When Love Speaks - Works For Piano, Composed And Performed By Grant Foster

Description

"This is amazing! Where has Grant Foster been all these years? ... I really haven't heard anything as striking as this for a long while... simply blew me away!" Andrew Lamb, Gramophone

Distinguished Australian composer and pianist Grant Foster came to prominence in Europe and the UK as a composer of poetic piano works and music for theatre, with artists such as Mary Martin and Sir Robert Helpmann commissioning Grant to write works for Broadway and incidental music for a pantomime.

When Love Speaks illustrates Foster's gift for melody, with world-premiere recordings of eleven significant piano works composed and performed by the composer

Says Barry Tuckwell: "Foster's romantic spirit and gift for melody rings out in music which engages, entertains and communicates with his audience"

Foster's music represents the great romantic keyboard tradition at its most emotionally charged, spanning a wide range expressing tenderness, love, frustration and anger - from the sparkling and affectionate miniatures Six Preludes, to his Ballade, with its inspirational narrative. When Love Speaks contains music of tenderness, love, frustration and anger. Foster's music-making is inspired and shaped by his emotions.

Now living in Bowral in New South Wales Foster is at the top of his game as a composer and more prolific than ever.

When Love Speaks was recorded in Melbourne's Iwaki Auditorium, 19th - 20th September 2015 on a Steinway Model D.

"I love his music. Grant Foster has a rare ability to compose melodic and imaginative works demonstrating a high level of sophistication." Richard Bonynge

The impetus for the compositions in Grant Foster's new recital disc When Love Speaks springs from immediate emotional impacts on the composer: from a story, a picture, remembrances of loved ones or the tragedy of the loss of a great figure.

It is refreshing to hear new music in an idiom that is familiar yet with a musical language that is the composer's own created with a pure intent. This is what the music of Grant Foster offers - there is nothing ironic in Foster's music - he is a romantic composer living in a post-modern age.

Discussion of modern classical music, as with the other high arts, is most often conducted by and for those "in the know".

Why is it that in modern classical music attractive melody and harmony, cornerstones of the wider audience's enjoyment of music, are regarded with such suspicion by credentialed composers, academics and commentators? And why are composers who write in what is considered a more conservative style rejected, shunned, looked down on like an embarrassing relative? Even the now revered Bach, at his height, was regarded by his sons as "The old wig".

To the average listener there seems to be an embargo on melody and harmony. As Alexandra Coglan put it in 'Does anybody like Modern Classical Music' in The Independent 2/10/2012: "Again and again harmony was brutalised and murdered, melody left out to die on the hillside".

Grant Foster's compositions on When Love Speaks are sincere, heartfelt creations, not confectionary masquerading as music. Perhaps it is a revulsion at the cynically created confection passed off as music that so irks the cognoscenti (when regarding music that is not at cutting edge) that the materials of our treasured classical music are frequently bowdlerised and diminished to create what is conceived to be saleable pap-music product.

It is always fascinating to hear a composer play any music. Composers often bring a different sensibility to the art of performance. In When Love Speaks where the composer plays his own music - and music of such a personal nature - we truly get to hear what lies beneath and between the notes.

After a prodigious start as a composer, writing his first opera at the age of sixteen, Grant Foster came to prominence in England and Europe as the composer of so-called "light" music. Among many commissions of this period were his incidental music to Sir Robert Helpmann's Peter Pan - a production that ran for seven consecutive highly successful seasons on the London stage. Foster never abandoned his serious roots and brings to his classical compositions the conviction that his music engage, entertain, enrich and communicate with his audience, while holding true to his own musical compass. When Love Speaks contains music of tenderness, love, frustration and anger. Foster's music-making is inspired and shaped by his emotions.