Thomas Rosenkranz

concert pianist and professor


Capturing the Energy of Improvisation in Thomas Rosenkranz's 'Toward the Curve' WQXR

In “Toward the Curve," American pianist Thomas Rosenkranz gathers seven composers' pieces for solo piano with electronics, interspersed with two improvised "Interludes" of his own creation. The works on the album vary in style, but they are all connected in a major way: they all exult in the role of the pianist as virtuoso. It’s hard to imagine a lesser pianist than Rosenkranz being able to capture the energy and complexity of these pieces. 

Rosenkranz, who is a master interpreter and improviser, treats the electronics as a concerto soloist might treat the orchestra. In some pieces the electronic part acts as an extension of the piano line, developing textures out of the instrument’s resonance. At other times, the piano and electronics are in dialogue, or in direct conflict. But throughout, the virtuosity of Rosenkranz’s playing takes center stage. There is a reason that the American Record Guide has described him as “one of the best new music performers around.”

Perhaps the most impressive element of the album is that it is largely improvised. An ease with improvisation is one of the skills that sets Rosenkranz apart from the majority of classically trained musicians, and he exploits that skill to its fullest in this album. “For me the energy of improvisation is what I'm trying to go for in any performance of old or new music,” says Rosenkranz. “This striving towards something that might work or fail right in front of your eyes seems to be some of the purest form of music making and for me, it is some of the most satisfying to try to capture.” There are improvisatory elements throughout the album, including the completely improvised Interludes, but the “energy of improvisation” he talks about is present throughout the entire album. It’s all but impossible to tell which moments in any given piece were precomposed, and which were improvised.

One highlight of the album is Peter Swendsen’s A sound does not view itself as thought, in which Rosenkranz interacts with the electronics in a particularly inspired way. In his improvisations he calls back to the great composers of Romantic piano music, either by direct quotation or general chordal and melodic structures. These moments, interwoven with Swendsen’s widely varied and timbrally effective electronic part, create the feeling of being thrown into a schizophrenic time machine. This juxtaposition of relaxation and chaos is written into the electronics, the 73 sections of which (a la Cage) are played back in a random and indeterminate order during each performance, keeping the pianist on his toes.

Jul 13, 2015 · by Marina Kifferstein

https://www.wqxr.org/story/capturing-energy-improvisation-thomas-rosenkranzs-toward-curve/


Provided to YouTube by NAXOS of America Kikai no Mori (After "... Ex Machina") : VIII. Things That Go... · Aiyun Huang After the End ℗ 2019 New Focus Recordi...

Avant Music News

It has to be said right up front: the music on After the End, which presents three new and recent vocal chamber works by the three contemporary composers Jesse Jones (b. 1978), Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon (b. 1962) and Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez (b. 1964), is of a refined beauty.

All three compositions are performed by small groups drawn from the faculty of the soundSCAPE summer Festival of Contemporary Music, an institution to which the three composers have been connected in various capacities in recent years. Given this history, it isn’t surprising that the performers—soprano Tony Arnold; flutist Lisa Cella; violinist Mark Fewer; percussionist Aiyun Huang; and pianist Thomas Rosenkranz—seem to have an especially good rapport with the work. Their realization of this sometimes rarefied, open-textured music is delicately balanced and austerely sensuous.

Jesse Jones’ After the End (2017), which was commissioned by soundSCAPE, sets a text by Jonathan Brent Butler to music for soprano, percussion and piano. Jones describes the text as pessimistic—it’s after the end of the world, after all—but at the same time holding out the promise of renewal. The vocal line is haunting but not despairing, proceeding at a measured pace intercut with rests. The accompaniment shimmers in slightly discordant, downward cascades of piano and vibes.

