"Although Vincent Persichetti's 12 piano sonatas embrace a marked stylistic evolution over four decades, each is skilfully crafted, concise, assured and effectively though never garishly wrought for the keyboard, reflecting the composer's considerable pianism.  Even the barest polyphonic writing is deployed with such registral care that it never sounds thin or dry.  Conversely, climactic chordal passages make a clear, sonorous and clutter-free impact.  Certainly Geoffrey Burleson not only observes to a proverbial tee but also relishes the composer's meticulous expressive and dynamic contrasts, elaborate pedal indication and precisely worked-out metric modulations.  In fact each sonata comes alive by virtue of Burleson's intelligent virtuosity and caring musicianship, qualities that also manifest in his annotations.  It's good finally to have all the sonatas brought together in a world-class, excellently engineered reference edition that constitutes a major addition to the catalog."

Brian Banks' music projects a wide array of influences, images & synthesized genres.  Deeply evocative and affecting, his musical language incorporates several different kinds of pentatonic scales, modal fugues, the blues, dramatic dissonant passages in complex meters, and profoundly lyrical writing.  This release contains piano compositions written since 1999, including 3 piano sonatas, and two sets of preludes.  A native of the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Banks now lives in Mexico, where he teaches composition at the

Universidad de las Américas, Puebla.

 

 

 

 

Arthur Berger:
Complete Works for Solo Piano
(Centaur Records)
~released in 2002~

Released in honor of Berger's 90th birthday year, this is the first CD to unite all solo piano music of the venerated American composer on one release, and includes premiere recordings of several works written over the last 70 years.  Berger's music projects a strikingly original synthesis of his own sonic and aesthetic vision with a multiplicity of influences, including jazz, Stravinsky, Copland, and Schoenberg.   This project received support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. 

Praise for
~Arthur Berger: Complete Works for Solo Piano~

"It's too bad the composer Arthur Berger had to wait till he turned 90 last year to see a recording of his complete works for solo piano.
The Centaur label has filled that gap with a CD featuring Geoffrey Burleson, a top-notch pianist, and it was worth the wait, both for Mr. Berger and for anyone interested in vibrant contemporary piano music.  The earliest works are products of a Bronx-born composer who has deftly fashioned an urbane voice from diverse enthusiasms.  You hear traces of the Second Viennese School, pungent Coplandesque tonality and plenty of streets-of-New York jazziness.  But just as these Neo-Classical works have some astringent atonal elements, the Five Pieces for Piano (1969), a rigorously 12-tone work, has Neo-Classical lucidity and shimmering harmonic radiance."
"Mr. Burleson brings rhythmic brio, rich colorings and a resourceful technique to his accounts of these works.  But what really draws you in is his palpable excitement over Mr. Berger's music."

-Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

"In its rhythmic cunning and unpredictability, Arthur Berger's music holds one's attention, with a restless fragmented style, tempi and metres constantly upturned...Berger's precise rhythmic pointing and independence of voices  are singular.  Geoffrey Burleson's agile, incisive performances make the strongest possible case for this music, and the disc gains by the pianist's own informed and comprehensive notes."

-Lawrence A Johnson, Gramophone

 

 

“Berger’s piano music is a major strand in his work...it is written in several techniques, and sometimes styles as diverse as German Baroque, cheeky French charm, and advanced New York jazz coexist in different layers within the same piece.  But all of it bears the unmistakable mark of the same quirky and indispensable personality, and all exhibits an elevated level of craftsmanship.  None of his music outlives its welcome; it’s sparse but not austere because it has so many implications.”
 “Burleson plays this music with assurance, color, character and devotion.  His extensive experience in all kinds of music, including jazz, comes in handy here, and so does the precision of his ear.  Burleson’s performances are full of playful insight, offered in tribute to the composer’s richly lived 90 years.”

-Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

 

The Pittsburgh Collective
~Works of David Sanford~

(Oxingale Records)

~Recorded live at the Knitting Factory,

released January 2007~

Burleson performs Sanford's visceral, eclectic and brilliant music with this top-flight jazz ensemble, and contributes two extended improvised solos, on "Bagatelle" and "V-Reel."  Sanford's stylistic palette encompasses modern classical within a large jazz ensemble sonority, with various forms--rhythm and blues, straight-ahead hard bop, so-called third stream, punk rock, funk, marches, waltzes, tangos, dance suites, etc--emerging, filtered through an emotionally charged, modern expressionist aural lens.

 

 

 

Barbara White:
Apocryphal Stories
(Albany Records)
~released in 2004~

Burleson performs Reliquary, an extraordinary 5-movement suite for solo piano which projects various musical remembrances, tributes, epitaphs and allusions.  Reliquary evokes and mutates the spirits of Claude Debussy, Franz Liszt, Maurice Ravel, Lennie Tristano, and machine age music from George Antheil to Tom Waits, in a potent work exploring the distortion of memory.

 

 

 

Urban Cabaret:

Songs and Solo Piano Music of Hanns Eisler,

Arnold Schoenberg & Ed Harsh

(Neuma Records)

~released in 1994~

 

~featuring Maria Tegzes, soprano~

An evocative survey of vocal and solo piano music by two of the leading musical forces of Weimar Berlin.  The CD opens with Arnold Schoenberg's alternately seductive and satirical Brettl-Lieder, written for the Über-Brettl Cabaret in Berlin.   Schoenberg's student Hanns Eisler is represented by his dynamic and forceful song collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, as well as his Piano Sonata No. 2 and other solo piano music.  American composer Ed Harsh's "be not the slave of words/i fear loquacious odes" concludes the CD, brilliantly recasting, colliding and synthesizing Weimar styles with modern popular idioms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Olivier Messiaen:

Quartet for the End of Time

(Centaur Records)

~released in June of 2008~

with

Carol Lieberman, violin

Bruce Creditor, clarinet

David Finch, cello

 

~lovingly dedicated to the memory of David Finch~

 

 

 

 

Bernard Hoffer:
Ma Goose and A Boston Cinderella
with
Boston Musica Viva
~and narration by~
Bob McGrath
(Bob of Sesame Street)
(Albany Records)
~released in 2005~

Burleson performs in two ballet sextets by Bernard Hoffer, an Emmy-nominated composer who has written music for everything from PBS series (American Experience, MacNeill/Lehrer News Hour) to Saturday morning cartoons (Thundercats) to orchestral and chamber concert works.  Both ballets were written for the Boston Musica Viva, and are by turns witty, virtuosic, lyrical and affecting.

 

Where the Sunsets Bleed: 
Chamber Music of Edward Knight
(Albany Records)
~released in 2005~

Burleson performs Knight's dramatic Sonata for Cello and Piano (1993), with cellist David Russell.