MOVE 50
Move Records MD 3450
In 2018, Move Records celebrated 50 years in operation, bringing Australian music to the forefront of its enterprises across the decades. I’m sure it hasn’t been plain sailing throughout every stretch of the journey and it can’t be a promising panorama if you survey the current recording scene where so much is available through so many different forms of media. You have to ask yourself: what next? Well, a touch of spartan resignation may be appropriate. The more intellectually adventurous can take consolation from the immortal words of the current President of the United States when reviewing the potential death rate from COVID-19: It is what it is.
As an appropriate observance of its half-century, the company produced this CD that comprises 24 tracks of works by Australian composers, ranging in length from the 59 seconds of Andrea Keller‘s Deep Blue to Paul Moulatlet‘s Dark Star which persists for 7′ 53″. Most of the performers are well-known names; ditto, the composers.. Further, quite a number of the works have been specifically composed to honour the Move label and its milestone, with a few directed in praise of Martin Wright who was one of the original founders and has been a producer and engineer on countless Move products.
As you could anticipate, the works vary in mode (although there are a good many piano solos) as well as in length, in ambition, and in accomplishment. In fact, the whole miscellany is something like a festive garland or a variegated bouquet; sadly, not full of fresh blooms as some of the pieces date from before 2018. George Dreyfus has recycled his Prelude – Outbreak of Love, written in 1981 for a projected TV series of the Martin Boyd novel. Another metamorphosed piece comes from Ron Nagorcka whose proffered duet was originally conceived in 1988. Roger Heagney offers a piano solo written on the birth of his first grandson who is now (one supposes) 15 years old. Keller’s scrap dates from 2012; Christopher Young’s Pathways, Ros Bandt‘s Mystic Morn and Moulatlet’s piece all come from 2016 and don’t seem to have been written for this particular occasion. Julian Yu has contributed a birthday piece but it also appears on a disc of his own music which was released almost simultaneously (on the Move label) with this one.
So, they’re of various lengths and varying provenances. As for personnel, 15 of the CD’s tracks are piano solos, nearly all of them featuring Michael Kieran Harvey who has expended his extraordinary talents on so many Australian compositions. Other piano solos come from Tony Gould, playing his own music on the Yamaha C7 grand that he selected for Move Records’ use 25 years ago; and from Gabriella Smart performing Ros Bandt’s Mystic Morn. The only other solo piece is the afore-mentioned Dark Star which Moulatlet wrote for Peter Sheridan‘s bass flute.
Linda Kouvaras and Deviani Segal collaborate in the former’s Northcote Days piano duet. Harvey and saxophonist Benjamin Price present Don Kay‘s no-nonsense Milestone Tribute while Harvey emerges yet again to work through A Memory on the Move by Ron Nagorcka with the composer providing a didjeridu profile. Two songs form part of the offerings: Christopher Willcock‘s Wisdom outlined by tenor Lyndon Green and pianist Andrea Katz, and Gordon Kerry‘s Sonnet After John Keats with soprano Merlyn Quaife and pianist Stefan Cassomenos the interpreters.
A quartet and quintet offer further variety. The first, Pathways by Christopher Young, has the composer on saxophone (soprano, I think), Tom Fryer on guitar, Ted Vining on drums and Nick Haywood bringing up the bass. The recycled Yu boasts clarinet Robert Schubert and a string quartet comprising violins Lorraine Hook and Deborah Goodall, viola Gabby Halloran and cellist Virginia Kable. And one computer construct – Warren Burt’s Postlude – is all the composer’s own work and shows us that the spirit of Latrobe University’s late Music School is still alive and kicking somewhere in the land almost 21 years after the death of the faculty itself.
Tony Gould’s Heritage sounds like a ramble, the splendidly accomplished academic/pianist walking around the Yamaha in a quiet minute-long meditation on the Move company’s mobility of repertoire; all reminiscent of Newport on a summer’s day. Roger Heagney’s Noah is compelling in Harvey’s hands, a ternary framework that suggests one of the simpler Czerny studies or a two-part invention; it remains minor in mode until about the ¾ point and it concludes with a tierce de Picardie, the whole given a compelling and driving airing by the interpreter.
The disc’s solitary quartet by Christopher Young comes from a 2016 recording where it was called Etherial Pathways; I haven’t heard the piece in its original form but it has apparently been edited specifically for this collation. Its dominant voice is the composer’s sax which weaves a meandering melodic line supported by guitar and a drum part that sounds oddly disconnected from the pitched instruments’ proceedings. Nick Heywood’s bass comes late to the party and the short work fades to black rather clumsily, but the entity has a quiet improvisatory charm.
