FOREVER BEELER
FOREVER BEELER
SONATAS & SOLI OF ALAN BEELER
Alan Beeler composer
Ladislav Bilan vibraphone
Jan Dvořák bassoon
Petr Hladík flute
Aleš Janeček clarinet
Lucie Kaucká piano
Jiří Král tuba
Vit Mužík violin
Dalibor Procházka bass trombone
Karolina Rojahn piano
Jennifer Slowick english horn, oboe
FOREVER BEELER represents a sampling of composer Alan Beeler’s prolific output throughout his musical career, which is generally defined by his commitment to compositional craft and structural clarity. The works featured on this album also reveal a playfulness lying just under the surface of Beeler’s compositional perspective. This quality of Beeler’s music is most notable in the seven sonatas for piano, often accompanied by another instrument, included in FOREVER BEELER.
Here, Beeler crafts engaging conversations between the players at his disposal – he employs a great deal of imitative writing and a more roaming style than in the more concise works on this album. A particularly clear example of Beeler’s fluid sense of style occurs in the second movement of his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, which is dominated by a subtle “swing” characteristic as well as the “cakewalk rhythm” popular in early twentieth century ragtime music.
One of the most deeply intriguing works in FOREVER BEELER is the Three Early Pieces for Piano, which ranks among the first music Beeler formally composed and published. These short pieces exemplify the directness of Beeler’s compositional voice, as they clearly develop and resolve a singular musical idea. In addition to being succinct, finely crafted piano miniatures, they stand as evidence to this album’s unique offerings to listeners.
It is extremely rare to have this kind of longitudinal representation of a composer’s career available in an individual recording. The collection is even more valuable because, despite his indomitable and specific approach to composition, Beeler’s oeuvre is filled with nuance, all of which stands out in FOREVER BEELER.
This album is also marked by the way it testifies to the creative conditions of the mid-twentieth century, when Beeler emerged as a composer. The many aforementioned sonatas featured on FOREVER BEELER, for example, suggest the composer’s abiding interest in the forms and styles of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Yet, piano works like the Twelve-Tone Quartal Etude indicate Beeler was not only subject to a variety of stylistic influences, but also extremely skilled in fulfilling their aesthetic mandates.