Eller: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 5

Featuring

Sten Lassmann
Heino Eller

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Composer's Artistic Vision

In the mid-to-late 1930s, Eller found his original voice in modal harmony, which he synthesized with national and personal idioms, as exemplified in his First Symphony, In modo mixolydia.

Composition History

Eller's Preludes, Book II, were the first of his compositions to be published in his lifetime, in 1932, after a protracted process involving a dispute over his fee.

Critical Reception

Eller's Preludes were criticized in 1950 by the Soviet cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar for their modernism, which was seen as lacking melody and having 'shapeless' and 'fragmentary' forms.

Compositional Technique

Eller experimented with piling up dominant-seventh and -ninth chords in different keys, a technique that Arnold Schoenberg later called the 'emancipation of the dissonance'.

Composer Biography

Heino Eller, an Estonian composer, initially emulated the 19th-century romantic-virtuoso piano tradition in his early works.

Historical Context

The Thirteen Piano Pieces on Estonian Motifs were composed in 1940-41, possibly under pressure to conform to the official ideology of Socialist Realism following Estonia's annexation into the Soviet Union.

Performer Biography

Sten Lassmann, the pianist on this recording, won first prize in the Sixth Estonian National Piano Competition in 2002 and is undertaking the first-ever recording of Heino Eller's complete piano works.