Flores de Viento III (1990, revised 2013), is a work in seven parts by Guadalajara-born Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. The composition is scored for soprano, violin, flute/piccolo, and percussion, and sets a series of poems, most of them by the composer’s sister Laura Zohn-Muldoon, based on the Mesoamerican myth of the feathered serpent Quetzalcóatl. Zohn-Muldoon constructs the music from concise, atonal melodic motifs that he varies and orchestrates as distinct splashes of instrumental color. By breaking the ensemble out into constantly shifting groupings of solo, duo, trio and quartet voices, he exploits the group’s timbral potential to its fullest. And the sheer variety of percussion instruments he employs—vibes, marimba, crotales, gong, congas, maracas and more—contributes significantly to the richness of the piece’s textures.

Mexican native Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez’s Kikai no Mori/Chance Forest Interludes (2015) was given its premiere at the 2015 soundSCAPE festival. The work is a fusion of two separate pieces, Chance Forest Interludes for solo soprano, and Kikai no Mori for piano and percussion. When presented together, the interludes are inserted in between movements of Kikai no Mori. The interludes are virtuoso pieces that provide a relatively quiet tonic to the fragmented melodies and suspenseful, rhythmic intensity of Kikai no Mori. The percussion part encompasses pitched and unpitched instruments and even the piano itself, through various extended techniques—tone clusters, playing directly on the strings, holding the strings while striking the keys—is turned into something of a multi-voiced percussion ensemble of its own.

-Daniel Barbiero, 7.29.19, Avant Music News



Around 2004, composer Paul Lansky famously made an about-face. After over 40 years of pioneering work in computer and electronic music, he began to mostly compose scores for live human musicians to play. In a recent interview (with himself!), he stated “I used to say that the difference between electronically sculpting sound and preparing scores was like the difference between being a filmmaker and being a playwright. I was right.” Textures, his latest work in playwright mode, was premiered on October 5, 2013, at Oberlin Conservatory’s Warner Concert Hall by the recently formed Hammer/Klavier ensemble, who commissioned it.

Hammer/Klavier is pianists Michael Sheppard and Thomas Rosenkranz and percussionists Svet Stoyanov and Gwen Burgett. Lansky wrote Textures to exploit the ensemble’s unusual instrumentation. As he told the audience in brief introductory remarks, “Piano performance practice has been around for more than 250 years and percussion…well, forever in some sense, but in formal practice for only the last 75 years or so. And both are, in reality, very percussive, so that’s a lot of material to reckon with.”

So, as Lansky said, he “started to splash notes onto paper, trying to fuse these two traditions together.” The resultingTextures is a broad and fascinating exploration of the similarities and differences in the sonic possibilities of pianos and a vast array of percussion devices, including marimbas, glockenspiels, vibraphones, wood blocks, bells, crotales, drums, cymbals, and more.  Each of the eight movements — I. Striations; II. Loose Ends; III. Soft Substances; IV. Slither; V. Granite; VI. Points of Light; VII. A flutter, On Edge; and VIII. Round-Wound — examines a different percussive sound realm.

Striations began with a repeated four-note figure tossed from player to player with increasing speed. Stoyanov and Burgett steadily expanded the textural complexity, adding notes of wood blocks, crotales, cymbals, and glockenspiel. Loose Ends has a bluesy jazz feel, with heavy rhythmic drums leading to a wild section on marimba and xylophone echoed in the pianos. Soft Substances had a lilting melody at its core. Bowed vibraphone and soft mallet cymbal strikes issued broad mellow sweeps of sound around soft arpeggiated trills on the pianos. Granite was all hard strikes in close formation, like toy soldiers marching, but not necessarily in the same parade. Rhythm dominated, with little tonal content, even from the pianos. Faint, delicate strikes on glockenspiel and long, slow pulls of the bow on vibraphone bars in Round Wound set the tone for a lush melody on the pianos, punctuated by soft strikes on wood and metal. An intricate winding fugue on marimba and vibraphone over steadily repeated bass on the pianos brought Lansky’s new “play” to a satisfying conclusion.

