Edgar Kelley: Complete Piano Works

Brian Kovach (piano)

Catalog #: TROY0225
Release Date: February 1, 1997
Format: Digital
Instrumental

Albany Records is proud to present the first disc ever devoted to the music of the great American composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley. Kelley grew up among the pioneers from New England and New York who founded Sparta, Wisconsin. He was a direct descendant of the Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford. Sparta was no ordinary frontier village. Its Yankee settlers were lovers of music and literature and as a boy Kelley took every opportunity to steep himself in both. His mother was a writer and musician and his father was a writer and newspaper editor. While drawn to both writing and painting, Kelley decided early on to become a composer. He studied at home first with a young tutor from Germany, who had just arrived from Leipzig, and then in Chicago, where he remained for two years. He then went to Germany, where he studied with the best teachers of the day and was exposed to the music of Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz and Chopin. In 1880, he returned to America and San Francisco, where he took a job as an Organist. He composed all the time. He married a singer, who helped him promote his music. He also taught at Western College in Oxford, Ohio. He went to New York where he became a friend of Victor Herbert and even taught a semester at Yale, where he conducted the New Haven Symphony. The history of music in America is filled with musicians like Edgar Stillman Kelley. Like so many of his American contemporaries, Kelley professed to be nothing more than entertaining. He succeeds so very well as this disc devoted to his music proves. An edition of the piano music of Edgar Stillman Kelley, edited by Brian Kovach has recently been published by Mel Bay Publications.

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Track Listing

Title Composer Performer
Polonaise, Op. 35 Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Ballet Episode Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Album-Leaf (Happy New Year) Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Lyric Opera Sketch for a Gavotte Movement, Op. 13, No. 1 Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Lyric Opera Sketch for a Waltz Chorus, Op. 13, No. 2 Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Flower Seekers, Op. 2, No. 1 Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Confluentia, Op. 2, No. 2 Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Headless Horseman, Op. 2, No. 3 Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano
Alice In Wonderland Suite for Piano, A Series of Pantomime Pictures Edgar Stillman Kelley Brian Kovach, piano

Reviews

  • "Edgar Stillman Kelley, a Wisconsin boy who went to Germany to study piano, Organ and composition, was an American giant before the turn of the century. His Orchestral pieces and theater music won extraordinary acclaim, and he returned to Germany to teach and write. He returned in his 50s to settle in Ohio and wrote steadily until his 1944 death. Philadelphia pianist Brian Kovach is recording Kelley's complete works. On this disc, he has gathered early pieces The Headless Horseman and Alice in Wonderland, plus an early polonaise and Confluentia, a piece evoking the merger of the rivers Rhine and Mosel, and Album Leaf, a best-seller in 1900. Kovach uses a lively technique with appropriate color and expressivity to resurrect music that has all but disappeared. The music is late romantic, and the shorter color pieces have vitality that gives them currency. Kovach's performance argues that Confluentia deserves a new audience for its eager tone painting."

    – The Philadelphia Inquirer

*Album cover provided for Editorial use only. ©Albany Records. The Albany Imprint is a registered trademark of PARMA Recordings LLC. The views and opinions expressed in this media are those of the artist and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views and opinions held by PARMA Recordings LLC and its label imprints, subsidiaries, and affiliates.