Long known as the only pianist playing PIANISSISSIMO by Donald Martino, Edward Wood performed this work in concerts sponsored by The Group for Contempory Music at The Manhattan School of Music in New York City and The Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. He has also performed Kenneth Girard's Suite for Piano (1998) for The National Association of Composers, USA, at Christ and St.Stephen's Church, NYC. Mr. Wood has also performed both volumes of J.S.Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier combined with the complete piano music of Arnold Schoenberg in a series of recitals at Jordan Hall in Boston. Mr. Wood holds a Bachelor of Music degree from The Eastman School of Music, with Distinction, where he studied with Armand Basile; and a Master of Music and Artist Diploma from The New England Conservatory, where he studied with Russell Sherman. Currently, his CD Music for Woodturning, in conjunction with the wooden sculpture Cycles by his sister Virginia Dotson, along with his video Ten New England Scenes for Canvas, Piano, and Camera are on a two year tour of The United States with the Challenge VI art exhibition. REVIEWS Michael Steinberg, THE BOSTON GLOBE "DRAMA OF 'PIANISSISSIMO' PRECISE, COMPELLING: Last night's Sanders Theater concert in the Fromm Foundation-harvard Music Dept. contemporary music series gave much to listen to and think about. We had ... the third performance-- the first before a large audience-- of "Pianississimo" by Donald Martino. It was, all of it, stimulating, provocative, absorbing. Martino's "Pianississimo" ... is not supersoft, but it is, in the composer's words, "the most piano", written in response to a request from composer-pianist Easely Blackwood to write the most difficult work possible. "Pianississimo" is a full-grown sonata, half an hour long, with tons of notes, and maximal variety of color and dynamics. Each time I have heard it, it has held me quite extraordinarily. We will be long exhausting this precise, expressive work, and its fantastical piano scoring will engage composers and pianists for some time....Performances were admirable, by members of Speculum Musicae in the Intonations; by Edward Wood in "Pianississimo" (the intelligent pianist of its first two performances, he is especially impressive in its delicate moments..." Bruce Saylor, MUSICAL AMERICA "The Group for Contemporary Music at the Manhattan School of Music... has for thirteen years offered a singular kind of atmosphere in which to present the music of our century. The performers are among the finest interpreters of contempory music anywhere, and the programming places the latest works by young composers side by side with the great twentieth-century masterpieces and works by important living composers. The Group's April 28th concert in Hubbard Recital Hall represented this on-going tradition in a program including Charles Ives, our great American original, Francis Thorne and Donald Martino, composers in their middle years, and Erik Lundborg, a young composer receiving increasing attention in New York...Donald Martino's PIANISSISSIMO (1970) is a very long work for piano solo. The title refers not so much to the dynamic level but to the extreme virtuosity of the piano writing. While the texture is largely pointillistic, the entire range of contemporary piano techniques is used: plucking of strings, stopped notes, clusters and ringing sounds. Within many of the dense sections of pointillism certain melodic shapes seemed to emerge. ...PIANISSISSIMO was here given its New York premiere by Edward Wood, who apparently spent several years learning the piece. He played it, astonishingly, from memory, a real feat for such a work, demanding in the extreme on the best of pianists." David Noble, QUINCY (MA) PATRIOT LEDGER A WEEKEND SPENT WITH THE NEW MUSIC: "The hardest piano piece in the world, written by a Boston area man and played by another, and a music drama that could revive the Latin liturgy controversy were events in the Manhattan new music scene last weekend. The piano piece was played by Boston pianist Edward Wood Monday night in a concert of the Group for Contemporary Music in the Manhattan School of Music's Recital Hall in New York. Titled "Pianississimo", the new work was written five years ago by Donald Martino of the New England Conservatory (since then, Martino has won the Pulitzer Prize for music, but not for this piece). The title of the work means "very, very quiet" in its conventional musical usage, but Martino used it here to suggest the mammoth demands the work makes on a performer's technique. It was written to be the most difficult piece in the piano literature, at the request of a pianist who later decided not to play it. Wood, a former graduate student at Martino's school, first played the work in Boston's Jordan Hall last December and again in Sanders Theater in February. He made a profound impression with the work Monday night. ...listening to this piece is a dreamy, intense experience remote from anything the standard repertoire provides. Inside the swirling, labyrinthine geometries and dissonances of the work, Martino opposes ideas of mild, ethereal quality with dense, impenetrable complexes of notes that somehow heighten the lyricism on one plane even as they cancel it out on another. Some passages are heightened by contrasts of tone color when Wood plucks notes inside the piano. "Pianississimo" is a masterpiece of piano music, and will enter the repertory if a new work can still do that (a proposition I seriously doubt, so far is today's "serious" music life removed from creative currents). Wood's musical dedication and pianistic authority were plain to hear; he clearly should be better known than he is." David Noble, QUINCY PATRIOT LEDGER, May, 1977 "In the midst of the festivities, a major work by one of Sessions' major pupils was played in a piano recital in Boston's Emmanuel Church. "Pianississimo", a half-hour long sonata by Donald Martino, who studied with Sessions (and other teachers) before coming to the New england Conservatory and winning the Pulitzer Prize for music, was played by Edward Wood, a local pianist. "Pianississimo" is thought by several experts on the question to be the hardest piano piece ever written. ...Although strictly a 12-tone piece, it is a study in long, lyrical melodic lines that often linger tantalizingly around the fringes of tradional tonal harmony. ...The baby grand at Emmanuel Church is not the instrument to attempt all this on, and Wood had predictable problems simply making the piece sound, but he succeeded in showing Martino's lingering, shadowy lyricism in his performance. After intermission, Wood sat back down to the problematic piano and played the "Hammerklavier" sonata-- Beethoven's hardest by a long shot. Not only that, he played it at Beethoven's marked tempos, which everyone else in the world finds impossible to keep up to. For this enterprise the lightweight piano was in some ways a help-- "Sometimes it sounded like a hammerklavier'" one informed listener said after the performance. And yes, the lightness of the piano's tone did suggest the instruments of Beethoven's day in some passages of the sonata. More than that, Wood's hypersped performance was strangely revealing in some parts of the monumental sonata-- the strangely altered recapitulation of the first movement, for instance, or the odd trio section of the scherzo. The elaborate, decorated passages of the slow movement and the crazier parts of the concluding fuge also were illuminated by Wood's approach. I'm glad I heard it." 21 Variations on a Theme of Andrew Wood JDT 3095 Theme / Poco Allegro / Meno Mosso / Allegro /Meastoso / Barcarole / Energetic / Andante poco / Adagio Andante / Allegro / Twin: Andante / Twin: Andante / Homage to Rachmaninoff, from England: march / Fughetta / Commodo / Poco Allegro / Meno Mosso / Adagio / Allegretto / Allegro con Brio / Barcarole / Listesso Tempo / Andante Serioso