{"id":112100,"date":"2018-03-28T22:47:37","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T20:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/reflections-on-the-historic-recordings-of-an-iconic-south-african-composer-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2018-03-28T22:47:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T20:47:37","slug":"reflections-on-the-historic-recordings-of-an-iconic-south-african-composer-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/reflections-on-the-historic-recordings-of-an-iconic-south-african-composer-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the historic recordings of an iconic South African composer | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflections on the historic recordings of an iconic South African composer<\/a>: <\/p>\n

South African born pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar.<\/span> Stephanus Muller<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From the outside, it looks like a barn. But on entering, you step into a spacious hall with a Model D Steinway piano and small recording studio. Potton Hall on the UK\u2019s Suffolk coast is located in Benjamin Britten country. To the north, it\u2019s half an hour from Lowestoft where the composer was born in 1913; to the south, 20 minutes from Aldeburgh where he died in 1976. <\/p>\n

It was here, on 15 and 16 February, where Daniel-Ben Pienaar sat down to record, for the first time ever, the complete solo piano music of pioneering South African composer Arnold van Wyk. Pienaar\u2019s work has been critically acclaimed in Gramophone Magazine (Editor\u2019s Choice), BBC Music Magazine (Instrumental Recording of the Month), Britain\u2019s Sunday Times (Top 5 Recordings of 2011), Diapason and Der Spiegel. Van Wyk was part of the beginnings of Western composition in South Africa in the early decades of the twentieth century. He contributed major works to the local classical music canon. <\/p>\n

Van Wyk was Britten\u2019s contemporary. He was born in 1916 in the small South African town of Calvinia and died in 1983 in Bellville, near Cape Town. Although he displays influences of Britten in some of his works, he was never part of Britten\u2019s circle. Studying at the Royal Academy of Music, Van Wyk encountered other important British composers and musicians. Most significant of these to Van Wyk was composer and editor Howard Ferguson, who became a life-long friend who supported Van Wyk emotionally and financially. Ferguson also edited and published some of Van Wyk\u2019s work after his death.<\/p>\n

Pienaar, who was born in South Africa, has been a member of the Royal Academy of Music\u2019s teaching faculty since 2005. As he explains on his website, he views the canonic classical repertoire as,<\/p>\n

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radically \u2018late\u2019 \u2013 both with respect to the works themselves, and to the performance traditions and great recorded performances that surround them \u2013 demanding an active intervention from the performer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This approach, of which Glenn Gould is perhaps the most famous historical pianistic reference point, situates Pienaar outside conventional notions of \u201cinterpretation\u201d that depend on the normative authority of the composer and score. Instead, Pienaar embraces performances, and especially recordings, as radical acts of text creation.<\/p>\n

Against pianism<\/h2>\n

Pienaar has recorded extensively, including the complete Beethoven 32 Piano Sonatas, the Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Books 1 and 2 and the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas. He is the first South African to have done this. <\/p>\n

Visiting the Royal Academy of Music in 2014 I was struck by how, during a public lecture, he traversed an expansive piano repertoire without any reference to \u201cstyle\u201d or \u201ctradition\u201d. Instead, he was concerned with \u201clight\u201d notes and \u201cheavy\u201d notes, and the effect the performer\u2019s choices in this regard had on the logic and creative possibilities of the music. <\/p>\n

In a series of lectures in 2017 in Stellenbosch he expounded on these ideas. They represented, to my mind, a fundamental challenge to the 19th century construct of concert \u201cpianism\u201d, a practice born from the crucible of virtuosity, composer geniuses and the development of a concert hall tradition.<\/p>\n