Pianist Geoffrey Burleson Performs Rare Music of Composers George Antheil, Roy Harris & Michael Sahl October 29, 2009

A Celebration of Pictorial Piano Works with Illustrations Highlighting Trio of American Composers – George Antheil, Roy Harris & Michael Sahl

WHO: Geoffrey Burleson – a critically-acclaimed pianist who has performed throughout Europe and North America. He has appeared as concerto soloist with the Boston Musica Viva, Arlington Philharmonic, New England Philharmonic and the Holland Symfonia in the Netherlands performing repertoire ranging from Mozart, Weber and Saint-Saens to Gershwin and Klaas de Vries. Since 2008, Burleson has released three CDs: Arthur Berger: Complete Works for Solo Piano (solo), Vincent Persichetti: Complete Piano Sonatas (solo) and Odd Couple (with cellist Matt Haimovitz).

WHAT: American Landscapes & Surreal Sonic Machines – a rare audio and visual program featuring the music of three dynamic and cutting-edge American performers from the first half of the 20th Century – George Antheil, Roy Harris & Michael Sahl. The night begins with the sophisticated music of composer Roy Harris’s “Piano Sonata” (1928), followed by Michael Sahl’s innovative “Blues/Pastoral/The Cave/Dance” (world premiere) and culminating with a rare performance of George Antheil’s “La Femme 100 Tetes” (1933) synchronized with video projections from Max Ernst’s surrealist 1929 collage novel of the same name.

About the composers:
Roy Harris – Born in a log cabin in the Oklahoma panhandle in 1898, Harris strived to evoke something of the untamed American landscape in his work amidst his very sophisticated and often eccentric compositional style. His Piano Sonata, Op. 1 is both unpredictable and inevitable in its arc and design while simultaneously highly fragmented, constantly shifting with dramatic changes in rhythm, and resplendent with very long, searching and poignant melodies.

Michael Sahl – Acclaimed as one of the earliest composers to write in the genre-blending style favored by the downtown New York scene, he successfully managed to straddle the line between classical "new music," pop, rock, jazz, and musical theater well before many musicians cared to experiment with such combinations. Sahl is fond of combining "Romantic” melody lines with "rhythm-section grooves." At one time, he was musical
director for folk singer Judy Collins.


George Antheil – An American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, inventor and self-described "Bad Boy of Music," his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with its cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices. Antheil achieved great fame largely for his “Ballet Mecanique” - a concerto where a machine is the soloist (a pianola or player piano) with the orchestra consisting of numerous pianos and percussion instruments that included sirens and airplane propellers.