled “Improvisations for Piano”, is exactly what the name implies: three improvisations captured in real time and then subsequently notated. Chiaroscuro requires two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, but it never sounds gratuitously dissonant–there’s that feeling for sonority again. Fantasia on an Ostinato, based on the famous Allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh, is one of Corigliano’s best-known pieces. Kaleidoscope, also for two pianos, is an early jeu d’esprit, while the Etude Fantasy never lets the didactic element get in the way of musical enjoyment.
The performances here are pretty stupendous. Ursula Oppens takes all the solos, and she’s joined by Jerome Lowenthal in the duo pieces. Her playing is spirited, subtle, colorful, and wholly winning. She conveys the freedom of the improvisations in Winging It and chooses an excellent timing for the optional repetitions in the Fantasia on an Ostinato (it lasts a bit more than 11 minutes). In Chiaroscuro, careful attention to balance and dynamics reveals the wonderful colors of this evocative score. The beautifully calibrated engineering, brilliant but never harsh or brittle, helps immeasurably. A disc to treasure. [5/26/2011]
