This album features the first ever recordings of Sam Hayden's complete music for solo piano, performed by contemporary music specialist and indefatigable champion of new music, Ian Pace, a pianist with a formidable reputation for mastering the most challenging of new repertoire. The centrepiece is Haydens monumental 7-movement cycle, Becomings (Das Werden) I-VII (2016-18), the most recent work on the album and the most ambitious and demanding in terms of scale and sheer virtuosity. Becomings is accompanied by two shorter acoustic works, still time (1990) and Fragment (After Losses) (2003). . A different soundworld is provided by Piano Moves (1990) for amplified piano. His solo piano works have in common constant transformation, existing at the extremes of gesture, polyphony, density, register, dynamic range and textual juxtaposition, very much reflecting an aesthetic alignment with modernist traditions and very much at the cutting edge of the avant-garde, while retaining an open and interesting experience for even less adventurous listeners. Hayden has received commissions from many ensembles and the BBC and is Professor of Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
