Moment Musical for piano solo Op.144 (2024) c.6'30"

Lowell Liebermann’s Moment Musical Op.144 was commissioned by the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra and Hilton Head international Piano Competition, with generous support from Louis K. & Susan P. Meisel and Peggi Moon & Bill Hutchinson

First performance on March 15th 2025 at the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. Dominic Chamot was the winner of the Jim Neumeister Memorial Prize for the Best Performance of Commissioned Work.

ABOUT

The title Moment Musical has been utilized in the past most famously by two composers, Schubert and Rachmaninoff. I dearly love both composers, but it is Schubert who has become especially important to me as the years go by, and it was he that I was thinking of when I appropriated the title for my own piece. (In the plural, the title would be Moments Musicaux and I indeed intend to write more of them to eventually create a set as both Schubert and Rachmaninoff have done.)

My use of the title is not meant to evoke any specific aspect of Schubert’s style, but there are at least a couple of superficial elements in my piece that are often found in Schubert’s keyboard writing: namely the use of binary (otherwise known as ABA) form and the use of an obsessive ostinato figure that underpins each of the work’s sections (something that is perhaps more readily obvious in Schubert’s Impromptus than in his Moments Musicaux.)

My own music (instrumental as opposed to song) is rarely programmatic, in that it is rarely “about” extra-musical things, one of the many reasons I feel a kinship with Schubert. It is music for music’s sake, about nothing more than the notes themselves and the abstract emotions that they evoke, rather than trying to paint extra-musical pictures or narrate specific emotional situations. As this was written to be a “test piece” for the competition, my hope was to write a piece that would highlight the musicality of the performers, although it is not without its technical challenges in its middle section.

Reviews

“He opened with a new, unrecorded composition by Lowell Liebermann, one of America’s sterling composers…strikingly memorable…magnificent, introspective work…I was thunderstruck by the performance and wished to hear it again…”
—-The Millbrook Independant