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Donald's Blog
May 8, 2015 More music in the Springs Went to the Mezzanine last night, a remarkable venue downtown; it costs only $10 to get in, and whatever you spend there goes to benefit the local Conservatory of Music. Last night was a CD release party: Angelina Gadeliya was playing her new album, Schnittke and his Ghosts. I had never heard any solo piano music by the late Soviet composer before, nor Webern's Op. 27 Variations for Piano. She also played an adagio by Mozart and a Skryabin sonata. She's a wonderful musician, and a lot of my friends were there; plus Angelina's husband had laid on a table full of eats, and there were some families there with children, so a good time was had by all. And along the way there was a real surprise for me. There was a question and answer session, and she was interesting on the subject of recording, and that the editing process is harder work than the recording: you might have half a dozen takes of a phrase for the producer to choose from (and that reminds me of a Klemperer story, for another time). I asked her about the fact that on her CD it says "Volume 8": what's on the other seven? It turns out to be a series called Music of Tribute, which includes everything from Haydn to, er, Schnittke, played by half a dozen different pianists. And she mentioned the name of Heiner Stadler. I buttonholed her later -- a delightful person to talk to -- and sure enough, her producer, and the label boss at Labor Records, is the same pianist, arranger and composer who released several legendary albums of "free jazz" back in the late 1960s and '70s. I've got a couple of them on the old Tomato label (recommended to me by Max Harrison) but I never knew anything more about Stadler. Labor Records issues everything from Louisiana Red to Eric Salzman's The Nude Paper Sermon. The label's website has a sort of strap line:
Stadler has a Facebook page, a Wikipedia entry... This calls for a new entry in the Encyclopedia. You just never know what you're going to run into in Colorado Springs.
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