The program began with studies of the characteristics of pianos and percussion instruments separated from each other, setting the stage for Lansky’s work combining them. Toccata for two percussionists, by Anders Koppel, pitted wood against metal with Stoyanov on marimba and Burgett on vibraphone. The players set off on a high-speed chase in call-response form, with accelerating pace, then an abrupt stop. A second section contrasted the rich warmth of the marimba with the chilly dazzle of the vibraphone, featuring sweeping gestures pitting moonlight against starlight. The finale featured slashing gestures in fugal speed-runs up the counterposed ladders.

David Lang’s Opheus over and under, for two pianos, aptly illustrated the percussive nature of the piano. Rosenkranz and Sheppard relentlessly pounded the keys, moving ever so slightly up the keyboard only to return to the middle and repeat the progression again. Some might think that once or twice around this block was enough, but there was great fascination in the numerous cycles with barely perceptible changes each time.

I care if you listen- Arlene and Larry Dunn

Provided to YouTube by NAXOS of America Piano Trio No. 1: IV. Prayer Wheel (to Suck Water from Nowhere) · Jennifer Choi Scherzinger: African Math ℗ 2015 New ...

Provided to YouTube by NAXOS of America Piano Trio No. 2: I. Mask and a Mask · Jennifer Choi Scherzinger: African Math ℗ 2015 New Focus Recordings Released o...


Q2

South African composer Martin Scherzinger's new album "African Math" is an especially enlightened take on the traditional music of Africa – mostly because his music recognizes that it is not African music, but instead, Western listeners, who might require the enlightening influence of a Western composer in this repertoire.

Scherzinger approaches his inspiration with a humility uncharacteristic of most Western attempts to engage with the musics of another continent. Too often, the idea seems to be that the European tradition can offer the rest of the world something their music is missing. But instead of condescending to bring Western sophistication to the music of Africa, Scherzinger uses European tools to alert European ears to the sophistication already present in the source material.

In the opening suite, Hallucinating Accordion, that might mean illuminating the complexity of an African polyrhythm by dissecting it and dividing that amongst the members of a piano trio, or conversely, by compressing those voices into the music of a single, monophonic instrument. Or through certain discreet octave doublings, dissecting the rich timbres hand built into that traditional instrument.

On the album's second half, Mirror Notes/Slow Noises, the polyrhythms remain just as complex, but here their overlapping cycles produce harmonies with more satisfyingly tonal implications – its white-key soundworld lies in a middle ground between austerity of pitch and harmonic warmth that could be the invention of a composer from the 20th-century Parisian circle of Nadia Boulanger.

Throughout the album, warmly recorded for New Focus Recordings, violinist Jennifer Choi, cellist Chris Gross and pianist Tom Rosenkranz bring a precision that makes the music's rhythmic shifts seems simple to play and understand, but nevertheless articulates them in a way that brings out just how complicated these processes really are. These scores hold up a mirror to the European tradition, one that allows it to see the traditions of Africa eye to eye – and discover that the other continent is, after all, closer than it appears.

- Daniel Stephen Johnson, Q2 Album of the Week

Provided to YouTube by NAXOS of America Run Before Lightning · Conor Nelson Nataraja ℗ 2014 New Focus Recordings Released on: 2014-10-14 Artist: Conor Nelson...

Provided to YouTube by NAXOS of America Danses Vagues: I. Dance d'ete (Inflorescence IIIa) · Conor Nelson Nataraja ℗ 2014 New Focus Recordings Released on: 2...


New Music Buff

This is a curious collection of flute and piano music. It is framed by two pieces from the late great Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012), one by Elliott Carter and a collection of world premiere recordings by composers far less familiar and markedly different in style.

The premieres are all by living composers (Josh Levine, Christopher Dietz, C.R. Kasprzsyk and Sam Pluta). Now these are all fine compositions but their style is so very different from the Harvey and Carter pieces that it is almost jarring to the listener. This living set of composers is represented by a far more conservative compositional ethic (please don’t read that as a negative) than the older, more modernist pieces which frame their efforts here.

