George Flynn - Trinity

With Trinity American composer George Flynn has created something quite extraordinary. A 114-minute solo piano work in three parts, Trinity was conceived in the late 1960s, but its completion spans 25 years: 1968 to 1993. The work's title refers both to the tripartite structure and to the site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb test took place, on 16 July 1945. As described in George Flynn’s own liner notes, Kanal and Wound respond to times of violence in the twentieth century (Poland during World War II and Vietnam in the 1960s respectively), while Salvage 'confronts the violence, seeking reconciliation'. The music makes great demands on the performer as well as on the listener, in terms of its length, its technical challenges and its subject matter. In fact, it is so demanding that Trinity has only been performed as a single unit on three occasions, each time by Fredrik Ullén, who also plays it here. Known as a leading exponent of some of the most complex piano music ever composed, Ullén has been described in Gramophone as a 'pianist as stylish as he is scintillating'. He has previously recorded the complete piano music by Ligeti, released on a two-disc set labelled 'a great gift to us all' in Fanfare and 'self-recommending' in Classical Source. His recording of Sorabji's Transcendental Studies Nos 1-25 met with similar acclaim, for instance in International Record Review: 'From impenetrable nocturnes and spectacular études in seconds, fourths, fifths and sevenths, to rippling arpeggiated triads, chordal glissandi and the most fiendishly complex counterpoint, Ullén's achievement is nothing short of breathtaking.' With Trinity he has taken on a new, equally daunting challenge, something that every buyer of the disc will be able to ascertain by himself, as the full score of Trinity has been included as extra material on the discs.