Kara Huber: Joan Tower Piano Works
Sacred Black Records

Committing an entire album to the work of one composer can be risky business. Performing a single piece as part of a compilation featuring material by multiple composers might conceal weaknesses—a paucity of imagination, say, or tendency towards self-borrowing—that a full album presentation could reveal. There's also a bit of a gamble in the performer presuming the composer will be sufficiently interesting to warrant the full-album treatment. Complicating matters further, the pressure intensifies on the performer when the composer's still with us and thus able to weigh in on the interpretations, something that obviously won't happen when a Liszt or Schumann album's being fashioned.

Any and all such qualms can be set aside in this case, however, as the work of American composer Joan Tower (b. 1938) holds up marvelously in this recording by Kara Huber, a long-time champion of the composer‘s work and as sympathetic an interpreter as could be imagined. The recipient of multiple prestigious awards, Tower is perhaps best known for her orchestral pieces, which thus makes this collection of solo piano music an all the more essential release. Its value is bolstered by the fact that the five pieces presented—four single-movement works and one in four parts—span three decades and capture in the most exposing manner writing Tower did for her first instrument. Not only do they show her maximizing the piano's expressive potential, they also provide a compelling portrait of her compositional voice.

Regarded as one of America's most important composers and honoured repeatedly, Tower has seen her work performed by countless soloists, chamber ensembles, and orchestras. From 1969 to 1984, she was pianist and founding member of the Da Capo Chamber Players and is currently Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972. She's created a staggering number of compositions and, as her many recent premieres indicate, shows no signs of creative exhaustion. For an interpreter, Tower could have asked for no one better than Huber. Her stellar technique was developed through studies at the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she completed her Doctor of Musical Arts in piano and conducting. She's performed as a soloist and recitalist at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and as part of the Steinway Series at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The album begins with one part from the popular Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman, which have been performed by over 600 different ensembles. Written in 2014 for solo piano, arranged two years later for orchestra, and dedicated to composer Tania Leon, Sixth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (2014) showcases different sides of Tower's personality, from mischievous and playful to contemplative and sober. The writing also reveals that her writing's characterized by the kind of adventurous openness that frustrates any attempt to slot it into one category. As eclectic is the four-movement suite No Longer Very Clear, whose title derives from a John Ashbury poem and which draws for inspiration from diverse subject matter. For the cryptic “Holding a Daisy” (1996), Tower was inspired by a Georgia O'Keefe flower painting that, in the composer's view, is “not as innocent as it appears.” An unrelentingly agitated and motoric pulse lends “Or Like a … an Engine” (1994) ferocious drive that only a pianist of Huber's extraordinary ability could make sound easy. Performed without interruption, the work's closing parts, “Vast Antique Cubes” and “Throbbing Still” (2000), inhabit dramatically contrasting realms, the slow-moving third movement a stark, spacious exercise in ascension, the tumultuous fourth spiked by rhythms associated with the composer's South American childhood roots.

September 2024