Gál: The Complete Works for Solo Piano

Hans Gál

Released on 12/27/05 by Avie Records
Main artists: Leon McCawley
Genre: Classical

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Avie's Hans Gál: The Complete Works for Solo Piano performed by Scottish pianist Leon McCawley is the first all-Gál release that is comprehensive and has some sense of permanence. Considering the great diversity of the musical world around him, Hans Gál is an amazing figure, a Viennese born five years after Alban Berg who nonetheless resisted both the Second Vienna School and the strong pull of operetta. His long career trajectory (Gál lived to be 97 years old) defies credibility -- he published his "Opus 1" the same year Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier premiered and was still composing when Pink Floyd released The Wall. While his music at times resembles Bartók or Prokofiev, it has a stamp of individuality that is hard to describe, and comparisons to other, better-known composers do Gál no justice. The gamut of Gál's music runs from sprightly and strongly accented (a trademark approach, it appears) to moody, colorful, and evocative; in the Sarabande funèbre of his Suite for piano Op. 24 (1922) Gál spins through a number of jazzy progressions worthy of Bill Evans. His music is psychologically very effective, but not effusively Romantic. He favors a tart and tasty palette of harmony, but only seldom launches into more dissonant ideas, and his appropriation of Impressionist concepts does not seem to invoke obvious comparison to French composers. Once he arrived at his unique ideas about composition around 1920, Gál stuck to them and did not allow any external influences to distract him from it. As his surviving contemporaries struggled with the concept of "continued relevance" during the Cold War, if anything, advanced age brought to Gál a clearer and more definitive understanding of his art as it had stood all along. This is apparent in the dazzling sets of preludes and fugues in all 12 keys major and minor that occupies the latter two discs of this three-disc set. For once, we have in Hans Gál: The Complete Works for Solo Piano a recording of a significant, little-known composer for which we need make no apologies for second-rate sound, notes, or performance. Pianist McCawley truly understands this music and delivers it with the elegance, grace, and the sensitivity toward touch and dynamics it needs. Producer Simon Fox-Gál, grandson of the composer, pays heed to every note of this music through his engineering and provides an illuminating booklet note. Hans Gál: The Complete Works for Solo Piano is a three-disc set, and more than three hours of music -- both a lot of piano and a lot of Gál. Nevertheless, Hans Gál: The Complete Works for Solo Piano lifts the veil off of an important subject, and may well serve as the last word on Gál for some time to come; it is most enthusiastically recommended.
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Gál: The Complete Works for Solo Piano

Hans Gal

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