While Yvar Mikhashoff (1941-1993) is best known as a pianist, and in particular a champion of contemporary music, a large portion of his formal studies was in composition, the culmination of which was a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, granted in 1973. That same year he began teaching piano at the State University of New York at Buffalo. From this point on, he devoted most of his energies to performing but continued to compose, the music often conceived for inclusion in his thematically linked programs. I once asked him what tipped the scales towards performing, to which he replied that when his father asked him if he wanted to take the bow from the stage or the audience, the die was cast.

Save for Dances for Davia, Set II, written in 1979, all the music on this recording is of early works. The songs are from two years, 1968 and 1969, and the first set of Dances for Davia dates from the composer’s seventeenth year. Yet it would be a mistake to think they are not representative of Yvar’s output as a whole. Hearing them in relation to the magnum opus of his final years, the transcendentally difficult Elemental Figures for piano, one notices the emphasis on a continuous melodic line, an expansive tonal harmony and through-composed textures developed from characteristic figurations.

Yvar was a citizen of the world and these songs reflect his love of language and the individuality of national musical identities. In Seis Caprichos, Spain is evoked through the flamenco-inflected vocal writing of “Crótalo” and the guitar-like accompaniment of “Adivinanza de la Guitarra” and “Chumbera.” The two Trakl cycles reflect Germanic traditions, the strict canon of “Nähe des Todes” from Rosenkranzlieder and the intense chromaticism of “Im Park,” the third song of Sebastian im Traum, which also has a canonic structure in the piano accompaniment. The third song of Beggars’ Songs, “The White Birds,” set to a Yeats poem, and the following solo piano Interlude are Yvar in his most American pastoral mode.

The two collections of short pieces for flute and piano are a kind of musical “amuse bouche,” intended to charm with not a whit of worry about the aesthetic wars of modernity. Their dedication to Yvar’s cousin, Davia, a dancer for whom he had a particular affection, is like a great deal of Yvar’s music that is connected to specific people with whom he had life-long musical and personal relationships. His vocal muse was Isabelle Ganz, cello, Frances-Marie Uitti, viola, Wayne Crouse and spoken word, Paul Schmidt.

For those who knew Yvar well, these pieces express his extroverted “joie de vivre” as well as a certain solitariness. Many of them were composed while traveling – there is always a note at the end of a manuscript, listing date, time and place of completion, often an airplane, airport or hotel. His varied life is present in the various sources of his music – a portrait of an unforgettable person.

- Nils Vigeland
September 2023