Japanese composer Kanako Okamoto‘s name is a new one to me, but not for Harvey who recorded some of her piano output for Move 13 years ago, including some works written for the interpreter. Bitter and Sweet is a carefully balanced piece that seems, like Gould’s opener, to be a mildly fitful meander with very few acidic spots, owing a fair bit to free-form jazz and impressionism, sympathetically accounted for by Harvey with alternating force and delicacy. L-ove Records by Vaughan McAlley (another long-time Move recording engineer) confines itself to 50 notes in constructing a three-part augmentation canon; the language is post-Webern in one sense with separate, disjunct notes all over the keyboard but with a diatonic bias. It would look clear on paper, I’d suggest, but deciphering the composer’s devices needs keener perceptions than mine.
Rachmaninov seems to be the influence of choice for George Dreyfus when putting together his Prelude for the unrealised Outbreak of Love TV series. There is plenty of virtuosic-sounding work for Harvey who does as much as any pianist can with this late Romantic confection, packed with Lisztian tropes and a masculine melancholy.. The piece has little relevance to this disc’s rationale but serves as a reminder of the composer’s facility with any style that he feels like adopting. Yet another revenant comes with Ron Nagorcka’s A Memory on the Move which began as a short prelude twenty years ago, was transmogrified for another presentation in 2002, and is here resuscitated one more time. Harvey accounts for the angular syncopation-rich piano part that occupies central position with only two extended passages from the composer’s didjeridu before both instruments carry out a dwindling into the ether. As a combination, this sound amalgamation works rather well, surprisingly tonal in that the wind’s fundamental note is in tune with the basic harmonic structure of the keyboard part.
Andrea Keller, like Heagney, has brought her family into the picture with her Deep Blue which takes inspiration from her son Luc’s breathing pattern and the fact that the baby was born with a caul; I’ve never seen his rare membrane but suppose it is coloured blue – sadly, not even Harvey’s skill can turn Keller into a Skryabin. Speaking of the pianist, his own Keen is specifically dedicated to Martin Wright and consists of a three-note plucked string ostinato with inbuilt glissandi while isolated notes that form the B-A-C-H pattern are keyed, both sound methods given with increasing fervour until a concluding 12-note arpeggio/chord stretching across the keyboard’s range concludes a noticeably chaste construction which somewhat perversely takes ‘keen’ in its mourning sense rather than as extolling the Move company’s acuity.
If ever a work lived up to its title, it’s Brenton Broadstock‘s An Endless Ripple, here given in its piano solo form by Harvey. The right hand plays a scale passage that swells by an extra note after each pause with quiet left-hand chords providing more meaty substance. It avoids most pictorial suggestions through its sudden pauses before the ripple resumes – not quite impressionist, but after the school. Andrew Bullen’s poem, Wisdom, provided Christopher Willcock with his song text. It concerns one of those superfluous angels from the Nativity in Bethlehem telling Wise Man Caspar that Herod’s murder of the Holy Innocents is inescapable. Lyndon Green has a reedy sound character but a secure articulation that makes each word clear and Katz gives an equally clear-cut account of the keyboard accompaniment that matches the vocal line in restrained declamation.
Ros Bandt’s work Mystic Morn doesn’t require much from pianist Gabriella Smart except a patience with pauses. The work is a series of flurries that shimmer and dissolve – which is one way to parallel Hans Heysen’s light-filled landscape from which the work takes its name. Sonnet after John Keats is Gordon Kerry’s setting of On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again. Quaife and Cassomenos make an excellent pairing for this powerful song where nothing is wasted and the ecstasy of the poet’s ambition is splendidly realised in the final couplet.
The irresistible temptation when faced with something like Michael Bertram‘s Iconoclast 2 is to wonder what happened to the first one. In fact, it concluded a 1984 suite, Five Pieces for Piano, which makes it one of the composer’s earlier essays. This fragment for Move’s semi-centenary holds two elements: a Caribbean dance rhythm – habanera, samba, Guadeloupe two-step for all I know – and a restrained toying with scales that suggests both Satie and then Prokofiev with its eventual turn into dissonance. Here again, Harvey is not over-challenged but persuasively realizes the piece’s bonhomie.
With From a Star Afar, Eve Duncan projects herself a few thousand years back and imagines looking down at earth. The result is a rather stern vision where the composer has Harvey negotiate a formally uncomplicated, short exploration of some brief motifs with an accent on the piano’s bass register through which means the composer observes the planet’s passing years; it’s a human history on a minute scale, then. You are challenged by the composer to find a hidden theme at the end of Don Kay’s Milestone Tribute for Harvey and Benjamin Price‘s saxophone. Good luck because it’s well-concealed. The work has a sort of theme-and-variations flavour, although the theme is a partially filled in descending common chord that enjoys increasingly disjointed handling until an out-of-nowhere major chord halts the piece’s not-for-turning forward motion.
