A Feast for the Senses: Performing Sitsky

When I received the extraordinary gift of Apocryphon of Initiation in August 2021, in the midst of Canberra’s Covid lockdown, it was a true breath of fresh air. I immediately read through the whole nine-movement, forty-five-minute work, relishing its freshness and creative vitality, playing and replaying every one of Larry Sitsky’s unique harmonies—and within twenty-four hours I had sent a list of questions to the composer regarding minor points of interpretation. The piece was recorded six months later, and a concert premiere followed in 2023.

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The experience of learning and exploring a new work by Larry Sitsky is a feast for the senses, and a wonderfully creative process in itself. Sitsky feeds off the collaborative energy between composer and performer, and almost always writes each new work with a specific musician in mind. Even though he is one of the most accomplished Australian pianists of his generation, he rarely composes for himself, preferring to mould his musical ideas around the pianistic personalities of his students, colleagues and devotees. As he wrote in 2009:

Being a performer, I have the person for whom the piece is being written very much in mind. Composition is allied to performance. The composer puts down what he can and then hands over the score to the performer who then does what he or she wishes with it. It’s impossible to notate everything, so you give part of yourself to someone who then makes it part of themselves.

The subtitle of Apocryphon of Initiation is “Concerto No. 3 for piano (without orchestra)”. The orchestra is still firmly present in Sitsky’s aural vision, and the score is peppered with indications of Sitsky’s imagined instrumentation. For example, the work’s opening gesture is underscored with indications like low strings and percussion as a sonic base, above which whirlwinds of piccolos seem to shoot for the stars. If the opening movement speaks of grandeur and awe, the second movement moves into a more mysterious, almost sensual realm. Sitsky asks the performer to hold the damper pedal through long stretches of music, often for twenty to thirty seconds. The undamped strings ring freely, building up a complex web of harmonies and sympathetic vibrations. The soft, whispering melodies acquire a glassy texture, hard but translucent. Towards the end of the second movement, soft chords gradually descend from the highest piano register like an angelic choir descending from the clouds. The initial chords, played pianissimo but warmly, begin angularly with sharp harmonic clashes. As the chords descend, they become rounder and more resonant, finally landing amongst an earthy, slowly pulsing drone (double bass and contrabassoons). The third movement transforms into something more rhetorically driven, with forceful and passionate melodies. Sitsky’s melodic style here is not one of conventional beauty, but rather something craggy and intensely passionate. My inner ear imagines a gravelly, untrained voice singing these melodies with more fervour than polish, straining on the high notes, brimming with emotion, pleading and exulting in turn.

This brief and wholly insufficient description of the first three movements might give a taste of what makes this work so compelling. Apocryphon of Initiation is Sitsky’s ultimate statement for the piano, a work into which he poured his entire musical vocabulary and pushed his pianistic language to its limits. Written at the young age of eighty-five, it is the pinnacle of a fifteen-year period devoted to large-scale piano composition, a period which itself is the culmination of a compositional journey spanning more than six decades in the profession. Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, the crown jewel of the master’s thirty-two piano sonatas, was Sitsky’s model.

I first met Larry in 1999 when I began studying piano with him at the Canberra School of Music, which is now part of the Australian National University. At the age of sixty-five, Sitsky had established a powerful reputation in the Australian classical music world with a formidable body of work as a pianist, composer and researcher. His catalogue of works already included six operas with the librettist Gwen Harwood and four violin concertos written for his long-time friend and fellow musical iconoclast Jan Sedivka. (A fifth concerto on its way to Sedivka was ultimately performed by his pupil Tor Frømhyr after Sedivka retired from concert performance.) At the time, Sitsky’s catalogue of piano music was surprisingly small. Among his most successful works for piano were a set of miniatures, the Twelve Mystical Preludes after the Nuctemeron of Apollonius of Tyana, commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, and his fourth fantasia, Arch, written as a test piece for the 1981 Sydney International Piano Competition. Arch was performed by the competition’s sixteen talented young pianists, including a nineteen-year-old Jean-Yves Thibaudet, then on the cusp of international stardom.

During my studies with Sitsky, I worked on a number of his piano works, especially his fantasias. These are free, improvisatory compositions that feel more like a stream of consciousness than a thoroughly planned and precisely executed sonata. Sitsky’s incredible intellectual capacity was always on full display in his large-scale works for chamber ensemble, orchestra and operatic forces, and he would draw up detailed pre-compositional plans to unify musical structures across a wide musical canvas. The solo piano was his vehicle for a more personal and experimental voice.

