Portrait with Piano- Jenny McLeod

The idea for this disc came about many years ago. As in my post about Morgen, very little remains of the hundreds of recordings I made prior to my injury in 1993. In the pre digital era, recording tapes were simply played twice and then reused. However, Radio New Zealand did have my 1987 recording of Jenny McLeod's Rock Sonata No 2 which I commissioned from Jenny for the New Zealand Arts Festival. I also knew that Rock Sonata No 1, which had been written for Eugene Albulescu had never been recorded as a solo piece. So I  approached Jenny to see whether there would be an opportunity of putting together a CD with these two sonatas plus other works with piano. Jenny was enthusiastic as the recording of her Piano Piece 1965 was long out of print, and Music for Four (for two pianos and two percussionists) had not been recorded. A number of years later I approached Wayne Laird who was also keen. We asked Stephen De Pledge to record Rock Sonata No 1 and the Piano Piece 1965 and the two of us joined  forces with percussionists Eric Renick and Lenny Sakovsky to record Music for Four. Sarah Watkins, James Yoo and Andrew Beer completed the CD with Seascapes, an arrangement for piano trio of two of Jenny's Tone Clock pieces. I was thrilled to have my old recording remastered as one of the few performances from my many years as a busy performing pianist and the whole provides a wonderful record of some of Jenny McLeod's fine compositions involving piano. The CD was released in 2021 by Atoll Records. 

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