Many Hands: The Piano Music of David Del Tredici, Vols 2-4

…There is an openness about the music as well, a welcoming, highly communicative quality, especially in his piano music, which is lyrical, intimate, charming, sometimes subtle, often deliberately bangy, and always from the heart. Del Tredici credits Marc Peloquin, the pianist here, with “getting me back to writing piano music” after a nearly 20-year “pianoless” intermission. Peloquin played Del Tredici’s 2003 Gymnopedies 1 (the first of an elegant set of three) and a collaboration was born, inspiring a huge stream of piano music, performed with authority and love on this 3-disc album. (Volume 1 is on Naxos; Volume 2, Many Hands, CD 1 here, was previously released on Albany.)…

The music of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici still sounds endearing in its playfulness. For the second time in a year, we have a reminder of this thanks to a release from the Albany label: first, a stellar set of his psychedelic 1970s orchestral pieces, and now, this volume from Marc Peloquin, a longtime Del Tredici champion. The first disc here is a reissue, but the second and third are new. Particularly touching among those: “Wildwood Etude,” which sets the second movement from Del Tredici’s as-yet-unreleased song cycle “Gay Life.” Particularly playful is the miniature “Opposites Attract,” which references Wagner and Virgil Thomson without forgetting to contribute some melodic invention of its own. The sequencing is far from chronological. One minute you may be hearing the elegiac and stately 21st-century works that make up “Late in the Game.” Another, you’ll be hearing the atonal student works of “Fantasy Pieces,” from 1959-60. Despite the breadth of the history covered here, Peloquin’s touch is admirably sensitive to the cantabile quality that Del Tredici is apt to bring to any harmonic idiom. As a result, this valuable set does more than hang together well; it also speaks to the sturdiness of its composer’s catalog.