# greatest contemporary solo piano works



## vamos

Solo works only.

Don't include anything Ravel, Debussy, Satie, Prokofiev, and so on.

Strictly modern. I want to learn more about where piano has come since the olden days of melody and harmony. I know there is a whole gigantic world of this music out there however I don't have the means to access it.

:

I'll start with an obvious one.

*Gyorgy Ligeti - Etudes*

Whew. Great stuff. This is growing to become one of my favorites.


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## Llyranor

Nobuo Uematsu has made some piano solos I really like.

A Return, Indeed... 




To Zanarkand 




Waterside 




Hope this isn't blasphemy! But I really enjoy them.


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## Argus

Check this thread out:

http://www.talkclassical.com/10071-piano-music-1953-present.html


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## Pierrot Lunaire

vamos said:


> I'll start with an obvious one.
> 
> *Gyorgy Ligeti - Etudes*
> 
> Whew. Great stuff. This is growing to become one of my favorites.


Same here. It's one of my favorite piano works. Actually, I'd say most don't come close to Ligeti's *Études*. Well, maybe a few. *Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus* by Messiaen and *Triadic Memories* by Feldman come to mind. Probaby something by Xenakis or Carter too. You set the bar pretty high though.


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## emiellucifuge

Pierre Boulez's legendary 2nd Piano Sonata


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## vamos

Traidic Memories is one of my favorites as well. Intriguing work.

I've got some major recommendations to make, both rather obscure but genuinely great finds.

1. Howard Skempton

*Described as the emancipator of consonance - Schoenberg the emancipator of dissonance.*

"Skempton's style is characterized by a concentration on the quality of sound and an economy of means,[10] absence of development in the conventional sense, and concentration on sonority.[2] Many pieces are also quite short, lasting no longer than one or two minutes.[11] Although the compositional methods are clearly experimental (involving, for example, aleatory), there is a marked emphasis on the melody in many pieces,[2] and already some of the earlier piano works (Saltaire Melody (1977), Trace (1980)) quickly became favorites of the public.[6]
Formative influences on Skempton's music included Erik Satie, John Cage and Morton Feldman.[2] For example, A Humming Song (1967), an early piano piece composed before Skempton started lessons with Cardew, is a miniature with static, gentle sound. The harmonic structure consists of eight symmetrically arranged pitches, out of which six are selected for use in the piece. Chance procedures are then used to determine the order and number of occurrences of individual pitches. The pianist is asked to sustain certain pitches by humming.[12] Another early piece, Drum No. 1 (1969), composed for the Scratch Orchestra, consists of just a few written instructions to the performers and is clearly inspired by similarly realized works by La Monte Young, whose music Cardew was enthusiastically propagating in the late 1960s.[13] The score of May Pole (1971), a piece for orchestra, consists of a chance determined sequence of chords. Each performer chooses a note from a chord, and chooses the moment when to play that note; the later, the softer the dynamics.[14] Skempton later called such pieces "landscapes" that "simply project the material as sound, without momentum."[15] Other early works include two pieces for tape, a medium Skempton rarely used later: Indian Summer (1969) and Drum No. 3 (1971)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Skempton#Works

He reminds me of a modern update on the aesthetic of Satie. I find his work to be the closest thing to what I imagine a modern piano work should be. I really like the dissonant music that many have created for piano and the explorations of timbre and so on - but I want to see a return to explorations of pure beauty and melody in harmony utilizing the things we've discovered over the past century.

Example of his piano music: 




There are very few recordings that I'm aware of. The one with John Tilbury (from AMM) playing his music is the one I plan to purchase.


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## Webernite

Carter's _Night Fantasies_?


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## Edward Elgar

vamos said:


> *Gyorgy Ligeti - Etudes*


I've analysed the first one and now I have to analyse the third for my analysis module. Do you have any opinions or useful facts about either of these specific etudes?

I love them too. Can you hear the melody in Bulgarian rhythm in Desordre? What an amazing piece! The right hand is in the heptatonic scale and the left hand is in the pentatonic.


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## vamos

Whatever the left hand starts doing towards the end of the first half... love that part.

I've skimmed through an online analysis... I believe this is what I read:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~tkunze/pbl/1999_desordre/ligeti.html

It doesn't make sense to me at all. I'm a neophyte right now and I can't make sense out of most of what they're talking about. Come back to me in a year or so and hopefully I'll be far from where I am now...


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## joen_cph

Have had a relatively conservative taste so far as regards this subject (less so in concertante / ensemble works with a piano actually). Might be too conservative for you, but some recordings that have given me much & are a joy to return to are

- *Boulez*: 1st Sonata (Aimard, Erato. A very light, almost impressionistic rendering)
- *Shostakovich*: Preludes & Fugues (especially the selection recorded by Sho`vich himself);
- Roger Woodward`s Etcetera- and Ogawa´s BIS-recording of *Takemitsu* works, such as "Les Yeux 
Clos" etc.;
- *Holmboe*: The piano suite "Suono da Bardo" - the early Fona-LP issue by Anker Blyme is better and 
more atmospheric than his later Danacord-CD;
- *Nørgård *has written two fine piano sonatas as well; at least the 2nd is also available on CD, both on 
LP;
- Niels Viggo *Bentzon*: Piano sonatas 4+5;
- Lubos *Fiser*´s sonatas (less the "Devil´s Sonata" on you-t than his 4th though, on a Wergo LP played 
by Volker Banfield);
- Beatrice Rauch´s *Gubajdulina* CD on BIS, far superior and more engaged than any other ...

