Richard Casey performs the complete piano works of Anthony Powers, 1983 -2003.
Continuing their interest in the contemporary piano, this is a must have for the serious collector. Featuring Richard Casey (piano) (also pianist on the award winning complete piano works of Peter Maxwell Davies), this is challenging, cutting edge music that although dissonant refers back to Brahms, Beethoven with ease as it skips through atonality into an almost bitter sweet post modern melodicism.
Born in London in 1953 Anthony Powers studied at the universities of Oxford and York, and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He taught at Dartington College of Arts before being appointed composer-in residence to Southern Arts (1980-2). Since then he has lived in Herefordshire and until 2010 taught at Cardiff University. He is a former chairman of the Association of Professional Composers. Powers' music, most of which is published by Oxford University Press, includes two large-scale symphonies (the first premiered at the 1996 BBC Proms), a number of concertos and other orchestral works, notably the BBC commissions Stone, Water, Stars (BBCSO, 1987) and Terrain (BBCNOW, 1992), vocal and choral works, including A Picture of the World (2001, Warsaw Autumn Festival) for countertenor Michael Chance and the BBC Singers, and the John Donne cantata Air and Angels for the 2003 Three Choirs Festival. His catalogue also includes a large corpus of instrumental and vocal chamber music. Powers' String Quartet no 3 was written as the test piece for the London International String Quartet Competition in 2000. He collaborated with Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney on From Station Island (for speaker, baritone and ensemble), commissioned for a German premiere and broadcast by RTE from the 2005 West Cork Chamber Music Festival with Heaney himself taking the role of speaker. Powers' work is typically characterised by strong architectonic frameworks that support a language of poetic intensity and magical sonorities, the music often taking its inspiration from the tension between different states, be they physical properties, landscapes, seasons or emotions.
