NEWS

06.12.2024

CD release: Angus Lee’s Rage Over Lost Time (2020) with HereNowHear

Angus Lee’s 2020 two-piano works, Rage Over Lost Time, was released on the album Sedgeflowers | MANTRA, published on the label False Azure Records by the American piano duo HereNowHear (Ryan McCullough & Andrew Zhou).

The piece was commissioned as part of a series of new pieces — including also works by Christopher Castro, Laura Cetilia, Dante de Silva, Aida Shirazi, LJ White, and Andrew Zhou — by the duo for the special recording/concert project, Rage (Vented), as part of the « Beethoven and Pianos: Off the Beaten Path » festival, hosted by the Cornell University Center for Historical Keyboards. All the new works take inspiration from the short work, Rondo alla ingharese quasi un capriccio (Op. 129), by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Written as a ‘prelude’ to Beethoven’s piece, Rage Over Lost Time (2020) was described by Andrew Zhou as a work that is “as intimate as it is lonely,” while Ryan McCullough likened the atmospheric aspect of the piece to visiting “a consignment store: old, worn bric-a-brac stacked on yellowing shelves, painted peeling, springs and hinges rusty and irreparable, fluorescent light contrasting with clouds of dust illuminated by golden hour sun.” With most of the piece inhabiting a soundscape consisting of ‘inside piano’ sonorities, the sudden appearance of the opening measures of Beethoven’s piece at the very end assumes an almost deconstructive function, rendering  “conventional piano sound […] so foreign that, in this context, a G major triad feels like a crude vulgarity.”

For more, see the work’s dedicated page here.