FUTURPIANO

LTM presents a unique CD showcasing three influential avant-garde composers associated with Futurism, featuring piano music composed between 1913 and 1933. Born in Belorus, Arthur-Vincent Lourie was the first Russian Futurist musician, and a signatory of the St Petersburg Futurist Manifesto in 1914. The five Synthèses written that same year offer a form of dodecaphony, while Formes en l'air the following year was dedicated to Picasso was a Cubo-Futurist concept using an innovative form of notation in which notes are spaced in independent blocks, with staves omitted in the place of rests. Born in the Ukraine and raised in New York, Leo Ornstein gave his first major recital of `Futurist Music' at the Steinway Hall in London on the afternoon of 27 March 1914. The programme included two of the pieces featured on this CD, Suicide in an Airplane and Three Moods. American-born George Antheil is represented by Mechanisms (1923), as well as a series of preludes written in 1933 and inspired by a graphic novel by Surrealist artist Max Ernst, titled La femme 100 têtes. Antheil claimed to have performed his early, riotous recitals with an automatic pistol placed on top of his piano, to deter physical criticism. All selections on Futurpiano are performed by noted Italian pianist Daniele Lombardi, and were recorded in Rome and Lugano in 1995. The CD booklet contains detailed historical notes and archive images.