Marilyn Nonken

Mr. Babbitt was represented by...the premiere of a work that Ms. Nonken commissioned for the concert, 'Allegro Penseroso' (1999). [It is a] witty, nuanced work that makes extreme technical demands. Ms. Nonken was not only equal to them, but more crucially, she clarified the conversational flow within these abstract works. In Mr. Babbitt's music, that single element makes the difference between an involving performance and a distantly abstract one. [ complete review ]

The program began with [Barraque's] Sonata for piano, played by Marilyn Nonken in a performance that was unusually but persuasively light in texture and skipping in motion. Perhaps too much has been made of what is heavy and oppressed in the work's three-quarter-hour progress. For Ms. Nonken, it is also fantastical, and it's just as intense that way, with a sharp glint in its staccato chords, a clear sense of the churning harmony in the most strictly determined sections and a nice scaling of tempos, so that one section bounces out of another. The silences of the latter part were duly ominous, but the music maintained the possibility of new adventure. The last note, instead of being the final nail in the coffin, was a bright point of light and promise.

[Barraque] has his champions, not least of whom is Marilyn Nonken.

French Iconclast Jean Barraque completed just a handful of works in his lifetime, notably a piano sonata this is regarded as thr Mount Everest of post-war serialism -- a legendary challenge that few musicians have faced. The 1952 Sonata is a vast, Beethovian statement, containing over 40 minutes of complex, violent, and often chilling musically beautiful music. Reaching the work's summit is Marilyn Nonken, a gifted young pianist.

Ms. Nonken, a noted advocate of 20th-century music, has been on tour with two programs of formidably complex atonal and 12-tone music: the complete solo piano works of Arnold Schoenberg and the complete solo piano works of Pierre Boulez.... Hearing her perform these works in concert is inspiring.... Mr. Boulez's music must at least seem authentic, gnarly and awesome. From the first work, "12 Notations" (1945), Ms. Nonken captured those qualities, as well as the music's delicacy and refinement.... Achieving continuity is a challenge in the Sonata No. 1 (1946) and the daunting 30-minute Sonata No. 2 (1947-48). Both works evolve in fits and starts in which splattering volleys of pitches and steely chords are followed by flickering, ethereal figurations. Ms. Nonken brought impressive dramatic cogency to these works, as well as to the Sonata No. 3 (1955-57), which can seem like a series of disconnected, meterless gestures.... When she concluded the program with the short "Incises" (1994), a sort of Boulezian answer to the Prokofiev Toccata, it was as if we were hearing some favorite old thing.

"Incises" is charged with a bright, cold, hard brilliance, like a spray of crushed ice. It is dense with events -- even when it is silent for a moment, Boulez's music never really "rests" -- but also far more generous in its emotional expression than much of his earlier work. Nonken proved a persuasive champion, all flash and agitation. [ complete review ]

The Dallapiccola, written for his daughter's eighth birthday, is formally precise, more related to Baroque composers (as Nonken describes in her helpfully to-the-point program notes). Its eleven sections use twelve-tone technique, somehow more chastely deployed, and in interesting contrast to the Schoenberg of forty years earlier. (Perhaps he didn't want to go overboard on his daughter’s special day.) Again, Nonken’s technique was clean, yet warmly inviting. [ complete review ]

The performer of the evening was the young pianist Marilyn Nonken, who invested every note...with thought and grace.

Ms. Nonken's playing of complex counterpoint was clear as a bell, and was even more striking in the slow, lyrical sections, demonstrating that the music has tunes as well as brains. Her playing also conveyed an innocence and a freshness.

Dench's "passing bells: night" (2005) was described as a musical response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which should not be held against it. This is neither anguished threnody nor jingoistic march, and while it may have been inspired by horrors, it does not exploit them. Rather "passing bells: night" is a sustained meditation, throughout which a deep, moist tintinnabulation resounds. Nonken made the most of its dark poetry. [ complete review ]

Dench's most recent piano score, passing bells: night, recalls Debussy's preludes with its waves of impressionistic sounds and its dark, moody atmosphere. New York pianist Marilyn Nonken adroitly projected the music's various inky shades at its first public hearing. It would appear from the program notes that Nonken has had this difficult score for only a fortnight, which made the performance even more meritorious. 

