Griffes: Three Preludes

The American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes’s piano works represent a remarkable musical achievement. Griffes was active as a composer for little more than twelve years, and did not write prolifically, but nevertheless produced pieces of great maturity which are both concise and extraordinarily powerful, showing the contemporary European influences to which he was exposed but also demonstrating a highly individual compositional voice. His Roman Sketches Op 7 contains his most famous work, ‘The White Peacock’—an acknowledged Impressionist masterpiece—while the final movement, ‘Clouds’, clearly heralds the language of modernism.

Almost all of Griffes’s piano music is present here, and the composer has never been better served on record than by his compatriot Garrick Ohlsson, who here applies the full force of his interpretive and technical prowess.

“Charles Tomlinson Griffes [1884-1920] wrote some of the most beautiful music ever created by an American.”

-Winthrop Sargeant

Among the small but precious body of work that constitutes his legacy, Griffes’s piano music occupies a substantial and significant place. An extremely accomplished pianist himself, Griffes composed music for the piano throughout his brief life. This comprehensive overview, chronologically sequenced, enables the listener to trace Griffes’s compositional development over the arc of his career. The peaks of his achievement in the genre are all here: his best-known piano work, The White Peacock; his “tribute to Wagner,” the brooding De Profundis; Clouds, which can stand comparison with Debussy's composition of the same name; The Fountain of the Acqua Paola, a stunning piece of “water music” in the tradition of Liszt and Ravel; the cryptic and enigmatic Three Preludes of 1919; and the Sonata for Piano, his masterpiece and one of the classics of American music.