Larry Sitsky
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"I cannot help but feel an immense sorrow for someone of Sitsky’s years. Here is a man who tasted what could have been a golden age of culture in this country; that age never properly took shape, and since the 1990s it has declined into non-existence, vanishing from both sight and memory"
January 14, 2024
11 mins
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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. Indeed, he has expressed frustration when performers complain that his writing is awkward or not idiomatic. 'You are always free to change it!' is his frequent response
January 14, 2024
14 mins
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In these last few years, there has been yet another shift in Sitsky’s approach to piano composition. These recent piano pieces—a set of preludes and three collections of “late piano pieces”—are strikingly different from their epically proportioned predecessors. If the phase of piano composition bookended by The Way of the Seeker and Apocryphon of Initiation could be characterised as one of expansion and monumentalism, then the current phase is just the opposite: marked by distillation and crystallisation.
December 28, 2023
17 mins
The latest
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Sitsky’s “compleat” purpose is to demonstrate what the significance of Busoni could be now, well into the twenty-first century. These volumes trace an ever-broadening curve, starting with Sitsky, the pianist and composer, writing fairly technically about Busoni, the composer for piano; then going on to a wider aesthetic embrace of Busoni’s underlying philosophy, across all musical genres; and finally evidencing Sitsky’s skills as textual scholar and interpreter in offering completions to key works left unfinished by the departing Busoni.
December 28, 2023
12 mins