Kawai Piano Prices: Night Fantasies: Piano Solo (Piano Large Works) [Paperback] Review

this is Carter's most interesting piano solo,written late;a quadruple commission; it seems most of his piano repertoire,his thinking excursis for the keyboard has been skewed toward chamber settings(The Double Concerto),the Wind and String Quintets(also late bloomer works) and the massive penumbral "Piano Concerto", that which has equally more interesting orchestrations than the content for what is played on the piano. The earlier Brahmsian/Copland-esque "Piano Sonata" from the Forties, has its points of interests,rolling rotund resonant timbres,bombastic declamations but that is an earlier Carter,formative times and a different set of creative paradigms at work actually, prior to the maturity and interest that set in after the "First String Quartet". . .The golden fruits of maturity has seen many works even an opera of mixed quality,and predictable-ness some of the solos and duets,dedications as "Espirit rude" are quite glib materials,tossed off. Here however the "Night Fantasies" is an interesting piece of music,certainly one that has entered the modern piano literature, a modern nocturne of darkness for dark times which never seem to recede,simply differing gradations of it. This work has entered the mainstream and academia naturally and you can see it played on piano competitions,although difficult to perform in that all the suggestive timbral layers Carter employs/deploys need continuous clarity.He sets a large pallette of piano attacks,mixed with an equal distributions of dynamics sustained moments mixed with more percussive effects,staccato with sustained, cloistered-like chorals deployed.If this agenda for "layering" is abandoned well the work will cohere-melt into one quite boring unadorned glob of timbre, suggestive of Schumann or Brahms having lived through World War 2.Ursula Oppens and Charles Rosen have exhibited the most interesting readings I think,and quite recently Pierre Laurent Aimard,in a nice recording with his own commnetary thrown in.I would like to hear Frederic Rzewski play this work, with his overriding dynamic approach and technical clarity he can summon to his fingers and perhaps glean the overbearing romantic-nesses from the work, making it leaner and more articulated.That is always the problem with modernity of this kind,it always tempts the interpreter into a more facile reading,more direct, more bound to the aesthetic of the romantic as Solti playing Schoenberg as Brahms or as he had done with Carter's "Variations for Orchestra" he had takened on tour.. If you bring direct unencumbered musicianship to Carter the music will reward you, and if you acknowledge its intellectual agendas you will be twice blessed.
Jon Link has done excellent work on mapping the poly-rhythmic distributions of this work,and David Schiff's excellent book to a less exhaustive degree and Yes! some can hear all of it,the poly-rhythms, layered textures if you have a map inside your head, and have some pre-requisite home study of the score prior to a listening experience, but short of that the work still harbors a neo-romanticism with an affinity for modernity, the wonderful fast furioso filigree displays, "fugitive" lines wanting to escape from the work's structural tyranny has a kind of other wordly quality.

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Night Fantasies