Griffes: Collected Works for Piano

The profile of American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes was severely damaged by the delayed arrival of Charles Ives onto the American scene, not to mention the heritage of his German musical training and his undeserved reputation as a composer of salon pieces beloved by amateur pianists. On New World's Charles Tomlinson Griffes: Collected Works for Piano, pianist Denver Oldham draws back the veil that began to cloak Griffes' music, thanks to mid-century misconceptions, and reveals it for the strong, daring, original, and ... Read More

The profile of American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes was severely damaged by the delayed arrival of Charles Ives onto the American scene, not to mention the heritage of his German musical training and his undeserved reputation as a composer of salon pieces beloved by amateur pianists. On New World's Charles Tomlinson Griffes: Collected Works for Piano, pianist Denver Oldham draws back the veil that began to cloak Griffes' music, thanks to mid-century misconceptions, and reveals it for the strong, daring, original, and innovative force that it is. Far from being a second-string MacDowell, Griffes' Americanism peeks through in even his most Europeanized music, for example as in the strangely bluesy gestures employed in Nightfall and in the second movement of the Three Preludes. The final section of Griffes' Piano Sonata, a milestone in American keyboard composition to those who know it, almost sounds like something written in the latter half of the 1940s, rather than in the late 1910s. Recorded at... Read Less