"Spleen" is an electrifying piece that uses the extremes of the keyboard, often splashily, and demands the kind of energy and assurance that has become Ms. Nonken's trademark.

Ms. Nonken gave this music, which is difficult in every way that music can be difficult, every possible advantage. Her strong technique made even the knottiest rhythms and chords clear.

Marilyn Nonken...played ["Echoes' White Veil"] with virtuosity and address.

The performers, all excellent, included pianist Marilyn Nonken, the soloist in Mr. Eckardt's ["A Glimpse Retraced"].

Not just in length but also in beauteous accessibility, "Triadic Memories" is a less daunting piece than the big quartet. That doesn't mean it's less important; beauty can  be its own reward. Ms. Nonken played it with a relaxed, almost rubber-wristed calm, caressing the keys without losing rhythmic definition. A lovely performance of a lovely piece.

[Morton Feldman's "Triadic Memories"] is a remarkable piece, especially when performed with the concentration and artistry shown here by the talented Marilyn Nonken.... It is a tribute to Nonken’s stunning expertise that she maintained the crystalline, meditative mood for the entire span.

In ''Kemp's Morris,'' the composer has the pianist wear bells on the wrist, a variant of the Morris dancing tradition of wearing them on the legs. Nonken's attention to the choreography of her hands added that extra measure of control that elevated it beyond mere effect or affectation. [ complete review ]

"Kemp's Morris" found Ms. Nonken, always precise and poetic at the keyboard, no less so when raising her arms to play the little bells attached to her fingers. [ complete review ]

Nonken's performances, which stressed lyricism, abounded in color and nuance, made convincing contextual and rhythmic sense of the sudden storms of sound and the prolonged buffers of silence, and brought clarity and direction to the sometimes self-obfuscating complexity of Finnissy's textures. [ complete review ]

At its best, and helped by a beautiful performance [by Ms. Nonken], ["North American Spirituals"] suggested a neglected churchyard, with tombs (hymns and spirituals) garlanded by ivy, their inscriptions partly effaced by lichens. [ complete review ]

[review of: Michael Finnissy: Portrait Recital (Verdi Transcription XXII, Folklore II, More Gershwin, Kemp's Morris, "Seeds of Love" from English Country-Tunes, Terrekeme)Marilyn Nonken, the pianist, furthered the impression of grace, playing [Finnissy's music] so smoothly that even when the music fragmented it remained essentially lyrical, and never, to use an adjective too often applied to contemporary music, "spiky." In "Kemp's Morris," she strapped bells to her hands (echoing those on the legs of a Morris dancer) and ended with gentle tinkling circlings of her hands above the keyboard, moving into the realm of choreography.

Hearing her decisive interpretation of Michael Finnissy's Verdi Transcription No. XXII, "I Vespri Siciliani," written in 2004, felt like listening to a Dali painting. Elements of the familiar, some recognizable as Verdi, were juxtaposed with unexpected fragments of thought. 

"Tombeau de Messiaen" [was] played by the splendid young pianist Marilyn Nonken.

The solo performance [of "Tombeau de Messiaen"] was by Marilyn Nonken, who, as always, played exceptionally. Without a doubt, she is one of the finest pianists interpreting new music today.

You could tolerate not hearing Ives's "Concord" Sonata too often -- oddly few pianists offer it -- if every performance were as fresh, as inviting, as cogent and as delectable in sound and gesture as Marilyn Nonken's at Miller Theater on Thursday evening.  Ms. Nonken is a pianist from music's leading edge, associated with new works and with pieces whose challenges have withstood the last half century.... "Concord," for her, is an old friend and a classic, and she made it sound as fluent as Schubert if, like Schubert, prone to eddies and strangenesses in the musical flow.

