Piano Sonatinas (Preview)

INTRODUCTION
DOUGLAS LILBURN BIOGRAPHY
Douglas Lilburn (1915–2001) grew up on ‘Drysdale’, a hill–country farm bordering the
mountainous region at the centre of New Zealand’s North Island. He often described his
boyhood home as ‘paradise’ and his first major orchestral work, Drysdale Overture (1937),
written while a student under the aegis of Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College
of Music in London, conjures up the hills, bush and stream as primal sites of imaginative
wonder. Recalling the impression of Drysdale Overture, Lilburn wrote: ‘I’m left with that
lovely Mark Twain image of Jim and Huckleberry drifting their barge down that great river,
looking up at the stars and wondering “whether they was made, or only just happened.”’ At
this time Lilburn wrote his Festival Overture and the Sonata 1939, together with other works
that expressed national pride: a cantata entitled Prodigal Country (1939), and the Aotearoa
Overture (1940), which has become a New Zealand classic. Although these works were written
in his student years, their content, style and general confidence reveal Lilburn as an
achieved artist.
Returning to Christchurch, Lilburn banded together with an innovative group of painters,
poets and publishers who were to prove influential. Settings of Allen Curnow and
Denis Glover, for instance, resulted in two iconic works: Landfall in Unknown Seas (1942),
a voyage of spiritual discovery for narrator and string orchestra, and the song cycle Sings
Harry (1953), the musings of a middle-aged bachelor who, returning to the mountains
where he grew up, begins to reassess and evaluate the course his life has taken. Two more
works, an orchestral tone poem A Song of Islands (1946) and the Chaconne (1946), find their
parallel in the regional paintings of Rita Angus.
In 1947 Lilburn joined the staff at Victoria University College in Wellington and completed
several works that received high critical acclaim, including two symphonies, two piano
sonatas, and the Alistair Campbell song cycle Elegy (1951) – a vision of the titanic indifference
of nature.
Lilburn composed the Symphony No.3 (1961), along with Sonatina No.2 (1962) and Nine
Short Pieces for Piano (1965–66), in response to a stimulating period of sabbatical leave.
Masterpieces of concentrated form, these works explore the boundaries of his instrumental
writing. From this point until his retirement, Lilburn chose to take on the new territory of
electroacoustic composition.
Lilburn’s final years were spent quietly at home in Thorndon, Wellington, tending to his garden
and, until the onset of arthritis, playing his beloved August Förster piano. He received
the Order of New Zealand in 1988.
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