Constant Lambert - Trois pièces nègres pour les touches blanches (1949)

Leonard Constant Lambert (23 August 1905 – 21 August 1951) was a British composer, conductor, and author. He was the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, and (alongside Dame Ninette de Valois and Sir Frederick Ashton) he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement.

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Trois pièces nègres pour les touches blanches for piano 4-hands (1949)
Dedication: To Edward Clark

1. Aubade (0:00)
2. Siesta (2:31)
3. Nocturne (5:35)

Andrew West & Ronald Woodley, piano 4-hands

Lambert held a very positive view of jazz rhythms and their incorporation in classical music saying once that:

"The chief interest of jazz rhythms lies in their application to the setting of words, and although jazz settings have by no means the flexibility or subtlety of the early seventeenth-century airs, for example, there is no denying their lightness and ingenuity … English words demand for their successful musical treatment an infinitely more varied and syncopated rhythm than is to be found in the nineteenth-century romantics, and the best jazz songs of today are, in fact, nearer in their methods to the late fifteenth-century composers than any music since."

Lambert was to take his interest in jazz much further in works such as the Piano Sonata (1929) and the Concerto for piano and nine Instruments (1931), where the style moves away from the "symphonic jazz" of Gershwin and Paul Whiteman to something much more tense and urban, with popular and formal elements of composition closely integrated, rhythms jagged and extreme, and harmony sometimes approaching atonalism. The second movement of the Sonata features a blues in rondo form. The Concerto's unusual chamber scoring becomes something of a hybrid between a jazz band and the ensemble used in Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire.