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What's all the noise?
Leo Ornstein
One January evening I was browsing through the reduced CDs in the record shop at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank and the title "Suicide In An Airplane" on an album cover caught my eye.
On closer inspection I found it was a collection of piano music by Leo Ornstein. I'd never heard of him and I wondered what on earth a piece of piano music called Suicide In An Airplane might sound like. Running my eye down the track list I was further intrigued by titles such as The Wailing and Raging Wind, A Lament For A Lost Boy and Night Brooding Over The Battlefield. The easiest way to find out what it all sounded like was to buy the album and hear for myself.
The hunch paid off. The album, Ornstein - Piano Works, played by Marc-Andre Hamelin, was a feast of short pieces, often very percussive and atonal, highly passionate, frequently menacing and technically very demanding.
The piece which first intrigued me, Suicide In An Airplane, opens with a section which imitates the drone of an approaching aircraft followed by fistfuls of crashing chords and glissandos suggesting a highly bumpy flight before returning to the drone as the aircraft flies off into the distance.
According to the sleeve notes, the piece was probably inspired by a 1913 newspaper report of a pilot who committed suicide by flying his machine into the ground. However, the piece does not end with an almighty crash which suggests that the pilot of this particular airplane gets to live another day.
I like to think that the music describes watching a very wobbly-looking aircraft which looks like it's going to drop out of the sky at any moment and the fear on the faces of the onlookers gazing upwards, chewing the ends off their fingers and saying to each other that the pilot must be a suicidal maniac. After a few dare-devil stunts, the pilot steadies the plane and flies off chuckling to himself while the onlookers hurry home to change their underpants.
The liner notes explained that Leo Ornstein may have been as old as 109 when he died in 2002, making him one of the longest-living composers of all time. Apparently, his precise year of birth is uncertain because his family fled their native Ukraine to the USA to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and official records about young Leo were lost.
Anyway, in the USA Leo Ornstein established himself as concert pianist performing music by the likes of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok, Debussy, Ravel and others. This music from Europe was very avant garde to American audiences in the second decade of the 20th century and he gained a reputation as a daring young modernist.
Amazingly, at the height of his fame as a performer, Orstein turned his back on the concert platform and devoted the rest of his life to teaching and composing.
You can take a look at details of the remarkable album and hear track samples at Amazon: Piano Music by Leo Ornstein
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