Output details

David Lumsdaine: Complete music for piano

Research content/process:

This performance project explored the complete œuvre for piano of a single composer, spanning thirty years and a wide range of genres and styles. The output features two (60% of total) world premiere recordings (Kelly Ground and Cambewarra). Knoop worked extensively with Lumsdaine not only in order to profit from the composer’s verbal gloss on the text of the works but also, critically, to re-engage with the textual status of the compositions: to clarify and to redefine notational and performance indications which had remained unresolved at the moment of immediate composition. The engagement with the performance tradition went further than the text, however, and Knoop involved Lumsdaine’s long-term collaborator at the Tall Poppies recording company to ensure sympathetic and appropriate acoustic, engineering and editing. The central aesthetic challenge of the project was to evolve a coherent performance style where – for the most part – no performance tradition existed. This challenge has to be read in the context of the wildly differing compositional aims of the four works: a response to a historical series of events in which a private programme for the composition had to be conveyed (Kelly Ground), an extended piece based on the final chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion (Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh’), the longest piece in the project, based on indigenous birdsong (Cambewarra) and a work that pays homage to Beethoven’s late Bagatelles op. 119 and 126 (Six Postcard Pieces). Furthermore, the compositional ambition of the pieces varied enormously – from the twelve-minute duration of the first movement of Ruhe sanfte to the finale of the Six Postcard Pieces, which lasts 22 seconds – and the project’s success in part depends on the degree to which Knoop successfully developed a performance rationale for the entire body of material.