A Delightful Group: American Piano Music by Bennett Lerner

Seeing the title of this record, I was a bit taken aback. I didn't know what to expect. One of those horsehair­stuffed sonatas by MacDowell? Some of those ickey-poo salon pieces by Ethelbert Nevin? It was difficult to guess at anything much later. Who knows the piano works by Howard Hanson or Roger Sessions? The com­plete piano music by Leonard Berns­tein and Irving Babbitt occupies an LP apiece, and Copland's just two. For a moment I wondered if anyone still writes piano music.

The record in question provides on­ly an equivocal answer to my ques­tion. The names involved-most of them at least--are of the highest musical pedigree and suggest the Right Stuff: Barber, Bernstein, Bowles, Copland, Ramey, Thomson. Even for a trivia-collector such as I the titles ring few bells, if Indeed any. But as one reads the liner notes, one discovers that there are some connections.

The composers are variously link­ed by close friendships and/or teacher-pupil relationships. Two works (Bernstein's and Barber's) were test pieces for Van Cliburn competi­tions, and Barber Is depicted chord­ing that his brought him twice as much as Copland's (unspecified). The catalyst, however, is clearly the pianist (and annotator) Bennett Lerner. With the understandable ex­ceptions of the two works just noted, he has apparently played (he is modest enough to tell us) the world premieres of most or perhaps all of the others.

The Thomson pieces are (typically) a lot of fun. The two tangos (a favorite Thomson form) are, says the com­poser, juvenilia (1923), which Lerner found while searching Thomson's files. The two portraits are of Lerner himself ("expressionless" counsels Thomson) and of Ramey thinking (nervously).

Who remembers Paul Bowles, who settled in Morocco decades ago? His wittily Thomsonian music was much recorded in the 1940s and 1950s. He gave it up for fiction, at which he was very successful, but that activity seems to have long ceased. The pop­-influenced set of preludes goes back 50 years, as do the Latin pieces. The third and fourth of the latter were never published, but Lerner acquired manuscript copies. The whole Bowles group is delightful and would, with the Thomson, probably sell me the record.

Samuel Barber wrote little after the failure of his magnum opus at the Met. The Ballade of 1977 bears his final opus number (46). The Bernstein piece is a set of variations on a chorale; the intent (word-plays on "touches") strikes me as wittier than the music.

Phillip Ramey is perhaps best known as an annotator of records and New York Philharmonic programs. He is not listed in the New Grove, Baker VI, or David Ewen's American Composers. His output appears to be small, but includes several piano sonatas and two piano concerti. At least on Initial hearing, the Fantasy sounds thick and cerebral to me. He has set poems by Bowles, incidentally.