Fourth Concert of Finnissy Piano Music with new post-referendum composition

This coming Thursday, July 7th, at 18:30 in the Performance Space, City University, I will be playing the fourth in my series of concerts to celebrate Michael Finnissy’s 70th birthday. Following the cataclysm of the referendum on June 23rd, Finnissy has composed a new set of three short pieces collectively entitled Third Political Agenda (2016). The individual titles of the pieces should speak for themselves:

1. Corruption, Deceit, Ignorance, Intolerance
2. Hier kommt ‘U K Ichbezogen Populismus’
3. My country has betrayed me

I played the First Political Agenda in the opening concert of this series, on Tuesday February 16th, and will be playing the extended Second Political Agenda in a concert in the autumn.

The whole modified programme, which combines a selection of very early works with others mostly based on jazz or dance forms, many of them written in connection with Finnissy’s work with various dancers, is as follows:

Third Political Agenda (2016) [World premiere]
Polskie Tance Op. 32 (1955-62)
Four Mazurkas Op. 142 (1957)
Two Pasodobles (1959)
Autumnall (1968-71)
Freightrain Bruise (1972, rev. 1980)
23 Tangos  (1968-99) [World Premiere]
***
Honky Blues (1996)
How dear to me (1991)
Willow Willow (1991)
Poor Stuff (1991, rev. 1996)
Sometimes I… (1990, rev. 1997)
Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man (1990)
Boogie-Woogie (1980, rev. 1981)
Jazz (1976)
Fast Dances, Slow Dances (1978-79)

From Autumnall (1968-71)

Finnissy’s works like Freightrain Bruise use jazz-inspired idioms filtered through modernist languages of atonality, fragmentation and alienation, whilst Boogie-Woogie attempt a free improvisatory reconfiguration of this idiom in light of its appropriation by artists like Piet Mondrian.

From Freightrain Bruise (1972, rev. 1980)

The 23 Tangos, also receiving their first complete performance in this concert, span a wide range of Finnissy’s compositional career, including several pieces written in the 1960s and 1970s, an important work (No. 12, previously No. 4) written for a special Tango project by the late pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, two pieces (Nos. 7 and 17) inspired by works of Debussy and Rameau for related projects initiated by the pianist Stephen Gutman, and a host of others written as tributes or portraits to a wide variety of individuals, many of them composers or other individuals involved with new music (No. 2 for Laurence Crane, No. 4 for Jane Dudley, No. 5 for Elliott Schwartz, No. 6 for Howard Skempton, No. 8 for Colin Matthews, No. 10 for Alison Shockledge, No. 11 for Paul Driver, No. 13 for Andrew Law, No. 15 for Richard Steele, No. 18 for Joanne Johnson, No. 19 for Henrietta Brougham, No. 20 for Eve Egoyan, No. 21 for Thalia Myers, No. 22 for Salvatore Sciarrino, No. 23 for Jutta Avaly). Characteristically, Finnissy explores how to push to the limits a type of composition which retains some recognisable aspects of the idiom, and as such the set is extremely diverse, also working in mediated allusions to a range of other music including that of Beethoven, Busoni, Dukas, Sibelius, Barraqué and that of some of the dedicatees. I have been associated with this project since giving the first performance of the original Tangos 1-6 in my 1996 Finnissy series, then of Nos. 7 and 8 in the same series, and later several other premieres of the gradually expanding set. In the 2000s, Finnissy made various modifications to the series and re-arranged the ordering, but they have never been heard complete until now.

From Tango 17 (1999).