Youtube Twitter Facebook
italiano print send send Skype
profiles - works

Works

Alvin Curran
For Cornelius
(1982)
for Piano solo


Length: 18:00

For Cornelius for piano solo was written in 1981-82 on hearing of the
death of the extraordinary musician, innovator, and revolutionary Cornelius Cardew (see original program notes from the first New Albion Recording).
This work which lasts approximately 18 minutes is in three parts: a pseudo Waltz, a Raging Roar, and final Chorale. It has been recorded by Ursula Oppens, Ivan Mikahshoff, Eve Egoyan, and Jeanne Golan and featured in concert by many pianists throughout the world, notably Oscar Pizzo, Daan Vandewalle, Reinier van Houdt, and Frederic Rzewski...

For Cornelius is dedicated to the composer's friend Cornelius Cardew, one of the most prolific musicians in the English musical panorama, although in effect it is actually dedicated to whoever feels the inevitable proximity of death.
During a walk on the outskirts of London, Cardew was run over by a car, offered no assistance but left at the roadside, wounded, for the whole night in the depths of winter; the morning after he was found dead, probably from exposure.
The composition was written immediately after Curran had heard of the death of his friend and is divided into three movements.
The first is a simple and unpretentious song, repeated many times.
The second, far longer, is intended as an authentic reflection which, starting first of all from the certainty and afterwards from the hope of living, of being rescued, evolves through the resigned recollection, always more agitated, of one's life advancing towards the inevitability of the death announced in the third movement by a solemn and inexpressive requiem.
(Oscar Pizzo)