But a commission from the Canadian pianist Gordon Rumson in 2004 completely changed his perspective. Rumson asked Sitsky for a substantial piano composition, and Sitsky responded with The Way of the Seeker, a forty-five-minute mystical journey in which he dramatically expanded his pianistic style without losing the freedom of his shorter works. As Judith Crispin wrote in her introduction to the work, “Sitsky intended to generate a large-scale virtuosic work from as few pre-compositional determinants as possible.” His strategy was to structure the work based on dynamic levels. By narrowing his focus to just one specific musical parameter—how loud or soft the pianist plays—Sitsky moved away from the formal structural precepts that had been thoroughly mastered and demonstrated in the great piano sonatas of, among many others, Beethoven, Liszt and Rachmaninoff. Using dynamics to build structure brought Sitsky closer to the traditions of improvisation and free jazz in the twentieth century. The Way of the Seeker begins very softly with a pianissimo prologue, eventually achieving a sustained fortissimo of maximum intensity in its penultimate movement, “Beyond Time”. Finally, the work sinks to its softest levels again in its contemplative epilogue, “Man of Light”.

Just a cursory glance reveals connections between this initial foray into large-scale piano writing in 2004 and the final summit fifteen years later, represented by Apocryphon of Initiation. While Sitsky has experimented with incorporating different types of musical organisation in his later piano works—chord patterns, rhythmic motives, his own unique flavour of serial row technique that prioritises melody and gesture, and so on—the idea of building structures based on dynamic levels has remained. Apocryphon of Initiation focuses more on the overall shape of the dynamics, rather than the specific dynamic level at any particular point, with a strong emphasis on crescendi. The fourth movement of Apocryphon, “Avenue of the Sphinxes”, is built upon a massive, extended crescendo, culminating in a spine-tingling run down the piano, and followed by two smaller crescendi—aftershocks, as it were.

Sitsky’s large-scale piano works all have allusions to mysticism and ancient traditions. The Way of the Seeker is inspired by Sufism, taking its title from a mystical eleventh-century Persian text. Apocryphon of Initiation is not based on a particular text, but rather is Sitsky’s free reflection on his extensive reading on ancient Egyptian religion. Both works depict a mystical journey, culminating in enlightenment and exultation; that is, the “Man of Light” at the end of The Way of the Seeker and “Illumination of the Adept” in Apocryphon of Initiation.

Sitsky has long been partial to mystical titles for his work, though he is always quick to distance himself from any specific extra-musical connections. He writes, “I call these inspirations: compositional springboards; mine is not program music.” Earlier in his career, many of his chamber works were given spiritual titles—some of my favourites are The Secret Gates of the House of Osiris for flute, viola, cello, and piano, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead; and Tetragrammaton for violin and piano, a four-movement work based on the Hebrew character Yahweh (God of the Old Testament). However, the piano solos, as a whole, tend to be more personal and were dedicated to specific musicians in Sitsky’s life. The first two fantasias are written in memory of Sitsky’s piano teachers: Egon Petri of the San Francisco Conservatory and Sydney Conservatorium’s Winifred Burston. Others were dedicated to his students or friends and have descriptive titles, such as Arch, Sharagan (No. 5, meaning song in Armenian), and E (No. 11, which centres on the single pitch of its name). The Way of the Seeker firmly established Sitsky’s shift towards piano works with mystical titles, a practice that has continued to the present. As Sitsky remarked in an interview: “Without the mystical reason for its existence, music, for me, loses its point.”

Roger Woodward presciently wrote in a 2005 article, “The Way of the Seeker places [Sitsky] at the beginning of an entirely new period of creative growth.” Sitsky’s next major piano work was the ten-movement, eighty-minute Dimensions of Night, exploring the concept of nachtmusik from various mystical traditions. Following Dimensions came a string of four piano sonatas and a suite, The Golden Dawn, written for seven female pianists who had matriculated from the Adelaide piano studio of Eleonora Sivan. The premiere performance featured all seven pianists on a dimly lit stage, dressed in black, each representing a different word from the Enochian language of angels, from “Mahorela”, meaning darkness, through to “Vaoan”, meaning truth.

