John Carbon: Short Stories For Piano
Convivium

A great many soloists, chamber ensembles, and orchestras have performed and recorded John Carbon's work over the years, but pianist Steven Graff seems to have an especially strong connection to it. His recently issued Short Stories For Piano, which augments the twenty-four-part title work with the thirteen-minute Icarus, is a welcome complement to the releases John Carbon Played by Steven Graff (2012) and John Carbon: Astro Dogs & Other Piano Works (2020). One imagines the composer, born in Chicago in 1951, must be well-pleased by Graff's interpretations when the connection between the composer and performer is so symbiotic.

Carbon's output is rich and varied, comprising as it does opera, choral, orchestral, vocal, and chamber works, and has been performed throughout the United States and abroad. Recordings of his violin, clarinet, and double bass concertos were met with acclaim, and works such as Notturno for Trumpet, Harp, and Strings and the orchestral pieces Hommage à Trois and Inner Voices and song cycles Letters from Abigail and Queen Victoria's Journey testify to his range. The list of works he's produced is long and and collectively supports one Fanfare writer's description of Carbon as “an extraordinarily talented and compelling composer.”

Graff was also born in Chicago and has appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra nine times. A graduate of The Juilliard School and The Graduate School of CUNY, the recitalist and chamber musician has performed throughout the United States and in China, Norway, Japan, Italy, and Israel, has recorded for the Centaur, Capstone, Zimbel, and Convivium labels, and is currently a full-time professor of piano at Converse University in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

As the two works on this latest release show, Carbon possesses seemingly unlimited powers of imagination. The twenty-four miniatures in the nearly hour-long Short Stories offer one delightful surprise after another, while the single-movement Icarus unfolds like the epic journey it is. The former work arrived at its current state after evolving through many stages. Written between 2013 and 2018, Carbon initially considered The Well-Blended Primer as a title for the collection, seeing as how, like Bach's Das wohltemperierte Klavier, its components focused on the twenty-four major and minor keys. But as he continued to work on the material, Carbon found it becoming less influenced by Bach only but also Chopin, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Schumann, Debussy, and Prokofiev. Stated otherwise, the pieces began to exhibit individual characters that invited the evocative titles they now possess and became less formal exercises, even if counterpoint remains a central part of the work's design.

Rather than alternate between preludes and fugues, Short Stories presents pieces that are lyrical and playful and venture down tonal, chromatic, and atonal paths. That lends the work an appealing unpredictability and constant capacity to surprise. Playfulness is reflect in Carbon's title choices, some of which directly nod to fellow composers (“Tea with Claude and Maurice,” “Czerny's Id,” “Joplin's Tic”) and others cue mental images (“Quantum Hobgoblin,” “The Woodpecker's Joke”). Vivid and vibrant tales they are as opposed to dry, technical exercises, and for the most part they're concise too, with only five pressing past the two-minute mark. Conspicuously distancing itself from the rest is the contemplative reverie “George Sand's Dream,” whose seven-and-a-half-minute length makes it seem an epic by comparison. After “Heather Bells” inaugurates the collection with a gently radiant outpouring of resonant lyricism, subsequent settings are but turns mischievous (“Pirate's Hornpipe”), playful (“Simon Says”), elegant (“Paean”), sombre (“Spider's Reflection”), heartfelt (“Fallen Heroes”), animated (“Guadeloupe Calypso”), and cryptic (“Thorny Reminiscence”). Whereas “Hunt in the Hollow” is hot on the trail of its prey, “Arctic Love Story” recounts a rhapsodic romance sprinkled with longing and melancholy.

June 2024