Marilyn Nonken - George Hunka

Dufourt / Nonken

Hitting the streets tomorrow, Hugues Dufourt: L’Origine du monde, a new album of piano and percussion works by the French composer, is already garnering rave reviews. In the March issue of Gramophone, Arnold Whittall calls the performance of the title work, inspired by Gustave Courbet’s controversial 1866 painting now at the Musée d’Orsay, “an exceptionally assured and spellbinding demonstration of Dufourt’s uncompromising creative ambitions. … While Marilyn Nonken is the tirelessly resourceful pianist throughout, there are also vital contributions from the New York University Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Haas.” Andy Hamilton in the British music magazine The Wire called it “a superb release. … In the works assembled here, physicality of performance is inseparable from musical sensuousness.”

Divine Art’s release completes Marilyn’s informal, indeed unintended, trilogy of spectral music for piano, following her 2005 double-CD Tristan Murail: The Complete Piano Music and her 2012 Voix Voilées (this latter also includes her extraordinary performance of Dufourt’s Erlkönig), all of which garnered top-flight reviews. After all, she did write the book on the subject. The CD booklet contains an excellent essay by Will Mason on this music to get you up to speed, and the album will be available tomorrow on CD from Amazon, as well as streaming on a variety of outlets, including Apple Classical. Bon appétit!

Sound all around

This Friday night, November 15, at 7:30 pm, my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken will take to the stage at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music and present Piano 360, a program of new and recent immersive musical works “surrounding the audience with a spatial audio ring of speakers,” according to the DiMenna Center’s page for this event. On the program are new compositions by Elizabeth Hoffman (which includes a few texts by yours truly), Ellen Fishman, and Natasha Barrett, as well as contemporary masterpieces by Alvin Lucier, Hugues Dufourt, and Jonathan Harvey.

Tickets for this event are available here; the DiMenna Center is at 450 West 37th Street here in New York. We’ll hope to see you there.

Patterns

It’s taken a while, but it’s worth the wait: the Complete Music for Cello & Piano by Morton Feldman, performed by my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken (piano) and the estimable Stephen Marotto (cello), is now out and available for purchase from Mode Records. The centerpiece of the 2-CD set is Feldman’s hypnotic 1981 “Patterns in a Chromatic Field,” but the works range in time from 1946 through 1981, permitting the listener to chart Feldman’s development over nearly thirty-five years of his musical activity. Recorded at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY, in 2018, it’s beautifully recorded and mastered by producers Jeffrey Means and Brian Brandt and engineers Jeff Svatek and Todd Vos. Nobody who’s interested in 20th-century American music will want to be without it.

The CD is available from Mode Records and a top-quality FLAC download of the album can be found at Bandcamp; it will be released through various streaming services next month.