The Piano Sonata is a virtuosic and exciting four-movement composition. While each of the movements is self-contained and unique, each is also fully related to the remaining three. The composer compares them to “four different people with the same genes.”Written during the summer of 1990, each movement is dedicated to a pianist who has performed Bell’s music. These are: Penelope Roskell, Wu Han, Michael Dewart and Carmen Rodríquez-Peralta. The music was designed to be idiomatic for the piano. Traces of a single-theme sonata form are easily detected in he first movement. The meditative, song-like second movement consists of a simple theme followed by a few variations. The third movement is a jazzy parody of the seriousness found in the opening movement. The rhythmic excitement of the concluding fourth movement gives the impression of an exotic toccata inspired by an imaginary South American dance.

Music from Six Continents 1992 Series(#3037)
Larry Bell – Sacred Symphonies

Sacred Symphonies was commissioned by and is dedicated to the composer’s Italian friend, Verio Piroddi. Signor Piroddi had requested a religious work; therefore, the composer drew from his own religious experience as a Southerner whose family was raised in the Pentecostal Holiness church. The title Sacred Symphonies is an Anglicization of the titles of the Schutz and Gabrieli works. To prepare for the orchestral work, Bell composed Four Sacred Songs for Soprano and Piano. Each song is a setting of a familiar hymn tune text; however, the music itself is new and makes no reference to the original hymn tunes. The four movements of the

Sacred Symphonies correspond, Mahler-like, to the four songs: “There Is a Fountain,” “Take the Name of Jesus with You,” “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and “Spirit of God Descend upon My Heart.” Each represents a religious state: atonement, evangelism, suffering, and humility.

Sacred Symphonies has a double texture throughout: the symphonic development of the themes of the songs coexists with a slow-moving version of the songs in a distant tonality. The sequence of movements suggests a sense of spiritual progress – a coming to terms with the conflicts of the past. The quasi-autobiographical subject matter and the combination of vernacular and cultivated techniques creates in Bell’s Sacred Symphonies the distinctive color of indigenous American music – music in the tradition and spirit of Ives and Copland.

Sacred Symphonies was completed in the summer of 1985 while Bell was a resident composer at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Conference and Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. The work received its first performance in February 1987, with the Seattle Symphony, conducted by Christopher Kendall.

Andrea Olmstead

Music from Six Continents 1996 Series(#3037)
Larry Bell – Piano Concerto

Piano Concerto was commissioned by Gerard Schwarz for Music Today and the Seattle Symphony Chamber Players. Dedicated tot he conductor, it was premiered by him in New York in 1989 with the composer as soloist. The work received its European premiere in Bulgaria in June 1996 with the Ruse Philharmonic Orchestra, Tsanko Delibosov conducting and the composer as soloist.

Piano Concerto is in three movements of increasing tempo and brevity. The first, Lyrical and Majestic, contains two themes one for orchestra and one for the soloist. During a brief moment in the middle of the movement the orchestra shares the piano’s theme. The piano, however, grudgingly recognizes the orchestra’s theme in an ironic role reversal at the end of the movement.

The second movement, Blues Theme with Variations, is based on an original melody. The popular blues idiom permeates the set of classical variations. As in the first movement, a brief cadenza introduces a recapitulation of the main theme.

In Dancelike and Driving, the third movement’s rhythm is rock-influenced. Later the blues theme of the second movement reappears. As the concerto progresses, each movement gets faster and shorter and the concertato texture diminishes; the piano ultimately plays with the orchestra and not against it.

The Black Cat harkens back to the monodrama made popular in the nineteenth century by such Liszt melodramas as Der Traurige Monch. Richard Strauss’ later monodrama Enoch Arden, recorded by Claude Reins and Glenn Gould, helped inspire my adaptation of the ghost-story setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s familiar tale of murder and madness.
I augment the monodrama’s typical narrator-and-piano instrumentation to include a cello. The cello represents the cat; the piano portrays the man telling the story and also sets the climate for the individual scenes. The cello has its own leitmotifs, for example, the tritone glissando that mimics a “meow” similar to the effect found in Ravel’s animal opera. The music is based on the opening melody in G-sharp minor (frequently necessitating the F double-sharp scull-and-crossbones on the page). Although the narrator’s part is not notated musically, I carefully connected the words with the accompanying music. Poe’s characteristic blend of the horrible and the ordinary is not without moments of humor – after all, a grown man is driven crazy by an innocent small animal!

The Black Cat (1987) was commissioned by and is dedicated to cellist Eric Bartlett, who, along with the composer, is a cat lover.Caprice for solo cello was written in 1978 and is dedicated to Scot Williams. The piece consists of several basic character types that are at first presented separately and then later in combination. The juxtaposition of these cross-cut strands of music produces a kind of ironic counterpoint of characters; hence the title Caprice.The Fantasia on an Imaginary Hymn for cello and viola was commissioned by Joel Chronic for his 1983-84 six-concert series at Juilliard and the Library of Congress entitled “The Cello: A Twentieth-Century American Restropective.” The work was composed at the American Academy in Rome in 1983. The New York and Washington premieres were played by Krosnick and Samuel Rhodes in March 1984. Later the Fantasia was played on concerts of the Juilliard String Quartet. Eric Bartlett and Sarah Clarke gave the Fantasia its Boston and European premieres.

In an interview with Perry Goldstein, Krosnick says of this piece: “Larry Bell has organized his serial structures in diatonic ways – that is, with the same building blocks with which traditional tonal music is made. Rhythmically, however, and in terms of its polyphony, it is contemporary in its complexity and careful detailing. The two instruments in Larry’s piece often represent two different characters, juxtaposing different kinds of music simultaneously, much like in the Carter Sonata. And yet, the organization of the materials and the materials themselves clearly come from the emotional world of Larry Bell. The music is often lyrical, sweet, playful – quite American sounding, containing the lilt of Southern folk music.”River of Ponds was completed in 1986 at the American Academy in Rome and was commissioned by and dedicated to Joel Krosnick and Gilbert Kalish. The tile itself is drawn from a series of painting called “River of Ponds” by Frank Stella. Stella was the Painter-in-Residence at the AAR during my Rome Prize Fellowship (1982-83).

The underlying theme of Stella’s River of Ponds is a reflection upon his own childhood and the fishing trip he took with his father. The movement titles of River of Ponds -“Black Creek,” “Wyatt Earp’s Pond,” and “Silver Lake” – refer to my memories of childhood in North Carolina.

The first piece, “Black Creek,” is based on an original melody. This melody first occurs as a vague recollection from the past. The center of the movement contains a clear presentation of this theme as a vivid memory. The end of the movement dissolves as it began. G major and B major are contrasting tonal areas that grow out of the intervals of the theme itself.

“Wyatt Earp’s Pond'” is a nickname given to a fishing hole near where I grew up. This title has a humorous connotation and the movement could be thought of as a scherzo; a scherzo with two trios. In the trios the hymn tune “Softly and tenderly” is quoted.

The last movement, “Silver Lake,” is a double variation form. The first theme is similar to the old hymn tune “The Old Rugged Cross,” stated in a slow and somewhat grandiose manner. The second theme is drawn from the first movement; however here the theme is dance-like, driving, and usually grouped in rhythmic units of seven. The recurrence of both themes suggest a rondo finale.