Joseph Kolkovich: Piano Works, Volume One

Joseph Kolkovich and his music have both been on long journeys. Born in Slovakia in 1957, he spent his first two decades there, as Jozef Kolkovič, becoming active in both classical music and rock. A move to California began a further decade as a rock keyboardist, after which he gradually returned to classical music, incorporating elements of both stylistic worlds in a language direct in its emotional appeal. The two shorter pieces in this first album of his piano music show an ability to generate atmosphere and structure from short motifs, but it is his epic First Piano Sonata, almost an hour in length, that reveals him as a master narrator. He was particularly moved by the history of the victims of the military regime in 1970s and ’80s Argentina, and by the courage of the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ in resisting it, and he responded with this monumental chronicle-in-sound, a multifaceted mix of explosive fast movements and tragic slow ones, drawing on both his rock and classical backgrounds in its mixture of lamentation and wild rides.

Magdaléna Bajuszová, piano