Gusztav Fenyo - Euan Moseley - Piano Topography (2025) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Piano Topography: No. 1, —
02. Piano Topography: No. 2, —
03. Piano Topography: No. 3, —
04. Piano Topography: No. 4, —
05. Piano Topography: No. 5, —
06. Piano Topography: No. 6, —
07. Piano Topography: No. 7, —
08. Piano Topography: No. 8, —
09. Piano Topography: No. 9, —
10. Piano Topography: No. 10, —
11. Piano Topography: No. 11, —
12. Piano Topography: No. 12, —
13. Piano Topography: No. 13, —
14. Piano Topography: No. 14, —
15. Piano Topography: No. 15, —
16. Piano Topography: No. 16, —
17. Piano Topography: No. 17, —
18. Piano Topography: No. 18, —
19. Piano Topography: No. 19, —
20. Piano Topography: No. 20, —



“ ‘Piano Topography’ is deliberately not avant–garde. I wrote it to provide an uplifting and life-enhancing musical experience for an audience. Writing avant-garde music, venturing easily into for example atonal music, runs the huge risk of doing the opposite: requiring listeners to take tablets to relieve headache or depression or to go to night school classes to understand what’s going on. Such music has its place but not here. On the other hand, to sound refreshingly different, even original, mostly cheerful and thrilling while still using mostly diatonic melody is much more difficult. After almost every bar a little voice tells you that it sounds like a bit of someone else’s music. You can easily end the day surrounded by a jeering wall of screwed up paper. “

Although basically diatonic, other scales slide in and out of the melodic line while subtleties of rhythms, sonorities and expressions have to be attended to. For these reasons it is deceptively difficult to play. In some places the music slides off the Richter scale (Sviatoslav). These pieces do not sound “difficult” like some works by Scriabin or Prokofiev but they are and to play them seamlessly while putting your own personality into a performance is quite a challenge.

It is not necessary to perform all 20 Topographs at a concert: the first 10, or second 10, or a group of just a few, played in any order, can be an exciting part of a programme or just one, for example No. 19, as an encore to finish off the “show”.

Usually the plan of each Topograph is A B A with the second A remaining in the same key so that the pianist does not have to learn a new set of fingerings. The B theme is usually slower.

Each Topograph is about the same length, 10 pages, or 5 to 6 minutes, a satisfying length – neither too short to be considered trivial nor too long to be considered tedious. They are characterised by tripping melodies, urgent rhythms and pungent sonorities.

DOWNLOAD ALBUM [flac]

DOWNLOAD ALBUM [Hi-Res]