Interpreting a Sitsky score is an artform in itself and is closely linked with his own performing philosophy. During his studies in San Francisco with Egon Petri, Sitsky began developing his life-long fascination with the music of Petri’s own teacher, the pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni. Busoni was well known, notorious in some circles, for recomposing classical compositions to suit his own pianistic inclinations. During my studies with Sitsky, I played a number of Busoni’s sometimes heretical revisions, including the cadenzas for Liszt’s solo pieces—namely, Polonaise No. 2 and the waltz from Gounod’s Faust—and the cadenza for Mozart’s D minor piano concerto. (Incidentally, a very public falling out between two giants of the classical music world, Hélène Grimaud and Claudio Abbado, occurred over a Mozart–Busoni cadenza!)

Like Busoni, Sitsky does not hesitate to recompose the classical standards. His performance of the Rachmaninoff Elegie, Op. 2, No. 1 from 2019 begins with a gently rocking cadenza and relishes in a rhythmic freedom and personal expression that is far beyond what we are accustomed to in the highly specialised but carefully gate-kept modern concert hall experience. His recording of Anton Rubinstein’s cello sonatas with David Pereira, originally planned for release on a national Australian label, remained unheard for eight years until the ANU School of Music published the recording on its YouTube channel in 2016. A brilliant interpretation by both players, this recording takes many liberties with the original score, spicing up the harmonies in a manner that would be sure to arouse the ire of this rather straight-laced and irascible Russian composer. Sitsky’s 2021 single arrangement of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and the later-titled Moonlight sonata—yet to be performed—not only links these two pieces into one concert work, but also gives them personal twists that clearly accord to Sitsky’s own aesthetic tastes. Sitsky describes the simple yet elegant “Für Elise” as “not one of Beethoven’s best” and treats it “whimsically, affectionately and humorously”, extending and extemporising on its signature opening gesture. The Moonlight sonata, in contrast, is treated with the utmost respect as a pivotal work in Beethoven’s early period; Sitsky seeks always to recapture the daring spontaneity of this sonata quasi una fantasia with unexpected flourishes, as well as to highlight the way in which Beethoven links motives between the first and third movements.

Sitsky is very comfortable with performers altering his literal score to obey the spirit, if not strictly the letter, of what he puts on the page. In fact, he has frequently expressed frustration when performers, particularly those who play other instruments, complain that his writing is awkward or not idiomatic. “You are always free to change it!” he can often be heard to respond. I find Sitsky’s piano writing to be highly effective as written, although he expects the performer to take considerable artistic licence in terms of rubato, phrasing and the pedal, much as the old pianist masters did. Sitsky does give precise metronome markings to indicate tempo, but then also provides the instruction, “Metronome markings are only important in relation to each other.” I took full advantage of this leniency in my interpretation of Apocryphon, pushing many of Sitsky’s tempi faster, sometimes up to a factor of two. My decisions to this end would seem to give more energy to the driving, percussive sections and increased space to the more tranquil and emotionally evocative phrases. Sitsky intended a forty-five- to fifty-minute performance time for Apocryphon, I reasoned, and the timing of the work as a whole seemed more relevant than the absolute speed of a particular section. But not all of my artistic decisions met with Sitsky’s approval; he was adamant that the chanting melody of the fifth movement, “The Hidden God”, begin much more slowly, gradually building up into an earth-shattering, all-encompassing prayer. Perhaps I did not fully appreciate what Sitsky meant when I recorded the Apocryphon in February 2022. In the premiere performance more than a year later, I brought a new level of spiritual profundity to this central movement, inspiring the veteran music producer Ralph Lane to remark afterward, “The fifth movement should really be recorded and released on its own!”

Apocryphon of Initiation is the culmination of a composer’s lifetime, and specifically the apex of fifteen years of writing major piano works. However, Sitsky has shown no sign of slowing down since its completion. He continues to compose at a prodigious rate, and his energies are now concerned with perfecting the piano miniature, returning to the compact and improvisatory style of his earliest piano compositions. Sitsky continues to push himself to transform his own musical language. He never rests on his laurels, always searching for and discovering new ways to tackle creative and aesthetic challenges. The remarkable legacy of Sitsky’s piano music over the last twenty years is yet to be fully understood. It is a legacy that can only and surely reverberate throughout both the Australian piano community and beyond for decades to come.

Edward Neeman is an Australian concert pianist who lectures at the Australian National University’s School of Music