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Gloria Cheng

THE ART OF MODERN PIANO MUSIC

By Stuart Isacoff

There is a reason so many contemporary composers— including John Adams, Pierre Boulez, Terry Riley and others—seek out Gloria Cheng to premiere their new piano works. She is not only fearless, but, as composer Steven Stucky reveals in his liner notes to her new Grammy-Nominated Telarc release, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutoslawski, her “approach is as patient as her technique is brilliant.”

The LA-based pianist—who is on the faculty of UCLA—has counterbalanced collaborations with the thornier composers by working on film scores by such Hollywood staples as Danny Elfman, James Horner, Maurice Jarre and John Williams. Everyone wants her. And no wonder: in the words of The Los Angeles Times, her performances are “miraculous in the sheer speed and sureness of her fingers, in the rich depth of color and sonority she obtain[s] from the piano, and in the sheer expression of joy she [brings] to a demanding new work.”

As Ms. Cheng told Mary Hannon, Editor of the journal Piano Forte, the recent CD came about organically. “I’ve wanted to record Esa-Pekka Salonen’s complete solo piano music for a long time,” she explained. “He wrote Dichotomie for me in 2000 and it has taken eight years to find a way to record it. It felt natural to pair the Salonen pieces with the breathtakingly beautiful, though brief, complete works of his dear friend and mine, the Pulitzer Prize winning Steven Stucky. Since Esa- Pekka and Steve together only had about 40 minutes of piano music, not enough for a full-length CD, I opted for Witold Lutoslawski, who represents a significant musical link between the two. Lutoslawski was loved, admired and personally acknowledged as a musical father by both Esa-Pekka and Steve, providing their most direct connection to the ‘Debussy- Stravinsky outlook’ that they all share, as Steve described it in the CD liner notes. Steve was close friends with both Lutoslawski and his wife, and wrote the first detailed study of his music, and Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony was the cornerstone of Esa-Pekka’s first concert as a visiting guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In terms of my personal history, I was part of that Lutoslawski performance with Esa- Pekka well before he became Music Director of the L.A. Phil— I was in the rank and file playing the second keyboard part. So combining these three composers on my CD made perfect sense, at least to me!”

 
Continued in the Winter 2009 issue of Piano Today subscribe

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