CAMDEN REEVES (b.1974): Das Hexenklavier, Notturno dalle fiamme dell'inferno, Lucifer's Dynamo, Diablo Canyon, Inventions & Fantasies.

Description: The diablerie suggested by the titles of these ingenious works is not, for the most part, of the overheated Romantic kind, with hellfire and demons with pitchforks; any such goings-on here are of a more cerebral kind, though this is not to deny the formidable technical challenges of the works. If someone were to re-tell the Faust legend with Faust as a composer-pianist, this might be the kind of obsessively questing, rigorously constructed, geometrically precise music he might entertain himself with. These works are studies in intricate and complex counterpoint, and the composer borrows freely from early Baroque forms - ricercars, toccatas, inventions in two or more parts, canons - though in a contemporary, highly chromatic, frequently polyrhythmic vocabulary. The results are more intellectually satisfying than any amount of bravura display alone, and more vigorous and visceral than academic explorations of compositional systems typical of our time. Rare, unusual and highly satisfying. Richard Casey (piano).