Monday, August 01, 2016

Karl Kohn is 90

Congratulations (as it happens, from Bali, but that's another post) to composer Karl Kohn on his 90th birthday! Although Karl and his duo-pianistic partner Margaret Kohn have given up their concertizing (they were perhaps the finest duo piano team in the US, with fantastic performances of everything from En Blanc et Noir to Visions de l'Amen, the Bartok Sonata, Structures, Piano Phase, the Ligeti...), he continues to compose in his distinctive athematic style, poised between total chromaticism and the local suggestion of the tonal. Viennese-born, a student of Piston and Fine at Harvard, but longest in California, which is marked by a certain touch of the fantastic that often emerges in the desert