SOMM Recordings is proud to celebrate the “stylish and powerful” (The Times) South African-born pianist-composer David Earl with a 75th Birthday Tribute. The release features Oxymorons – 24 Preludes (1993) and Scenes from a South African Childhood – 9 pieces for solo piano (2013). Of interest is that the second of these childhood scenes, “Princess Rainbow,” was included on the much-praised African Pianism release [SOMMCD 0647] by pianist Rebeca Omordia.

David Earl was born in Stellenbosch in South Africa’s Western Cape in 1951. He made his professional piano debut aged 16 with the South African Broadcasting Corporation and played Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto with the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra the following year. He moved to London when he was 19 to study at the Trinity College of Music, performing the first of a number of solo piano recitals at Wigmore Hall while still a student and broadcasting live on BBC Radio 3.

Earl gave the premiere of his Piano Suite No 1 Mosaics at Wigmore Hall in 1977. His First Piano Concerto and Chéri, a ballet commissioned for The Scottish Ballet, followed in quick succession. His extensive catalogue includes further ballet scores, operas, chamber music, choral and vocal works, film scores, a wide range of concerti for various instruments, and works for solo piano.

David Earl teaches at Cambridge University, and, prior to settling there, he spent seven years in Oxford. He describes Oxymorons as miniature tone poems reflecting friends and places he encountered during his Oxford years. The title also relates to the paradoxical idea that he was writing tonal music at a time when it was not considered de rigueur. Following the same order as Preludes by Chopin and others, this set begins in C major and its relative minor, and cycles through all the keys to F major and D minor.

The nine pieces that make up Scenes from a South African Childhood are personal essays from a specific time and place, which are universally evocative through their very specificity. David Earl grew up on the small estate, Old Nectar, in the Jonkershoek Valley north of Cape Town. The music evokes scenes of a young David walking through the gardens of Old Nectar with his mother; flyfishing with his father in the river flowing through the valley; vacationing at Groot Drakenstein and discovering there Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25, which becomes indelibly associated with the place. Then moving to Cape Town, where its monuments, beaches, trees, and warm southern-hemisphere Christmases create their own nostalgia, expressed here through music.