Composer’s Note
I wrote the first of my (many) piano sonatas at the age of 19, having been bowled over by the first London performance of Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. This piece, with its contradictory extremes of intellectual loftiness and gleeful vulgarity, seemed to open a door to creativity, giving me permission to find vocabulary to express hitherto inarticulable ideas.
Since then I’ve been encouraged and inspired by a widely diverse succession of works which have demonstrated fascinating handling of musical form and content. My endless search for compositional four-leafed clovers has turned up names including Satie, Busoni, Alkan, Medtner, Cage, Poulenc, Carla Bley and Hildegard von Bingen.
My life in music is like a party at which I’ve enjoyed lively conversations with lots of interesting people.
John White
Recorded at The Old Granary Studio, Priory Farm, Norfolk, October 2006 by Jonathan Powell.
Engineering and editing by John Lely and Adaq Khan.
Produced by Adrian Green.
Track Listing
Disc 1
01 Sonata no.20 (1963) 5.26
02 Sonata no.30 (1966) 3.34
03 Sonata no.14 (1960) 23.24
04 Sonata no.12 (1960) 2.27
05 Sonata no.13 (1960) 3.19
06 Sonata no.4 (1959) 12.47
07 Sonata no.7 (1960) 4.57
08 Sonata no.19 (1963) 3.36
09 Sonata no.34 (1967) 4.39
10 Sonata no.28 (1966) 1.32
Disc 2
01 Sonata no.2 (1957) 13.32
02 Sonata no.9 (1960) 6.56
03 Sonata no.18 I (1963) 3.59
04 Sonata no.18 II (1963) 4.46
05 Sonata no.18 III (1963) 4.55
06 Sonata no.25 (1965) 3.55
07 Sonata no.31 (1967) 8.40
08 Sonata no.11 I (1960) 2.58
09 Sonata no.11 II (1960) 1.40
10 Sonata no.11 III (1960) 1.34
11 Sonata no.11 IV (1960) 2.21
12 Sonata no.24 (1965) 6.42
13 Sonata no.23 (1965) 11.01
Total running time 138.38 minutes
