Sonate - A Calendar Set

Album review

American composer Judith Lang Zaimont has a distinctive style that has lasted through multiple changes of fashion. She has a knack for drawing on Romantic traditions without being retro or sentimental, remaining loosely tonal but deploying unusual structural devices. Zaimont has written works in various media but trained as a pianist, and these three attractive works, highly idiomatic to the piano and each having received multiple recordings, make a good place to start with her music. The Sonata for piano is a highly virtuosic piece whose last movement recalls some of Prokofiev's toccata-like finales. It's a popular piano competition piece, and pianist Christopher Atzinger obviously knows it well. The opening movement adheres to sonata form, but defines its subject group by texture as well as thematic material. The work contains hints of the jazz and ragtime with which Zaimont began her performing career. Nocturne: La fin de siècle, composed in 1979, expands on the language of the Chopin Nocturne. A Calendar Set--12 Virtuosic Preludes (1978), is a group of short pieces that were actually composed during the months they represent. The most accessible and entertaining of the trio of works here, they are prefaced by lines of poetry or description of the specific events they represent. Sample "July: The Glorious Fourth!" (track 11), which quotes The Stars and Stripes Forever in a unique way. Recorded in a concert hall in the Canadian Rockies, the sound does justice to Atzinger's spirited performances. Recommended, especially for piano students; the music is goes down easy and is tailor-made for recitals and the like.

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