SKU: BT.MUSM570201747

English.

For solo Flute, originally published in 1997.

SKU: PA.H07988

ISBN 9790260104471. 31 x 23.5 cm inches.

Piano Sonata No. 4 from the years 1962-1964 is dedicated to the memory of Fiser's friend, the pianist Antonin Jemelik, who died tragically. As a tribute to their friendship the composer incorporated into the introduction a quotation from their favourite work, Piano Sonata No. 10, Op. 70, by Alexander Scriabin. The tragedy of the death of the composer's friend pervades the emotionally intense passage of unison octaves which follows the three-bar quotation. From a compositional point of view this work is a masterpiece of the mid-Sixties. Written as one movement, the piece is divided into numerous mutually contrasting segments which themselves are clearly grouped into two sections, exposition and development. The individual themes are introduced in the first section and thematically expanded in the second section. The motif treatment lies almost exclusively in the fragmenting or curtailing of the theme, or in the use of a combination of several themes, for the most part brief and eloquent. This compositional method, together with a clear-cut manner of execution, mainly semitonal melody and sharply contrastive dynamics, lends force and transparency to the piece. Piano Sonata No. 4 was completed in 1964 together with Symphonic Fresco, Concerto da camera for piano and orchestra and Fifteen Prints after Durer's Apocalypse and has earned its rightful place alongside them as masterpieces of Fiser's oeuvre.

The work was first performed by Pavel Stepan in Prague's Rudolfinum in 1965. The new setting for this piece is based on the single edition to date (Panton, 1969); only with regard to a few inconsistencies in the score was it necessary to consult the composer's manuscript (kept at the National Museum - Czech Museum of Music).

SKU: HL.48024642

ISBN 9781784542658. UPC: 888680949068. 7.25x10.25x0.241 inches.

New edition of this enigmatic, single-movement work for full orchestra lasting 13 minutes and dating from the early-1930s. In his preface, Gerard McBurney comments that, Despite the music's modernist surface, the Chant symphonique's 'three closely integrated movements' correspond rather neatly to a traditional sonata-form exposition, development and recapitulation. There is even an overall tonality of sorts - D major. But 'parts', 'moods', keys and cadences are all subjected in this unusual work to tremendous pressure and distortion, so that we quickly begin to suspect that something other, different and more mysterious, is really going on here..

SKU: UT.QC-2

ISBN 9788881094585. 6.5 x 9.5 inches.

The career of Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) spanned the lives of both Mozart and Beethoven and was exceptionally diverse. It encompassed performing on the keyboard, conducting, teaching, business activities and composition in the realms of keyboard, chamber and orchestral music. This book focuses on Clementi’s keyboard sonatas and aims to shed new light on their relationship with the complex cross-currents of late eighteenth-century musical style, both in England, where Clementi was active for much of his career, and the continent, which he visited periodically.
The first chapter summarises Clementi’s historical reputation as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and evaluates the impact on it of the significant developments in Clementi scholarship since 2000. The aim is to stress the deficiencies of the established view of Clementi as a keyboard pedagogue and to stress the importance of liberating him as much as possible from this ingrained perception. This is attempted, in the remaining chapters, through close, analytical readings of a variety of keyboard sonatas from all stages of his career, comparing them with a range of works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and other contemporaries such as Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812). The comparisons are made from the perspectives of distinguishing features of Clementi’s style such as his unusually intense deployment of strict counterpoint in the later keyboard sonatas; his cultivation of irregularity in recapitulations; his use of the ‘three-key’ exposition in the middle-to-later stages of his career that seems to anticipate nineteenth-century developments, and also his assimilation of heightened virtuosity into the earlier sonatas, often in the form of cadenzas more suggestive of the keyboard concerto – a genre Clementi seems, rather strangely, to have neglected. The book has been envisaged as a direct response, not only to the most recent scholarship on Clementi, but also to current approaches to eighteenth-century music in general, including the interdisciplinary work of Annette Richards.