Her dominant qualities would be advantages in any music: lightness in attack, clarity of texture, singing lines (and singing chords), variety of nuance, certainty in defining climaxes and in moving toward or away from them, a sense that the end of a movement must matter, as witness her deft conclusion to a brilliant account, at once fantastical and purposeful, of the "Hawthorne" movement, or her way of making the disintegration at the end of "Thoreau" secure and affirmative.

That last moment, where the music drifts away (or, one might say after this performance, drifts here), was special partly because its previous history had been persuasively outlined in the appearances of its underlying hymn tune in each of the previous movements. In the "Alcotts" the culminating entry of the hymn had been exalted. [ complete review ]

Let's start with the Ives, for Nonken's performance came as a revelation. It is easy to poke fun at this composer -- for his technical awkwardness, which borders on the spectacular; for his provincial New England crankiness; for the way he throws in quotations from other pieces ("Bringing In the Sheaves" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom" are favorites) to wrap up a passage, in rather the same random fashion that the Monty Python troupe will drop a cow on a character who has become tiresome. 

All that said, and many faults of construction forgiven, there is genuine majesty in the "Concord" Sonata, and nobody else, in my experience, has brought it out so convincingly as Nonken. Her secret, I think, lies in her steadfast refusal to italicize Ives's modernism. Other pianists, impressed by the fact that the composer was messing around with tone clusters, polytonality and long passages of unremitting dissonance early on, treat these innovations as the central fact in Ives, belaboring them with the single-mindedness of a dog with a squirrel in its mouth. 

Nonken recognizes Ives's experiments as part of a whole, and not necessarily the most interesting part, either. On a purely artistic level, invention is much overrated: If it were all that mattered, Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Edison would be ranked as great filmmakers. What Nonken emphasized in the "Concord" were lyricism, continuity and organic structure, and for once, the piece held together as a work of art, rather than as a mere glossary of effects. In her hands, the close of the "Emerson" movement, in particular, sounded like great music by anyone's standards. [ complete review ]

The Ives sonata is a perennial touchstone. There's so much in it that the piece is a quarry of meaning, making it rarely the same touchstone at any given encounter.... The best news is that Nonken lived up to her considerable press. There's nobody like her out there, from her attractive stage presence (think Bebe Neuwirth in Broadway's Chicago) to her lack of self-serving ostentation in a piece whose very presence on a program is, to say the least, cheeky.... Each of the four movements -- which are inspired by specific American literary figures -- had its own distinctive, well-chiseled character, which was a reflection of how deeply she meets the music on its own terms. Immediately in the opening Ralph Waldo Emerson movement, the music's thick textures and seemingly garrulous character were prioritized into layers, with a clear sense of progression from one block of thought to another. "The Alcotts" movement was touching in its hymnlike simplicity, and large sections of "Hawthorne" and "Thoreau" were mesmerizing thanks to Nonken's deep concentration. Ives is often full of unhomogenized quotations from popular music, and Nonken never let them become jokey. What you heard was a musical Mount Rushmore, though instead of the conclusiveness that comes with the broad strokes of enshrinement, the performance raised myriad questions about who these literary figures were and what Ives was saying about them. [ complete review ]

Ives's ''Concord Sonata'' is that composer's titanic contribution to the piano's literature, and few are the pianists who can manage it. Even fewer have managed it as well as Nonken, who again employed proven pianistic virtues in the rendering of a wholly original and radical work of art. [ complete review ]

Charles Ives' Concord Sonata is a beast of a piece, with some of the literature's thorniest passages over its sprawling length (almost three-quarters of an hour) and requires an expert ability to sort out the texture's disparate strands. A high percentage of the score contains densely written chords -- some would say "muddy" -- that also sound muddy if not clarified. As with voicing in Beethoven or other composers, the interpreter here needs to show the listener what to listen to -- to point the way amid the thickets. Granted, Ives may have intended some messiness as part of the effect, but the pianist still needs to say, "Here, look at this, even though there are a zillion other things fighting for your attention."  