Some works that I plan to explore more are *Sorabji*´s, *Messiaen*´s "Catalogue des Oiseaux", and at least I´ll get somewhat better acquainted with Jean *Barraque*´s Piano Sonata ...

Whereas *Tishchenko*´s and *Boris Tchaikovsky*´s piano sonatas seem very disappointing, too simple in general, like *Silvestrov*´s works ...

Concerning these Russians, there are couple of *Boris Arapov*´s sonatas available on you-tube, they are more in the Scriabin- and Prokofiev-vein though and played by Sokolov (they were uploaded quite recently):






This is what immediately comes to mind, though ...


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## Rangstrom

I'm probably even more conservative, but have enjoyed:

1. Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated
2. R. Stevenson: Passacaglia on DSCH
3. J. Dillon: Book of Elements

and would certainly second the Shostakovitch Preludes and Fugues and the Messiaen Vingt Regards.


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## science

Rzewski has already been mentioned, but I will add my agreement.

Silvestrov's Bagatellen und Serenaden have not been mentioned, and might not be if I don't. They are pretty, something like a contemporary Grieg or Satie, just light music. Getting too close to "new age" music for some people.


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## Guest

Rautavaara's etudes and sonatas (especially the second piano sonata, "The Fire Sermon").


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## Sid James

If a guy who died in 1991 is recent enough for you, Turkish composer *Saygun* wrote some excellent piano music. He covered a wide range of the modern trends/styles, some of the _12 Preludes on Askak Rhythms_ remind me a bit of Ligeti, actually. I have enjoyed the disc below:










BTW, no-one has mentioned Cage's _Sonatas & Interludes for prepared piano_, which I have not as yet heard, but obviously they are significant items in the late c20th repertoire...


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## Guest

Mid-century, Andre (1946-48), not late. Significant, yes!

John Cage, _The Perilous Night_
John Cage, _Etudes Australes_
George Brecht, _Incidental Music_
Annea Lockwood, _Piano Burning_
LaMonte Young, _The Well Tuned Piano_
Tom Johnson, _An Hour for Piano_
Karlheinz Stockhausen, _Klavierstueck nr. 9_
Walter Marchetti, _Nei Mari Del Sud_
Walter Marchetti, _De Musicorum Infelicitate_
Ross Bolleter, _Secret Sandhills_
Hans Tutschku, _Zellen-Linien_

A few of the many things done to and with a piano.

The first Cage is for prepared piano, the second is for independent left and right hands.

The Brecht is from the _Water Music_ Fluxus box. I've performed this several times.

The Lockwood is just that, a piano set on fire.

The Young is a kind of correction, as it were, of the _Wohltemperierte Klavier._ A kind of going back to natural tuning rather than equal tuning.

The Johnson is an early minimal piece with a text to read while you're listening to the music.

The Stockhausen opens with 144 repetitions of a chord.

The first Marchetti is a computer randomisation of piano chords, far as I can tell. (Online descriptions of Marchetti as well as CD liner notes are frustratingly obscure (and sometimes just plain wrong).) The second is a long piano piece of several smaller bits that break off abruptly and start up again. I'm listening to it as I type.

The Bolleter is one of the longer ruined piano pieces, a journey that started in 1987 at the Nallan Sheep Station, where Bolleter recorded himself improvising on a ruined piano that had ended up in tractor shed. Bolleter would go on to found WARPS, the World Association for Ruined Pianos Studies, which includes a large park where ruined pianos can continue to decay.

The Tutschku is also a prepared piano piece, but not physically like Cowell or Cage or Bunger. In his piece(es), a microphone picks up the piano sound and routes it through a computer, which alters the sound in real time.


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## LordBlackudder

sorry double post.


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## Jeremy Marchant

I raise my eyebrows at *Stockhausen*'s Klavierstuck IX being included on a list of "greatest piano works" when there is X and even, because of its structural radicalism, XI to consider. 
Personally, I enjoy XIII - and even XV, though, since this is for synthesiser with electronic music backing track it stretches the definition of a piano beyond breaking point.


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## Guest

I certainly don't mind considering all those other Stockhausen pieces.

And I'll consider them (and enjoy them) without moving my eyebrows at all!


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## LordBlackudder

I would definitely recommend the Final Fantasy Piano Collections.

Maybe also the Kingdom Hearts Piano Collections.

And you might like Benyamin Nuss plays Uematsu.


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## vamos

now check this out

Nikolai Kapustin
his sonatas are the ones you must seek out


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## Pierrot Lunaire

I forgot about George Crumb's *Makrokosmos* series. That's another great one.


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## starry

some guy said:


> The Bolleter is one of the longer ruined piano pieces, a journey that started in 1987 at the Nallan Sheep Station, where Bolleter recorded himself improvising on a ruined piano that had ended up in tractor shed. Bolleter would go on to found WARPS, the World Association for Ruined Pianos Studies, which includes a large park where ruined pianos can continue to decay.


I prefer 'Going to war without the french is going to war without an accordian'. A much shorter piece but perhaps length isn't always an indication of whether a piece is substantial or not.


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## Guest

It's true, length is no indicator!

And _Going to war..._ is also a cool piece. (My favorite is _Nallan Void,_ the first one I heard.)


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## LordBlackudder

Liberi Fatali on Piano:


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## EzraDonner

My name is Ezra and I'm a young professional composer and pianist based in the United States. Some great works named so far, others I look forward to getting to know. If you are interested in contemporary solo piano music, I invite you to visit my website http://www.ezradonnercomposer.com, where I am offering free downloads of some of my recent music (2009-2011). Thanks for listening and cheers!


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## mikey

Carl Vine's 1st piano Sonata gets a lot of play.


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