Contemporary music for piano lessons

In 2016, the Ludwig van Beethoven Institute of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna organized the Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition for the third time. Its aim is "to motivate composers to write piano pieces for the classroom that reflect the musical language of our time but are also playable for children and young people.

This time, the jury had to choose from 176 pieces submitted from 41 countries. The first prize went to the Indonesian composer Matius Shan-Boone for his Six Views from my Window. The second prize went to Briton Peter Yarde-Martin with The Five Elements and there was a third for Sonetos from the pen of the Spaniard Daniel Serrano Garcia. All young composers who are not yet thirty years old.

The prize-winning pieces have now been published by Universal Edition in a collector's booklet. The three prizes could easily have been distributed in reverse order. The Six Views from my Window are really original and varied, but probably a bit too big for the target audience. Extensive playing instructions do not make access any easier either. Yarde-Martins Five Elements are more manageable. However, measured against their substance, his pieces are a little too prolix and monotonous.

This cannot be said of Serrano Garcia's contribution. The six Sonetos make use of the most diverse sound spaces and notation techniques. They are interrupted by two intermezzi (Barcarola I and II), which can hardly be surpassed in terms of brevity and concentration. All these pieces can be read and learned without great effort. The musical experience, on the other hand, is, so to speak, inversely proportional to this. An unusual quality!

Matius Shan-Boone, Peter Yarde-Martin, Daniel Serrano Garcia: K 2016 (Six Views from my Window, The Five Elements, Sonetos), UE 37110, € 17.95, Universal Edition, Vienna 2017