Of course only time will tell the eventual place of these works in the annals of musical history but the fact here is that we have two towering works by Harvey, a tasty bit of one of Carter’s lesser known works and essentially unheard works from a gaggle of newcomers. The listener just has to be prepared to switch gears.

The performances are beautiful and loving throughout. The Harvey pieces truly stand out as the masterpieces they are as does the Carter. Curiously Carter (1908-2012) has been somewhat maligned since his passing for reasons that defy logic but I am glad that this late Carter piece was included.

This is a lovely recording and performance. The juxtaposition of the modernist pieces framing the neo-romantic pieces by the younger composers is striking but stick with it. The pleasures of this recording are in the loving and committed performances as well as the recording itself which is quite lucid.

Conor Nelson on flute and Thomas Rosenkranz, piano are new names to me but I will keep them in mind having heard what they have done here. The ear who made this recording so listenable was Ryan Miller, the recording engineer.

-- Allan Cronin, New Music Buff, 6.27.2016


Provided to YouTube by NAXOS of America 4 Piano Pieces: No. 4. - · Thomas Rosenkranz Inflorescence - Music from Soundscape ℗ 2013 New Focus Recordings Releas...


American Record Guide

The soundSCAPE festival, held annually in Maccagno, Italy, brings together scholars, performers, and composers for two weeks of lectures, masterclasses, workshops, and concerts. This program of seven works is titled “Inflorescence” and refers both to the arresting opening composition, Josh Levine’s Breathing Ritual (Inflorescence V), as well as the burgeoning of color and variety characteristic of today’s new music scene. Levine describes the aforementioned work (for voice, percussion, and piano) as the last in a series that develops freely but coherently and draws on a variety of found musical sources. His Transparency (PartI) is scored for bass drum, four triangles, and sandpaper; it is dominated by an almost ritualistic, slow series of rhythmic figures for the drum, each separated by silence sufficient to allow the contemplation of the instrument’s complex resonance—a sounding space that, in Levine’s words, tries “to teach the instrument to transform its body, to speak or even sing”. By contrast, Webern’s Op. 12 songs sound positively traditional—in the best sense of the word—in this context. Mark Applebaum’s Curb Weight Surgical Field is an etude in sound, where the voice (who produces tongue clicks, whistling, kissing sounds, and so on) seems to animate or color a complex series of sounds produced in the piano’s upper range (both conventionally, through striking the keys, and with a variety of inside-the-instrument efforts); though the work sounds a little old-fashioned (and not in the best sense of the word), a surprising timbre sometimes makes the whole enterprise worthwhile. In Rzewski’s punishing Piano Piece 4 the performer executes a number of virtuosic techniques to transform the piano into what the notes describe as “a huge sonic gong”. Georges Aperghis’s Recitations for Solo Voice, from 1978, partakes of a sonic terrain similar to works such as Berio’s Sequenza for voice, but holds up remarkably well to my 2014 ears. Although the recorded sound is sometimes too dry and the piano, in particular, sometimes sounds much too brittle (especially in Levine’s Breathing Ritual), these are expert performances of some very exciting and unusual new music. Singly and in combination, Arnold, Huang, and Rosenkranz are some of the best new music performers around, and their commitment to this repertory makes for readings that are unusually vivid and subtle.

- HASKINS, May 2014


Provided to YouTube by harmonia mundi Music for 18 Musicians (modular Version) : Section III A · Ensemble Signal Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians ℗ harmon...


