A member of the Scratch Orchestra in the 1970's and a contemporary and collaborator of Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars and John White amongst others, Smith has amassed an extensive body of work that draws on a wide range of influences from contemporary composition to Javanese classical and Albanian folk musics. Here, John Tilbury plays a collection of 12 of Smith's brief sonatas, each focusing on a particular musical genre.
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John Tilbury / piano
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Recorded April 1988 in London.
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Tracklisting:
1 - Charleston 3:28
2 - Maxixe 2:54
3 - Ramble 4:20
4 - Dub 2:58
5 - Mambo 3:23
6 - Nocturne 4:32
7 - Bossa Nova 2:56
8 - Boomerangs 2:52
9 - Quasi Tambura 4:33
10 - Tango 3:00
11 - Thelonious 2:37
12 - Allegro Barbaro
Available as a 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC download.
John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.
Video by Helen Petts
