Name: Gunnar Johansen: Piano Works
SKU: DACOCD 908
Availability: InStock

Gunnar Johansen: Piano Works

SOLON PIERCE
The pianist Solon Pierce was born in Plymouth, Wisconsin USA and holds degrees from The Juilliard School, Oberlin College, and the University of Minnesota where he completed doctoral work. Instructors have included Abbey Simon, Jerome Lowenthal, Grant Johannesen, Robert McDonald, Alexander Braginsky, Howard Karp, and Ellsworth Snyder. He has appeared in venues in Europe and America including Victor Borge Hall (Scandinavia House) and Isaac Stern Auditorium (Carnegie Hall) in New York, Estate Whim in St. Croix USVI, Rundetaarn and Eliaskirken in Copenhagen, Skagens Museum in Jutland, Fondation Danoise in Paris, Larz Anderson House in Washington DC, Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, Sofiakyrkan in Stockholm, Maison Francaise and Magdalen College in Oxford UK, British Music Information Centre in London, and many colleges and
universities. Pierce has given world premieres of works by Kaikhosru Sorabji, Gunnar Johansen, Justin Rubin, Nicholas Brown, Curt Wrangö and has recorded for Centaur Recordings and Radio Denmark.

Review: PianoNews

Gunnar Johansen

1. Danish Folk Song (1928)

2. Lullaby for Lorraine (1943)

Sonata III (1943)
3. Imperiosamente, molto deciso
4. Fugare; Quieto
5. Passacaglia; Andante Semplice
6. Ricantazione; Coda (Tragico, tenebrae)

from Twelve Etudes Plus One (1977)
7. Etude #1
8. Etude #4

9. Catenaria #1 (1968)

Sonata XXIII (Trilogie der Leidenschaft) (1949)
10. An Werther
11. Elegie
12. Aussöhnung

13. The Lullaby My Mother Sang (1936)

Gunnar Johansen © Solon Pierce
In a stroke of rather fortuitous good fortune, I grew up in a town that was about 5 miles from where Copenhagen-born Gunnar Johansen (1906-1991) settled in the woods of southern Wisconsin in the United States.
Johansen as a pianist and composer was a world figure, but first and foremost struck you as a genuinely approachable human being of uncommon warmth–he left a profound and lasting impression both as a musician and as a man. I first met Johansen in 1982, played for him several times over the course of the succeeding years, and heard him perform numerous times towards the end of his life.
Although Johansen’s initial experience in the United States was to be in California, based in the San Francisco Bay area for the first decade of his years in America, Johansen found his true second home in a state that locates its flagship university (the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Johansen was appointed as the first musical artist in residence in the USA in 1939) in the county of Dane. States in the American Midwest such as Minnesota (Swedes) and Wisconsin (Norwegians and some Danes) were heavily populated by Scandinavian immigrants especially in the later 19th and early 20th century, and when Johansen arrived in 1939, he proceeded to fit right in.

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 2022

CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 908

EAN: 5709499908006

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