Label: Cold Blue

ケージやフェルドマンを演奏するロサンゼルスを代表するピアニストの一人Vicki Rayが演奏を担当!!ペンシルベニア出身のアメリカの作曲家であり、Harold Buddとの共作アンビエントや電子音楽、パフォーマンスアート、ミニマルの制作にまで踏み込み、そして1980年代初頭から続くウェストコーストのアンビエント/ミニマル・レーベルCold Blue Musicに多くの名作を残している米コンポーザーDaniel Lentz。超絶技巧にてダイナミックに進行するピアノ曲[River of 1,000 Streams]。ライブ演奏されるソロ・パートに万華鏡のように現れる最大11のレイヤーを重ねたもので、トレモロの重厚なテクスチャーより形成され、徐々に豊かなハーモニーが最低音域から最高音域へと大きな弧を描いて上昇する傑作。



“When it comes to attempts at musical seduction, Lentz’s music is way out front.” (Kyle Gann, Village Voice)

“Lentz’s music inhabits…a musical ‘state of becoming,’ where both new and reappearing musical and textual fragments are fused through complex layering processes.” (John Schaefer, New Sounds, WNYC)

“Lentz’s work ‘chortles’ in ways both sensual and intellectual.” (Los Angeles Reader)


River of 1,000 Streams is a beautiful, bold, virtuosic, slowly evolving piano work in which a live/solo part is expanded by the addition of hundreds of “cascading echoes” (reappearing fragments of the music) that appear kaleidoscopically in up to 11 simultaneous layers, creating thick clouds of (primarily) tremolos that gradually gain in density and volume as rich, drifting harmonies climb, in a great arc, from the very bottom to the top of the keyboard. This piece, “conceived one early morning on the banks of the Yellowstone River” (Lentz), is more purely textural than most of Lentz’s recent work. Yet, like much of his work, its structure is that of a densely woven tapestry of new and recurring moments of music.

River is performed by one of Los Angeles’s most prominent pianists, Vicki Ray, a Grammy-nominated new-music champion and a founding member of the California EAR Unit and Piano Spheres. She has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and many new music groups in LA and around the world.