Michael Blake
TWO PIECES for cello solo
Bardic Edition BDE1105
Pentimenti began as a concertante work for cello and small ensemble for Friedrich Gauwerky to play at the dance-themed Johannesburg Mozart Festival in February 2013. When the festival director got cold feet, the work morphed into a piece for solo cello and imagined accompaniment, with some of the pentimenti (in art, visible traces of earlier painting beneath the paint on the canvass) of the original accompaniment still evident in the score. Pentimenti marks the centenary of the riotous premiere in Paris, on 29 May 1913, of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. Friedrich Gauwerky premiered Pentimenti at the Nirox Foundation, Sterkfontein, South Africa on 24 February 2013.
Duration 14 minutes
I composed the richter scale in Italy in July 2015 as a 60th birthday gift for my old friend Kalman Richter. He and I explored the New Music repertoire for cello and piano in the 1970s and 1980s back in South Africa, and he was the cellist in my two Johannesburg-based New Music ensembles - Orion (1974-1976) and Moonchild (1977-1981). The pitch material is drawn from the musical letters of his name A-C-H(B natural)-E. The first performance was given by Friedrich Gauwerky in Hurth, Cologne on 17 December 2016.
Duration 2 minutes
Michael Blake
Duration 14 minutes
I composed the richter scale in Italy in July 2015 as a 60th birthday gift for my old friend Kalman Richter. He and I explored the New Music repertoire for cello and piano in the 1970s and 1980s back in South Africa, and he was the cellist in my two Johannesburg-based New Music ensembles - Orion (1974-1976) and Moonchild (1977-1981). The pitch material is drawn from the musical letters of his name A-C-H(B natural)-E. The first performance was given by Friedrich Gauwerky in Hurth, Cologne on 17 December 2016.
Duration 2 minutes
Michael Blake
