John Anderson performs Debussy Images, Book 2, No. 1: "Cloches à travers les feuilles". Recorded live July 24, 2010, at the Centro culturale Elisarion, Minusio, Switzerland.
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www.johnclementanderson.com
JOHN ANDERSON has two diplomas from the Music Academy of Pescara, where he studied with Bruno Mezzena. He began his musical education with Phyllis Olsen at the age of four in his hometown, Lawrence, Kansas, (USA), and continued to study privately with her until university, and attended occasional masterclasses with Byrnell Figler and one with José Ramos Santana. He graduated from Hertford College, Oxford, in 2004 with a First in music, and in 2005 served as artistic director to the first Oxford International Music Festival. He received perfect marks from the Academy of Pescara for his first piano diploma, and was awarded perfect marks, lauds and "special mention" for his second diploma concentrating in 20th century piano repertoire. He was a regular participant of the Ticino Musica Festivals in Lugano/Ascona/Locarno Switzerland from 2001 until 2010. He continues to study with Bruno Mezzena in Pescara.
He has performed in the USA, Italy, Switzerland, UK, and in Russia, and with various orchestras, including performances of Stavinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds (with the Pescara Academy Orchestra), Saint-Saens' Rhapsodie d'Auvergne, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 (with the Lawrence Chamber Orchestra and Juan Francisco LaManna conducting), and the Schumann Concerto in A minor (with Hertford College Orchestra, Oxford, and the Pescara Academy Orchestra). His interests also include composition and analysis, which he studied with his Oxford tutor, Hugh Collins Rice. He was a jury member of the 2009 international singing competition "Putevka k zvezdam" in Moscow. He is president of the Italian music association "Project Odradek".
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Debussy dedicated "Cloches à travers les feuilles" ("Bells sounding across the leaves") to his friend, the sculptor Alexandre Charpentier, who was a master of miniature reliefs and was part of the movement towards the Art Nouveau. The piece, entirely understated, is a like a miniature landscape itself, or a bas-relief in sound. There is only one bar marked forte, of which only three notes are fortissimo. The rest of the piece never rises above mezzo piano. According to the critic Laloy (to whom the second of this series was dedicated), the piece suggests the "deathknell resounding from Vespers on All Saints' Day to the funeral mass on All Soul's Day and traversing, from village to village, the yellowing autumnal forests in the silence of eventide" (trans. from preface of Henle edition). The opening bars present to us these melancholic tolling bells, calling and responding from three different directions it seems.
The opening four bars are basically geometric in construction and the music is abstracted entirely from a research into pure tone quality itself, with the timbre of each note carefully articulated with a unique combination of marks in the score. We have four strata of entirely independent sonorities, but all constrained within a pianissimo. Such rarefied textures, finding means of expression on the very edge of silence, would become very frequent characteristics in much of the music following for the rest of the 20th century. Perhaps this along with the second movement, which shares in many of these traits, are Debussy's most refined works for the piano, and triumphant culminations of his investigations into the piano's sound world.
Just as Mallarmé and the symbolist poets were making poetry not of ideas, but of just words, the "musicien français" was creating musical meaning not out of linear development or progression, but out of a static juxtaposition of sound events, with musical sense inherent in sonorous effect, a triumph of art for art's sake. Debussy, in spite of his Germanic conservatory training, managed to refocus attention to the actual sound event, and it was thus largely he who provided the gateway to modern music; Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Berg all acknowledged their great debt to him. If one were to look for his equivalent in painting, Debussy could be called an "impressionist" composer, though he himself preferred the term "symbolist". "If there is Impressionism in music", Oscar Thompson writes in his book on Debussy, "Reflets dans l'eau is one of the most perfect examples of it." Whether his music refers to or suggests something outside it (as Debussy said, "suggérer, c'est le rêve"), the music is never a means of expression as it is for Schoenberg, but is the artistic principle in its own right.
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Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (Debussy Images) - LIVE Recording - John Clement Andersonby JohnClementAnderson430 views
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