DESCRIPTION:
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During the summer of 2000, just after I graduated from college, I was invited to perform a solo recital at the Festival of the Hamptons on Long Island, New York. The festival’s director, Lukas Foss (1922-2009), prefaced the invitation with a request that I play a piano sonata by Donald Harris (born 1931), his friend and colleague. I did, and then met Harris immediately following the recital. Although I finally had met Harris in person, I first had discovered him through this Sonata, his earliest professional composition finished in Paris in 1957. The Sonata was Harris’s first independently composed work, completed after he left Nadia Boulanger’s studio and before he began working with Max Deutsch. In Harris’s own words, he loved every note, he caressed every note, and he felt liberated to compose freely in a style of his own choosing after an unremarkable start with Boulanger. In many ways, this opus one came to define the parameters of his maturing compositional style.

Since that first performance, I have played the Sonata many times, and have even written papers analyzing the music’s elaborate structures. Fundamentally, I have grown to love the piece. This film was born out of the desire to make intimate and understandable a music whose language is atonal and whose aesthetic is complex. I wished for the film not only to explain what circumstances led Donald Harris to compose the Sonata, but also to expose an audience to the work’s intellectual vigor and subtle emotional beauty. In effect, I hoped to make clear why this intricate music so captivated me. In these ways, the film is an unfolding composition, one in which its uncommon protagonist, the Sonata itself, is assembled gradually from fragments into a complete, meaningful, and freshly interpreted performance.

—Daniel Beliavsky

Film Credits:

Produced and performed by Daniel Beliavsky
Film and photography direction by Engin Ufuk Kaplan and Alexis Boling
Sound recording, engineering, editing, and mastering by Engin Ufuk Kaplan
Edited by Bodine Alex Boling

© Daniel Beliavsky 2011
© opus1films 2011

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Film review: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2011/Aug11/Harris_France.htm

*Please support this film by purchasing a DVD copy at http://opus1films.com/purchase/film/