Skalkottas - Passacaglia

"Passacaglia" from 32 Piano Pieces (1940)

Nikolaos Skalkottas (1904-1949) was a significant Greek composer who wrote dodecaphonic and atonal music mostly influenced by the Second Viennese School. Skalkottas began violin lessons as early as five years old, but later abandoned performance in favor of composition. He studied with Kurt Weill and Philipp Jarnach (a pupil of Busoni), and also attended the masterclasses of Schoenberg, who described Skalkottas as one of his most talented pupils. Skalkottas was a prolific composer of chamber, instrumental, orchestral, and stage works. His piano music is typically virtuosic, with disjunct leaps, complicated textures, and continual syncopations. With the exception of his tonal and nationalist works, much of Skalkottas's output remained unpublished and unperformed until after his death.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• nikolaos
• skalkottas

[Quandrify]

@claytonlisa I think you may come to realize that the results are infact, in all senses, extremely musical; it is merely a matter of understanding expression in an radical sense. One may call Picasso unartistic because his paintings don't reflect real life; in reality, they reflect most of the time what it really is; paint on paper, in it's most beautiful form, and the ideas the painter had in a very raw sense, without the filters of simplicity.

[JohannVanMozart]

Amazing piano work. Skalkottas is one of the greatest composers!

[xodn3300]

@claytonlisa the thing is that they probably don't compose, let alone improvise, with such rule. if you like gubaidulina i'm sure you will find plenty of other modern composers you might like, regardless of how they compose.

[claytonlisa]

I like Gubaidulina's Chaconne, for example, but most of this 20th century piano repertoire strikes me like someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of music theory sitting at the piano and improvising with one rule: don't conform to any known music theoretic principle. Seems self-defeating and the results are, in my opinion, almost always un-musical.

[mynameisandycostello]

I've never heard this work before.. Thanks so much for the post!