Making short work of this complexity, Nonken more than proved her mettle by playing expert tour guide, and the results were scintillating. She was especially effective in the contrasts between crunchingly dense pages that abruptly disappear and in their wake are replaced by wispy soliloquies. As she raced around the keyboard, occasionally pausing for a hymn here and there, some might say this is Ives at his most maddeningly disorganized, but I find this piece exhilarating. It is also exhilarating watching a star pianist perform it, since it is horrendously difficult to play -- not only for "getting all the notes" but also in the stamina required.  

I especially loved watching Nonken's athletic agility in the second and third movements, Hawthorne and The Alcotts. And she did a beautiful job with Ives' lone special effect: a wooden block used to depress a group of keys simultaneously ? no doubt avant garde in 1911. The result, a softly shimmering pulse in the right hand as the left offered a fluid counterpoint, was mesmerizing and at just the right volume level. [ complete review ]

The program's second half was filled by Charles Ives' Piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," written during 1911 and 1912. Although Ives was coloring outside the lines of musical convention when he wrote the piece, the sonata sounded comfortable and in spots almost quaint. 

The sonata is divided into four movements named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amos Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau, all major figures in the American Transcendental movement. Ives wove bits of hymn tunes and folk melodies into the piece, along with a little Beethoven and a pealing church bell.  

Nonken brought lovely ringing, warm sounds to the hymn tunes embedded in the piece, spinning off in a heartbeat into strident, surging lines. She brought a rhythmic discipline to the piece that underscored how tied Ives was to the conventions of meter, despite his stretches away from conventional tonality.

Jarvinen's "Four Rosicrucian Preludes" proved a set of lovely, straightforward proclamations, in what the composer described as the style of Erik Satie. Their musical language is mostly consonant, their rhythms stately, their mood alternately teasing and genuinely touching. [ complete review ]

In the very different world of Lucier, Ms. Nonken was thoroughly absorbing. His piece depends on interactions between the piano's sound and two pure electronic tones, which move very slowly away from the middle of the keyboard in opposite directions and back again. As they track across what the pianist has just played, they seem to pick up the sound and bend it or create acoustic beats with it. The piano changes in front of your ears, as much as it does when this excellent performer sweeps through Schoenberg. [ complete review ]

Marilyn Nonken played the piano with remarkable clarity...[and] gave an assured, crystalline account...a pointillistic abstract essay full of extremes in range, dynamics, and timbre.

"Cocktail Music" for solo piano is a twelve-tone work that is light and jocular, rare for this idiom. The piano was played by Marilyn Nonken, consistently one of the most impressive and compelling performers of new music today.

I heard Nonken do Salvatore Martirano's Cocktail Music a few years ago (aside from her excellent recording), and liked it even more this time around. My companion and I were discussing the laconic title, seemingly at odds with the hyperactive virtuosity, especially in the later pages. The music is in the modernist tradition, but seems borne of jazz a bit, too, with flashes of humor that Nonken exploited to the fullest, including some well-timed trills. Further, much of the piece has giddy avalanches of notes in very rapid tempi, and it was almost amusing watching her hands dart back and forth. With her keen reflexes, clearly she was reserving any actual cocktails for after the performance. [ complete review ]

[Ms. Nonken's] program opened with Tristan Murail's "Les Travaux et les Jours," written in 2003. Constructed in nine vignettes, the piece is free of the restrictions of tonality and meter.

The piece's second vignette, or miniature, for instance, plays with the decay of sound. Chords are struck and held, the sound diminishing and thinning to nearly nothing before another chord is struck. The movement becomes increasingly urgent and emphatic.

The piece demands pointed dissonant chords, ethereal, transparent sounds and a wealth of colors in between - all of which Nonken supplied with complete technical command and musical conviction.

