The first compositions by Rodney Sharman that pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa encountered were his artfully idiosyncratic transformations of Puccini arias. On Known and Unknown she is heard playing those early Opera Transcriptions, plus later Sharman adaptations of music by Bizet, Monteverdi, and Wagner. The extent to which composer and performer imprint a fresh identity upon melodic material drawn from a piece as iconic as the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde is testimony to the collaborative rapport that has grown between them during a quarter-century of creative friendship.
Sharman’s choice of canonical opera as a source is indicative of an interest in theatrical modes of expression that also surfaces in original compositions, wherein Iwaasa is required to vocalize at the keyboard. More fundamentally, those Opera Transcriptions point to Sharman’s enduring interest in the heightened experiences of time passing that music may induce. Opera’s narrative structure, with its reliance upon pivotal events and capacity for transcendent moments, clearly appeals not only to Sharman’s taste for storytelling, but also to his pervasive compositional involvement with memory and change, recognition and discovery.
Notable among the other pieces featured here are Sharman’s Canonic Toccata (1996), occasioned by Michael Finnissy’s fiftieth birthday, and Known UnKnown (2021), a musical exploration of Iwaasa’s relationship with her mother. In his crafty recalibrations of existing works, but also in his own music more generally, Sharman conveys a fascination with the multifaceted terms of human interaction, and especially with the role time may play, not as a conceptual abstraction, but within the colouration and character of shared feelings and perceptions.