Sarah Cahill - Leo Ornstein - Fantasy And Metaphor (2008)

In the course of an astonishing long life, Leo Ornstein (1893 - 2002) had many shifts of fortune. Recognized as a child prodigy on the piano, Ornstein's family fled the Russian pogroms and moved to New York City in 1906. Ornstein studied piano and composition and graduated from what would become the Juilliard School of Music. From 1915 through the mid 1920's, Ornstein was famous as a concert pianist and notorious as a composer of highly dissonant, futurist works of avant-garde music. Coming from a poor Russian Jewish family, Ornstein married a wealthy heiress, Pauline Mallet-Provost. In the 1920s, Ornstein abruptly retired from the concert stage and founded a music school in Philadelphia. In the 1940s, the Ornsteins sold the school and lived in various places far from the public eye, including a trailer park in Brownsville, Texas. At this point in his life, few people remembered anything about Ornstein, the charismatic pianist and former "bad boy" of music.

Throughout his life, Ornstein continued to compose. In the 1970s he was rediscovered and gave several interviews. His music received exposure in concerts and in recordings. Ornstein composed music into his 90's and died in a nursing home in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 2002 at the age of 108 or 109. In 2007, musicologists Michael Boyles and Denise Von Glahn wrote a biography of this fascinating and elusive figure: "Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices." Ornstein's son, Servio, maintains a website devoted to his father's music which includes the scores for many of his compositions.

This CD of Ornstein's piano music, "Fantasy and Metaphor" consists of 15 short compositions dating from the 1960s and 1970s performed by the noted avant-garde pianist Sarah Cahill. It is the third CD of which I am aware devoted to Ornstein's works for solo piano, following recordings by Marc-Andre Hamelin on Hyperion and Janice Weber on Naxos. The Hamelin and Weber recordings include some of Ornstein's futurist early compositions as well as piano sonatas written when the composer was in his 90s. Thus, with the exception of "A Morning in the Woods" (1971) on the Weber CD, none of the works on Cahill's CD have been recorded before. It is a discovery to hear this music.