“great character and emotional integrity...a thoroughly worthwhile project”
Mark Tanner, Piano Professional Magazine
“recomendable"
Adolfo del Brezo, OpusMusica.com (Spain)
“…surely more than just ..intensely pleasant music'.”
Michael Darvell, ClassicalSource.com
Paul Riley, Venue Magazine
Robert Matthew-Walker, Musical Opinion Magazine
Andy Gill, The Independent
“…highly listenable stuff, very deftly in control of its chosen medium. A number of disparate influences are on display here, but welded into an overall idiom of considerable charm… ..Intensely pleasant music'? Most certainly.”
Calum MacDonald, International Record Review Magazine
9/10 “this album is beautiful, moving and relaxing”
Andy Whitehead, Cross Rhythms
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“A colossal musical project… stunning and seriously impressive"
John France, MusicWeb International
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"Exciting stuff all round - vital, energising, but sensitive when need be. Toes - prepare to tap."
Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International
Read the reviews at www.johnpitts.co.uk
Email - bristolcomposers at blueyonder.co.uk
Visit intenselypleasant's channel on youtube
Download mp3s from 
Individual mp3s or the whole album are currently available to download from amazon.co.uk, CDBaby, Lulu, Napster, Tradebit, Amazon.com (and French and German Amazon), CD Universe, rateyourmusic.com, Lala, Rhapsody and will shortly be available for download from iTunes, eMusic and others.
Buy the CD from the Welcome Stranger Shop.
ipm08 is a new album, released January 2009 on the cd.tp label, supported by the PRS Foundation for New Music / The Bliss Trust.
JOHN PITTS has music degrees from Bristol and Manchester Universities, studying composition under Adrian Beaumont, Geoff Poole, John Casken and John Pickard, also receiving tuition from Raymond Warren and Robert Saxton. In 2003 John won the Philharmonia Orchestra Martin Musical Scholarship Fund Composition Prize, his Piano Quartet being performed by the Fidelio Quartet in the final stage of the competition at the Royal Festival Hall. Typhus and Nuts & Bolts, two of his chamber pieces, have been shortlisted by the Society for the Promotion of New Music. He writes music for Christian worship, with two hymns on Naxos CDs recorded by his brother Antony Pitts and TONUS PEREGRINUS, including one in Faber's The Naxos Book of Carols book. In 2006 Choir & Organ magazine commissioned I will raise him up at the last day for their new music series. John has also written music for four plays and two short operatic works - Crossed Wires (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 1997), and 3 Sliced Mice (commissioned by Five Brothers Pasta Sauces). John has conducted four Bristol Savoy Operatic Society productions, arranging Pirates of Penzance, Gondoliers and Iolanthe for small band. He is one of the founding members of the Severnside Composers Alliance, and has had four pieces released on CDs on the Dunelm label. One reviewer wrote "This is lovely music to listen to and shows a deep absorption of earlier styles but with a large degree of originality added for good measure." Another wrote "I would have liked to hear more of this music." This CD is the result.
CHANGES is a minimalistic counting duel for 20 nifty fingers. It starts with the skeleton of a short repeated phrase (in 14/8) which gradually fills out, and then moves through two enormously tricky sections in which the two pianists have overlapping bars of different lengths (14 and 15 quavers). The duet finally builds to a dramatic climax.
TOCCATA is a tour de force of driving energy, based on some wild jazz-infused harmony and a few simple cells of melodic material which are explored and developed over a 9-minute period: technically demanding, mentally strenuous, the music's energy is regulated until the final release in the last section, where all the thematic fragments converge, and uninterrupted momentum is achieved. Two passages call for the use of the middle "sostenuto" pedal, which sustains only selected notes and leaves all others dry.
The seven "intensely pleasant" AIRS & FANTASIAS for solo piano were written between 1992 and 2007. The airs are essentially melody-dominated, and the fantasias are pieces in free form with a minimalistic use of repeated and rotating patterns. The pieces are intended to be performed individually or in numbered pairs, or as a complete collection. The subtitles are largely programmatic or self-explanatory, other than Air 3 (On an anagram) which uses a melodic motif based on the letters of a name. The performance of Fantasia 2 on this disc uses optional piano preparations (a small plastic ruler secured loosely in place over middle C to the E above, another ruler wedged between 2 of the 3 F strings, and a bent metal ruler from the next C up over a further octave). A&Fs 6-7 inhabit a different harmonic world to the other pieces, using a collection of chord relationships called "Twisted Harmonies".
ipm08a
Also recorded on 21/08/08 was a piece for 30 nifty fingers: ARE YOU GOING? by John Pitts. It is a fast, frenetic, complex, polyphonic romp based on the folk-melody Scarborough Fair, pulled around in various time-warps. Daniella Acker joined Steven Kings and John Pitts at the Steinway, and an mp3 of ipm08a is available initially as a digital download only.
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