While the rest of the world is looking ahead to a new year, Clipper Erickson, piano is on the look-out for new repertoire.

Erickson, who is on the faculty of Westminster Conservatory of Music, Rider University, in Princeton, and Boyer College of Music and Dance – Temple University, in Philadelphia, has two new releases of rediscovered works which have languished in obscurity for decades.

These include world premiere recordings of pieces by R. Nathaniel Dett, the grandson of fugitive slaves who became an important figure in American music, and Cyril Scott, in his day a frontrunner of the English avant-garde, whose reputation faded over the decades until he was remembered, if at all, as the composer of one or two innocuous miniatures in Grandma’s piano bench.

Interestingly, there was a creative exchange between the two by way of eccentric Australian pianist Percy Grainger, who championed works of both composers. You can read all about it in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/12/classical_music_local_pianist.html