In May, New York’s Ensemble Signal released one of a very few commercial recordings of Music for 18 Musicians, composer Steve’s Reich’s seminal work of minimalism from the mid-’70s. Signal, founded by Lauren Radnofsky and Brad Lubman in 2008, have toured the world, released five recordings, and received wide acclaim for their vitality and precision. Here, the group reproduces fellow New Yorker Steve Reich’s 1978 release on ECM with impeccable fidelity. The work contains eleven “Sections”, bookended by two movements called “Pulses”. The orchestration comprises of violin, cello, female vocals, pianos, maracas, marimbas, xylophones, metallophone, clarinets, and bass clarinets. Based wholly on an eleven-chord cycle, the work explores the pulsating auditory sensation caused by the onset and location of the various pitches in space. Built on meticulous repetitions, the work concerns itself only with what’s pure and right, musically speaking.

While most music assumes the task of finding home -- that note or chord that ties things up and makes the makes the whole journey worthwhile --Music for 18 Musicians finds home at the start, and never leaves. Every subsequent movement comes as a resolution you never knew was needed. Any purer, and you’d be listening to an infinitely sustained, spectrum-spanning major chord played by a million hand-holding citizens of the world. While the work cannot be described as devoid of conflict, it tenses and relaxes so subtly that even the tension is relaxation by the standards of most other music. Like Terry Riley’s In C, a minimalist masterpiece of a decade prior, layers are added and removed with such care that any change at all is given the utmost respect. In the first notes of “Pulses”, the work materializes with stunning clarity. Instruments come into focus immediately, sounding like a team of archers firing a single target: sometimes they all hit a single spot, other times in perfect, geometric formation. Other times still, one arrow splits another, cleanly and silently: a perfect and an instantaneous arrival coupled with a quiet and unassuming departure.

Over the first few sections, the piece builds from meditations on single notes and chords, its passages formed by simple addition and subtraction, crescendo and decrescendo. It’s music that couldn’t offend your sensibilities if you wanted it to. Baths of harmonies cycle over and over again; melodies slowly grow longer and stronger through the many cycles, never over- or under-asserting themselves. Instruments claw their way in from beneath to emerge and eventually subsume others, briefly take their turn as lead, and blend back into the mix. Bright and airy, the vocals blend seamlessly, and the bass clarinets saw gently as if tracing a fine piece of wood. With “Section 5” comes a more prominent change in the form of a wonderful new piano theme, and with “Section 11”, a welcome variation on an original theme, simultaneously foreign and strangely familiar. Throughout the hour-long experience, the piece never once grows uncomfortable with itself, never falters or questions its path: “The way is straight and true. Just follow yourself,” a sign tells you. “Okay, sign, I will,” you say to yourself. And you do.

The whole thing feels very universal. It blends musical styles and cultures to the point that Music for 18 Musicians transcends style and culture. At the roots of this work are patterns, the very musical traditions of earth: the frameworks of folk, pop, and classical musics. This music is easy to appreciate because its experimentation remains firmly within the bounds of structure and intuition. Objects interact in compositionally governed ratios, instantly clear and recognizable—the perfect soundtrack for a child as he or she lays awake, pondering what it is to become someone.

In a sense, the ensemble’s work is a difficult one to evaluate. With such an immensely challenging piece to perform, the ensemble deserves commendation for even trying, and indeed, its rendition adheres to the original miraculously—no need for creative embellishment. In this sense, there’s not much to say about Ensemble Signal’s particular recording, except that it’s flawless—in pitch, in volume, in timing. Furthermore, given the technology of the day, Signal produce an even cleaner recording than 1978’s. And perhaps here lie both its strength and weakness. It’s tempting to describe Music for 18 Musicians as otherworldly or inhuman, but perhaps it’s just not about anything human. It conveys a message neither political nor social but rather scientific and aesthetic. It’s music about patterns, and here, that’s quite refreshing.

POP Matters NOAH HARRISON

18 Jun 2015


Provided to YouTube by NAXOS of America Rhapsody in Blue (arr. F. Grofe for piano and orchestra) · Thomas Rosenkranz The Oberlin Orchestra in China ℗ 2013 Ob...


Live Recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Oberlin Orchestra (2005)

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