Blake Lifecycle 24 Pieces Pno HBM

Piano Solo. 80 pages. ****************************************************************** Lifecycle is a brilliantly conceived piano cycle of 'imagination and reflection', combining teaching pieces (the Chaconne and Toccatina are from the Associated Board's Diploma syllabus) with recital works ranging from the uncompromising technical demands of Scherzo and Oberon, to the outstandingly sublime yet musically powerful Prelude and Nocturne. Lifecycle covers the composer's creative life with an extraordinary number of musical connections running through the set, namely the melodic importance of the interval of a third – most often major and rising, the second being the harmony of a bare fifth, again often rising, but equally heard as a chord. Blake conceived the idea for Lifecycle, a sequence of 24 pieces for the piano, after a conversation with world-renowned pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy in 1962 and dedicates the cycle to this wonderful musician. Although there are 24 works in the set, it is not a set of Preludes as written by Chopin, Scriabin and Rachmaninov, but there does appear within the cycle one piece in each of the 12 major and 12 minor chromatic keys.