Louis Moreau Gottschalk - The Banjo

Описание: Touch 2022

The Banjo
Composed by: Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)
Arranged by: Jerome Moross (1913-1983)

Performers:
Fei Dong
Ng Jing Ting

Programme notes:
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) was an American composer and pianist born in New Orleans. During his childhood, he was exposed to Louisiana Creole folk music, which influenced many of his compositions. Gottschalk went to Paris at 13 with the intention of pursuing Classical training at the Paris Conservatorie to fulfil his musical ambitions. Unfortunately, his application to the Conservatorie was rejected. Thus, he studied piano privately under Karl Hallé and Camille-Marie Stamaty, and composition privately under Pierre Malenden. He subsequently returned to America in 1853 and mostly toured around the region for the rest of his life.

Gottschalk composed The Banjo in 1853, the same year he returned to America. The Banjo is originally a solo piano work with a folk-like and flashy character that imitates mid-nineteenth-century African-American banjo playing techniques such as strumming, up-picking, and downstroking. It is a comprehensive documentation of nineteenth-century African-American banjo tradition, and is commonly featured as an encore by many piano virtuosi, such as Crypien Katsaris. In The Banjo, the cyclic form is used, whereby a basic repeating phrase is presented in different variants throughout the work. The piece opens with a fanfare, before the opening variants, which feature an accompaniment that resembles simple up-picking and downstroking. This is occasionally punctuated by simple broken chords. Throughout the piece, repeated notes mimic the successive plucking of a single string, whereas thick chords and accents mirror strumming. The piece then ends excitingly with a variant that is evocative of quick virtuosic strumming of chords.

Tonight, we present an arrangement of The Banjo for piano duo by American film composer Jerome Moross (1913-1983).

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