Gordon Sherwood Symphonie n 1 - Concerto pour piano - Sinfonietta Dimitrieva Albert - CPO777012

Masha Dimitrieva, who studied with the legendary Conrad Hansen, Edwin Fischer’s master pupil, is one of the leading Russian pianists living in Germany and has performed in public with interpretations creating a sensation. In her most recent release she not only launches a recording of the complete piano oeuvre of the contemporary American composer Gordon Sherwood but also presents the first recording ever of his works for this instrument. Gordon Sherwood once called himself »the most famous of all unknown composers.« When he was twenty, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos performed his first symphony at Carnegie Hall, and during the following years he was awarded prizes and fellowships. Nevertheless, he gained a foothold neither in the music business nor in middle-class life. He wandered around half the world for twenty years and spent fifteen years of his life as a beggar – ten hours a day, seven days a week, nine months a year – in order to earn the money enabling him to live in a little village in the mountains of the Algarve in Portugal. During the last years of his life he resided in a retirement home in Bavaria. Sherwood was a committed opponent of consumerism and a one-man example of resistance to our increasingly empty buyer-may-care culture. His music? Exuberantly vital, rhythmically powerful, brilliantly instrumented, with reminiscences of Copland and Ives. The CD also includes his Symphony No. 1 and the Sinfonietta op. 101.