Maurice Wright Recordings
Sonata
Marc-André Hamelin, piano
"Few recent piano works can stand next to the Concord so well as Maurice Wright’s Sonata of 1982." (Kyle Gann)
Night Scenes
"The career of Maurice Wright offers another good example of the changing character of uptown music. Wright's oeuvre has progressed from early works built on complex pitch material to more intuitive scores, such as Night Scenes (1989). Night Scenes is music that, again, deas not limit itself to one technique, but uses many devices to evoke and sustain nocturnal moods not easily described in any other way." (Mark Swed)
Quintet
"The brass quintets of Bolcom and Maurice Wright have a common link with the American Brass Quintet through the Aspen Music Festival. The ABQ premiered Bolcom's work there on July 7, 1980. A few years later, while attending a performance by the Emerson Quartet at Aspen in 1983, Robert Biddlecome of the ABQ first discovered the music of Wright (born in Front Royal, Virginia, on October 17, 1949). After the concert, Biddlecome asked Wright if he had written anything for brass quintet. Wright hadn't, but "right then and there,”' he says, the two of them agreed that he would compose a work for the ensemble. He completed the Quintet in the summer of 1986; later that year the ABQ premiered the piece at Merkin Hall in New York. " (Elaine Guregian)
Suite for Piano (1983), Chamber Symphony (1976), Night Watch (1978), Sonata II (1983)
"It's nice to know that contemporary composers can be regular folks. Maurice Wright's Suite for Piano twists and turns and gurgles through an impressionistic journey, and as it turns out, the composer actually intended the work as a set of musical postcards describing a recent trip through the Rocky Mountains. Listen carefully to [Marc-Andre] Hamelin's sparkling performance and you will hear thunderstorms, rushing rivers, the gnashing of truck gears, and even the chugging of beers. The other solo piece [Sonata No. 2 ] on this recital [CRI CD 660] is less whimsical, but shares the lucid and elegant style. Compared to the almost neo-classical restraint of the solo piano music, the Chamber Symphony is joltingly vigorous. The music just zips along, propelled by a series of upward sprinting motifs. The computer-generated "symphony" seems capable of an infinite variety of sounds, but Wright has shaped his tremendous resources with good taste, and in such a way that the timbral balance makes sense . . . In that respect, this work is a model of restraint . . .The song cycle Night Watch is enlivened by the subtle theatrical sense and wry humor that characterizes much of Wright's music. The pianist's wife, Jody Applebaum, delivers a bright, agile performance. (Fanfare magazine)
Chamber Symphony
"Maurice Wright is rapidly attaining a considerable profile among American composers of his generation, particularly as indicated not only by the number of works that have recently been recorded but also
by the company they keep. As with anything connected to computers in the last half-century, the development of technology with electronic music has been stunning in the speed of change. Wright’s Chamber Symphony for piano with electronic sound was composed–technologically speaking–in the Middle Ages, when a composer often could not hear the music he had composed until after he had followed elaborate processes that were different from one kind of piece, and one kind of equipment, to another. Only at the end of the process could he decide whether that had been the music he had actually conceived! Maurice Wright’s output includes several works for percussion instruments, including a marimba concerto premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.(Steven Ledbetter)
Madrigals
"Mr. Wright's four Madrigals were very stylish, modeled after centuries-old examples, yet fresh and sensitive in the treatment of the texts. (New York Times, 1979)
On Texts of Robert Herrick, John Dowland and John Donne.
