Joseph Havlat is an Australian pianist and composer who delights in all forms of music-making, curation and creation.

Joseph Havlat is an Australian pianist and composer who delights in all forms of music-making, curation and creation.
This programme is a journey of four quarters, taking Hans Abrahamsen’s 10 Studies as a scaffold for sonic exploration throughout four languages and ages. He writes of his set that ‘these pieces can be seen as studies of the piano’s character or soul, if you like. A soul that has been created by all the music that has been written for the instrument, from its childhood until today.

Joseph writes: I have simply taken the liberty to pave paths between them: in the first four studies, the modern grand piano remembers its romantic age, the Schumann-esque and Chopin-esque worlds, but seen from our time, as a kind of psychoanalysis, so we have the German Schumann’s Ghost Variations, written in the throes of insanity at the end of his life. Finnissy, ever able to intertwine the musical past and present, moves us to another epoch, with pieces ‘more mechanical and rhythmical, and perhaps slightly cool and jazzy. In the second half ‘the French piano spirit and sound from Debussy and Ravel are mirrored, the Preludes offering no better source of reflection, and as the last Study Le trombe del mattino is in the language of Italy, ‘the land of light’, what better than Respighi’s transcriptions of old lute music for luminosity and pureness?

This is a Kirckman Society Promotion.