Piston: Chamber Music including the Quintet for Flute & Sting Quartet

"The art of composition is never completed. It is a lifetime's continuing pursuit", wrote the American composer, Walter Piston. Born in 1894, he was a self-taught violinist, pianist and saxophonist earning a living playing in dance halls, hotels and restaurants. He was twenty-six before he began to study composition, eventually moving to Paris as a pupil of Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. Though his music was influenced by their teaching, his individuality and Americanism is evident throughout his modest catalogue of music. Central to his output were eight fine symphonies, two violin concertos, and the famous ballet, The Incredible Flutist. Most of his chamber music comes from his later life, and combine his ready sense of good humour with an attractive melodic content.

Reviews:
"The Naxos American Classics series is throwing up both intriguing repertoire and some appealing performances...

Piston's splendid String Sextet dates from 1964 and occupies a very different world. Its opening is dark, intense and ruminating: a netherworld, with light glimpsed in an cello solo (exquisitely played by Judith Glyde). Given the movement's threnodic, monumental feel, we might almost be in post-war Poland..."
- The Strad (Roderic Dunnett) Dec 2000

"Walter Piston (1894-1976) is a composer whose surname conjures up images of pulsating, mechanistic music, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the four chamber works on this disc, the quality that most prominently distinguishes his style is the restraint, refinement and subtlety that he acquired during his French musical education: he was a pupil of both Nadia Boulanger and Paul Dukas, whose Sorcerer's Apprentice wit seems to have struck a chord in Piston's own personality.

"These fine performances, recorded during the 1999 Australian Festival of Chamber Music, bring out the lightness and delicacy of the Quintet for Flute and String Sextet's slow first movement and the combination of lyricism and energetic lines in its finale.

"The various ensembles are thoroughly persuasive here. The veiled colours that shroud the opening of the Piano Quartet are identified with just the same assurance and clear characterisation as the more robust, Brahmsian workings of the Piano Quintet. An illuminating disc."
- The Daily (Telegraph Geoffrey Norris), Saturday, 23rd Sept. 2000