TT 324: RIP David Del Tredici

Composer who also recorded Robert Helps's piano Etudes

David Del Tredici has received a excellent and substantial obit from Allan Kozinn in The New York Times. (Gift link.)

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An intriguing footnote to Del Tredici’s career is his one recording of a fellow composer, the Three Etudes by Robert Helps.

These Etudes are very beautiful and very hard. Del Tredici learned them when they were brand new in the late ‘50s, recorded them for a Helps LP in 1970, and played them one last time at the Helps memorial in New York in 2002. (Del Tredici dressed in bad-boy leather for that performance; Richard Goode played Helps’s Hommage a Faure.)

Helps was both a great composer and a great pianist. He told me that he was very happy that the young powerhouse Del Tredici took these pieces on, for that meant that Helps could forgo learning the Etudes at concert pitch himself.

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I haven’t explored all that much of Del Tredici’s music, but I admire Virtuoso Alice, the long concert transmutation of Alice material for piano. Aza Torshkoeva plays it in one flawless take on video:

Nothing shocks us anymore, but at the time (the mid-1970s) Del Tredici’s Alice pieces were truly shocking. The first paragraph of Virtuoso Alice could basically have been written by a 19th-century composer.

As the piece unfolds, the piano language remains essentially “old-fashioned,” although there are certain outré harmonic notes that spike the post-modern punch. Del Tredici said he spent a few days and nights listening to records of Josef Hofmann, Ignaz Friedman, and other “golden age” pianists before coming up with his own paraphrase somewhat in the manner of Chopin and Liszt.