top of page

Reviews: Cowell: Piano, Chamber, and Vocal Works

The MHS Review 389 Vol. 11 No.11 1987

click on the cover to return to the table of contents

H. Wiley Hitchcock, ISAM Newsletter (May 1987)

FEATURED RELEASE.png

not yet released.png

Continuum: Cheryl Seltzer, Joel Sachs, Directors


Continuum, the New York-based chamber group directed by Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs, presents a whole album of Cowelliana. The biggest piece on it is the dazzling quarter-hour long Set of Five (1952) for violin, percussion, and piano (previously recorded by the dedicatees of the work, Maro and Anahid Ajemian); smallest is the 30-second long What's This?('' motoric force gone berserk,'' writes Sachs in his excellent jacket notes); and somewhere in between are half a dozen other pieces, of which the most interesting are the unpublished Elegie (composed in the early 1940s for the dancer Hanya Holm)--a sort of diatonicized Banshee, and like that famous howler played entirely on the piano strings--and Sunset and Rest, two songs of 1933 to texts by Carl Ruggles' daughter Catherine.

bottom of page