What's in my new CD for Christmas?

This is what I wrote in the booklet of my new CD, "A Virtuosic Christmas", available to public on the second week of November. ............................................................................................................................................ Sorry that it's not quite a Silent Night anymore. ............................................................................................................................................ This CD contains my two virtuosic piano works based on Christmas songs that I have always loved, and still do until now. Apart from that, I had so much fun recording my shorter piano works from Alicia's Piano Books, but since this release is related to Christmas time, I chose only those that are related to love. As I am working with the extremely talented young vocalists Mariska Setiawan and Nikodemus Lukas for my bigger projects these days, I kindly asked them if they would like to record my songs that they have sung in the past, and they happily agreed. I have written hundreds of vocal works about love (and sometimes its absence) too. The songs featured in this CD are their own choice, I just asked them that the theme should be related to love. ............................................................................................................................................ The "Adeste Fideles" Fantasy & Passacaglia was written during the days when I was "dry" during my first few weeks of writing my opera, CLARA. Clara had a difficult start, since I tried to change the structure of the story into a flashback. Even with the structure carefully planned, I was still feeling insecure even until I already wrote down the first few (even many!) notes. The theme doesn't help either. It's so painful, not the usual "mental" pain as in unrequited love, but a physical one, since it's about rape and death. Everything is so violent, and I have so much fear for violence. I tried to make this opera as a therapeutic method for me to deal with things that I fear so much in me. So, I wrote a variation of the passacaglia every time I dried up or was incapable of writing .... which proved that those days were a lot! "Adeste Fideles" turned into one of the longest pieces for piano that I've written. ............................................................................................................................................ The original "Silent Night" is perhaps the only musical work that is remembered from the German composer Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863). On the Christmas Eve of 1818, Joseph Mohr, an assistant pastor at St Nicholas, showed Gruber a six-stanza poem he had written in 1816. They were both working in that church at Obendorf, near Salzburg. He asked Gruber to set the poem to music. The church organ had broken down so Gruber produced a melody with guitar arrangement for the poem. The two men sang "Stille Nacht" for the first time at Christmas Mass in St Nicholas Church while Mohr played guitar and the choir repeated the last two lines of each verse. In later years, Gruber composed additional arrangements of the carol for organ and for organ with orchestra, as well as scores of other carols and masses, many of which are still in print and sung today in Austrian churches. There are no royalties involved in these two songs, and I have liked the tunes since I remembered, so writing paraphrases on those tunes proved to be really fun. I just hope that they are fun to play as well! ............................................................................................................................................ I learned a lot mostly from Rimsky Korsakov's work Variations and Fugue on B.A.C.H in writing my own music music, Fantasy & Fugue on B.A.C.H. both of which I performed in a concert at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, in my concert with all works based on the 4-note theme B.A.C.H., where H is the note for B in German, and B itself is B-flat as we know it. The program also included the works of Alfredo Casella, Arnold Schoenberg's Suite op. 25 and a new work by Spanish prominent composer Santiago Lanchares. My piece turns out to be so different from Rimsky's, but from his work I learned the harmonic wealth and possibilities from that motif. And also I realized how it could be so diatonic, chromatic and atonal at the same time. My piece lasts for about 5 minutes or so, it is quite virtuosic and perhaps it's the most "atonal" sounding of my works till now (apart from some short pieces in Alicia's Piano Books), but I hope its virtuosity would compensate its atonal dissonance, especially the fugue which lasts for only about 1,5 minutes. ............................................................................................................................................ Apart from writing a series of Rapsodia Nusantara based on Indonesian folkmusic (my target for now is to write 34, as we have that many provinces in Indonesia), I am writing a series of Love Songs too. There were personal love songs, using the names of the people who are in love (such as Henoch Kristianto & Yenny which is recorded on Henoch´s CD, and Karini & Wahyu in this CD), but what I meant here are abstract ones, just with numbers. While Rapsodia Nusantara pieces serve as virtuosic works, Love Songs explore easy(-ier) piano techniques, but they will focus on 1 or 2 techniques only. So, they would serve as a kind of etude, sometimes not in the finger techniques but in balancing the voices, in developing sensitivity in tempo and timing etc., which is highly important for young pianists but now often forgotten in the musical education for the young that focuses only on the "fast fingers". ............................................................................................................................................ As for my vocal works in this CD, they speak for themselves. I can only add that the 3 poets whose dainty poems I use in my songs with harp are "new friends". I met Adimas Immanuel, Bernard Batubara and Didik Siswantono during the ASEAN Literary Festival 2015 and I had the pleasant surprise of discovering their imaginative worlds they depict through their poems. I now bring the collection of their poems that will keep inspiring me everywhere in my travels. ............................................................................................................................................ @anandasukarlan , October 2015