Fennimore: Selected Piano Music

Joseph Fennimore has written songs, chamber music, orchestral works, and two one-act operas. His works have been performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera Studio, the New York City Ballet, at the Almeida Festival in London, and the Ravinia, Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and Tanglewood festivals, among others. His music has been performed nationwide, in Europe and Japan and broadcast worldwide on Spectrum, Nonesuch, and Albany Records. Born in New York City, Fennimore has been composing since childhood. He attended the Eastman and Juilliard Schools of Music, receiving degrees with honors from both. After a brief but distinguished career as a pianist, he founded and or its first five years directed the Hear America First Concert Series in New York City devoted to American music. The piano works on this disc include Armistice, a set of three pieces named for the intermission between the two world wars; Variations on a Theme of Beethoven; The Woolworth Man and The Hen's Snuffbox are stylized rags taking their titles from poems in Afro-American dialect by Herbert Woodward Martin. Foxtrot is a sonata in two movements. Blues conjures smoky bars, a haze of booze, hangovers and regrets for the sour love of one-night stands. An Old Soft Shoe is danced by a vaudeville tatterdemalion in top hat and tails, deftly bouncing his rubber cane, executing comic bits and pratfalls while proudly recalling better times long gone. Bernini's altarpiece of St. Teresa in ecstasy and St. Teresa's own writings about the experience give some notion of the central portion of the Second Romance: Calentura de Teresa. The first performance of Concerto Piccolo was at the Eastman School with Howard Hanson conducting.