Pianist Nonken took part in the Cage circus, but her main duty was her luminous recital Sunday of Murail works.... Here, delicacy and urgency are juxtaposed with rare drama and hypnotic power.... Nonken's crystalline command of sonority and detail clarified the haunting elements in Murail's music. She is a supreme interpreter of new music who blends audacity with sensitivity.

Nonken is fearless: this program had more notes than one cares to think about, and she blazed through all of them with ease and a bit of sang-froid. Visually, she exudes expert detachment, but she clearly understands the music deeply.

Mr. Nichols's "Chelsea Square" flirts with tonality but keeps its distance, it nevertheless allowed Ms. Nonken to paint in more gentle, rounded hues. [ complete review ]

There are marvellous ideas in David Rakowski's music. At the very end of the first movement of his Piano Concerto (2006), for instance, the soloist suddenly switches to toy piano to play a flourish that's at once otherworldly and mischievous.Similarly the jazzy syncopations and riffs in the movement that follows convey simultaneous feelings of playful spontaneity and lurking menace .... Pianist Marilyn Nonken, who's had a long association with Rakowski's music, plays the tricky solo part of the Concerto with great flair and finesse.

Nonken has been one of several tireless champions of Rakowski’s solo piano works. It seems particularly fitting that he has fashioned a concerto for Nonken .... resulting in a work of ambitious scope and a near-frenetic events structure. Easily one of Rakowski’s finest pieces to date, it features a host of playing techniques – thereby allowing Nonken to exercise both her conventional chops and explore some avant paths along the way. ....While the piano writing is tailor-made to Nonken’s abundant capabilities, she’s also given a chance to exercise a bit of whimsy in several asides for toy piano. Nonken records Rakowski’s cadenza for the CD, but it’s worth mentioning that the composer let her create her own for the premiere – such is the trust and close working relationship of creator and interpreter here. The other interpreters on the scene, Gil Rose and the BMOP, are sterling in their preparation and superlatively musical. The disc is one of the orchestra’s best thus far, and the weightiest and most satisfying in Rakowski’s discography to date. Serious fun indeed!

BMOP/sound ... has released a steady stream of impeccably produced, beautifully packaged discs with exacting and engaged performances of 20th- and 21st-century music. Several elegantly probing pieces by Brandeis-based composer David Rakowski were recently featured on a BMOP Sound disc called “Winged Contraption,’’ including his Piano Concerto in a strong performance by Marilyn Nonken.

The keyboard writing [in David Rakowski's Piano Concerto]--much of it derived from the composer's piano etudes--is virtuosic and intricate, [and] Marilyn Nonken ... plays the socks off the solo part ... a brilliant creation that offers a multitude of inventive details, lots of drama and excitement, and a satisfying sense of large-scale formal logic.

[Ms. Nonken] played music that demanded the agile, speedy fingerwork that has become her calling card.... Mr. Rakowski, whose relentlessly virtuosic "E-machines" (1988) and "Bam!" (1991) opened the program, is an unusually accomplished eclectic. Even as a listener notes a parade of influences, from Minimalism to jazz, the music somehow maintains a sense of consistency. [ complete review ]

Rakowski, a Brandeis faculty member who has been patiently amassing a remarkable set of piano etudes over recent years ("Pollici e Mignoi" for thumbs and pinkies only, "Touch Typing" for index fingers, "Plucking A" for reaching inside the instrument), was represented by yet more of same: "E-machines" (1988) and "BAM!" (1991), done by Nonken to even more of a fare-thee-well than on "Hyperblue," an all-Rakowski compilation on the CRI label. [ complete review ]

Performances are convincing, especially Marilyn Nonken's readings of the Etudes.

"The People United" draws from a Chilean protest song by Sergio Ortega, a recording of which introduced Thursday's performance by Marilyn Nonken. Mr. Rzewski's music is relentless, dense, theatrical in its mood swings, fiercely difficult and long (about 50 minutes). Its language can be harmonically simple, or it can flee tonality along complex paths.

