Christina Naughton / Michelle Naughton AMERICAN POSTCARD

“They have to be heard to be believed,” said the Washington Post of piano duo Christina and Michelle Naughton. The twin sisters pay tribute to their homeland with the album American Postcard. It offers music by four US composers: John Adams (his Roll Over Beethoven, a work the Naughtons premiered in 2016), Aaron Copland, Conlan Nancarrow and Paul Schoenfield. As the sisters explain, “These pieces show the diversity and variety of American music. But one thing that ties them together is an exuberance that, to us, feels deeply American.”

Herbert Henck CONLON NANCARROW - GEORGE ANTHEIL Piano Music

As well as being a superb technician, the pianist Herbert Henck always puts together his discs with great thoughtfulness. This brilliantly executed programme of the renegade American composers Conlon Nancarrow and George Antheil may seem an unlikely juxtaposition, but it makes musical sense. ... The sources of Nancarrow’s inspirations are clear – the rhythmic energy and the syncopation come from jazz, while the clarity and the contrapuntal ingenuity stem from neoclassicism in general and Stravinsky in particular. Jazz and Stravinsky had also been the main inspirations of Antheil’s music more than a decade earlier, when this self-styled “bad boy of music” left the US (in 1922) to live in Europe for 11 years, touring as a pianist and scandalising his audiences with his own provocative compositions. At a recital in Paris in 1923, he played his Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage and Mechanisms (all three included here by Henck, alongside the Jazz Sonata, and the Sonatina, of the same vintage, and the Sonatina for radio written six years later). ... The music is still immensely attractive, full of vigour and harmonic daring – some untethered harmonies anticipate the more abandoned moments of Messiaen, other insouciant tunes sound like close cousins of the music of the Parisian Les Six, and yet other works are entirely rhythmic. ... As far as I know, the two composers never met, but had they done so, they would have found they had a lot in common, as Henck so lucidly demonstrates. (Andrew Clements, The Guardian)

Amy Williams / Helena Bugallo CONLON NANCARROW Studies and Solos

One aspect of the polymorphously polyrhythmic music of Conlon Nancarrow is its lack of practicality in live performance. Nancarrow didn't have, in his time, access to electronics, and as his interest in hearing multiple levels of rhythmic activity increased he turned to the only medium capable of delivering the goods -- the pneumatic technology of the player piano, driven by the "digital software" of a paper roll punched by hand. About the time his work began to gain attention, Nancarrow started to receive commissions for works from real, flesh-and-blood players. One of them, the late pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, created a number of arrangements of Nancarrow's studies for various live ensembles, including a four-hand version of Study No. 15. Duo pianists Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams have taken Mikhashoff's work as the point of departure, resulting in this disc, Conlon Nancarrow: Studies and Solos. 

Ten of Nancarrow's studies are heard combined with six other works written for human players. Three Two-Part Studies, Prelude, Blues, and Sonatina are early works from the 1930s and '40s, and the Three Canons for Ursula and Tango are late works. The obvious benefit that human intervention brings to the table in these pieces is a sense of touch and expression. Nancarrow's modified player pianos were capable of delivering discretion between soft and loud, but there was little they could achieve in terms of any gradations in between. The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo demonstrates that there is a lot to experience in Nancarrow's music outside the realm of its pneumatic context. Wergo's recorded sound is excellent, and Bugallo and Williams make Nancarrow's horrendously difficult rhythmic textures seem both natural and non-mechanical. Particularly impressive is their handling of three movements from the "Boogie Woogie Suite," namely Studies No. 3B in C and D; although the original player piano version is very exciting, Bugallo and Williams make it sound like a fractured duet between Art Tatum and Meade Lux Lewis. (Uncle Dave Lewis)