On the other hand, its 36 variations are arranged in a viselike symmetry. "The People United" is like a battlefield - a place where the listener observes both exhausting violence and the cool hand of a strategist. Ms. Nonken's playing, which included Ethan Iverson's racing, wriggling cadenza, was the victory of a survivor who had met every mood and outburst head on and with style, outlasting every obstacle.

The Schoenberg was a canny pairing with the Ives, since compositionally they are separated by only a few years. It is difficult to imagine how a 1909 audience would have responded to these passionate unmoorings of tonality, and Nonken's illuminating reading brought out a quiet urgency. It also made a great beginning to a very well thought-out program. [ complete review ]

Ms. Nonken's playing was impressive for its fleetness, gestural sweep and imagination.... The audience listened raptly and gave the stalwart pianist an ardent ovation.... It was a heartening week for this most persecuted of composers, who clung all his life to the belief that someday his music would be celebrated exactly this way.

Nonken came into her own through the exercise of her own extraordinary talents and applying the principles of historically-informed performance -- not for her fin-de-siècle angst; sumptuous pedaling; and tempos far slower that the composer's metronome marks. Instead her work was transparent, volatile, chameleon-colored and often playful; Schoenberg smiled. The Gigue from Op. 25 (Schoenberg pouring new wine into old bottles) went like lightning, and the audience burst into applause. Nonken fascinated by bringing romantic colorations to a thoroughly contemporary way of hearing this music.

Marilyn Nonken tackled the composer's complete solo piano works in an elegant program at Miller Theater on Thursday night. Beginning with music from 1894, and ending with two works from 1928 and 1931, Nonken played with wonderful clarity and a probing intensity of focus. Nonken's playing not only illuminated these works individually, but also traced the fascinating arc of the composer's development - from his early Romantic musings with flashes of originality, to a mature and startling expressionistic language that would change classical music forever. 

These pieces are difficult for both the body and the intellect, but her technique is in place and her feeling for these pieces is so heartfelt, so sincere, that one is constantly engaged. In an odd way, her role may have been that of a preservationist, a determined protector of important music that history embraces in the abstract and...one day may take to heart. [ complete review ] 

Nonken's gee-whiz, blow-them-away encore was the "Six Little Pieces," Op. 19, of Arnold Schoenberg. The sky has fallen.[ complete review ] 

Her Schoenberg performance was highly persuasive and indicative of her strengths and her tastes. As she explained beforehand, the pieces are startlingly new in that they belong to the first year or so of atonality, and at the same time reassuringly old. She brought out these qualities, but with the adverbs reversed.

The start of the third piece certainly had a good Viennese-waltz swing, but in general Nonken seemed most committed to the music's novelty and left some of the most Romantic gestures sounding pale and lost. This was interesting. So was her intelligent underlining of motivic links that made these pieces belong together. [ complete review ]

Salvatore Sciarrino: Sonata III Marilyn Nonken...ended the program brilliantly with the Sonata III (1987) by the Italian modernist Salvatore Sciarrino, a work that had just as much cerebral integrity as Mr. Wuorinen's [third] sonata but more fantasy and elegance. Ms. Nonken's performance also earned her whoops and cheers. It was a very encouraging night for contemporary music.

Marilyn Nonken gave a luminous account of [Klavierstück IX], showing how the extremes of regularity and irregularity dovetail. The chord repetitions were tense and lifted as much as they thudded; the surreptitious detail of changes in balance and resonance came through, partly thanks to the use of moderate amplification, as Mr. Stockhausen prefers. Ms. Nonken also captured the marvel of the moment when monotony gives way to the first melody, and maintained a sense of purpose through all the beautiful, wavering music that results, right up to an extraordinarily quiet but intense close that clinched the whole piece.

In "Klavierstück IX" I entered into something like an altered state. After 144 repetitions of a stubborn chord, two timid little tones emerged, and for a heartbeat, Marilyn Nonken let the music hang suspended, while I wondered if those little notes were some kind of footnote to the opening, or just a momentary pause for breath before the music moved ahead.