Kate Tempany‘s name is one of several on this CD that I don’t know – Paul Moulatlet, Simon Barber and Kanako Okamoto are the others. Her offering is a piano solo performed by Harvey: Expansion – Heart Reflects the Sky. It aims to present an image of grasslands moved by the wind, which effect is accomplished with a minimum of apparent effort, a dreamy susurrus played only on the white notes and husbanding those almost to pentatonic status. A dread of encroaching totalitarian regimes (and leaders?) underpins Moulatlet’s Dark Star for solo bass flute. Peter Sheridan is put through a range of sound production techniques in a substantial score that occasionally verges on the frolicsome, possibly because the interpreter is allowed certain moments of freedom. While the final moments have mournful suggestions, the score is far from a dirge or an elegy. I suppose you can find inside its length moments of the ‘unease’ that Moulatlet feels (or felt in this 2016 construct), but the final impression is of striving and action.
Physics rears its not-that-ugly-a head in Andrian Pertout‘s Saral Aavart Gati, which exists in piano trio and piano solo forms; what we have here is the latter, performed by Harvey. It’s an unnerving work with an emphasis on the instrument’s extremes and a tendency to operate at both levels simultaneously. Pertout’s explanation of the score’s genesis and realization relies on a familiarity with technical information but, broken down into one elementary thought bubble, appears to be connected to the every-action-has-an-equal-and-opposite-reaction Newtonian truism. Heady stuff, and the only one of these 24 tracks that brings you face-to-face with your own intellectual inadequacies. Warren Burt’s Postlude computer work has a more jargon-filled explanation; it has 50 tones (for each of Move’s 50 years) per octave throughout its length and the physical actualisation of its composition seems to have been complex. But the results summon up ghosts, like the Cage of those endless Sonatas and Interludes, and some early electronic experimental pieces where a sound and its decay were reversed. You can hear further shadows – a gamelan, a glockenspiel, robotic percussion of several kinds – but what surprises is the regular metre that persists for lengthy slabs.
Simon Barber proposes an intriguing premise for his Interpolationen, a piano solo outlined by Harvey: each bar is a variation on the preceding bar. Here’s a music of fits and starts, event piled on event in its later stages where the pianist operates at both ends of the keyboard, like Pertout’s work mentioned above. But it has an underlying nervous sensibility that eventually breaks into violence; still, if you’re hoping to see how it works, you’d need a score to follow in order to trace the variant process. Linda Kouvaras sees more in Northcote, the Melbourne suburb, than I ever did although my experiences came in pre-gentrification times when my daughter, her husband and their first-born were eking out their lives in Raleigh Street. Northcote Days, a piano duet, presents an aggressive affirmation in its chains of unfilled chords and hectic clambering. In some senses, the work serves as a travelogue that takes you through various parts of the district at different times of day (or so I assume from the nocturne-like segment that takes its place in the kaleidoscope on show). . It’s a fine workout for both executants who carry off the piece with panache and well-rehearsed synchronicity.
The deceitful Ephyran king is the apparent inspiration for Brendan Colbert‘s Sisyphus, a piano solo performed by Harvey with buoyant authority. You can – if you want – find an aural image of the rock-pushing that reaches a certain point before Zeus forces it back down to the bottom of the hill. But this image is dispelled by a central section which takes place at the top end of the piano – an atonal gambol in the Elysian Fields, possibly – only to be negated by the piece’s determined plunge to the bass in the final bars. This work has been specifically dedicated to Martin Wright who has certainly performed the ongoing – and sometimes thankless – task of promoting serious Australian music in its multifarious forms, daily pushing against indifference and our own home-grown brand of philistinism.
And then there was Yu. The popular composer melded Happy Birthday and a Chinese melody, Stepping Up, for the last piece on this CD which Yu and his wife played at Martin Wright’s 70th birthday party. The birthday tune, tossed around by Robert Schubert and his string quartet colleagues, is variegated and fragmented cleverly enough, summoning up the spirit of Dreyfus in his nose-thumbing days, but the traces of the Chinese melody, Bubugao, are well-hidden in Yu’s jaunty quick-step, After all the cosmic imagery and high-flown postulations, Stepping Up Birthday brings this disc to an earth-bound end with something approaching glee: an essential ingredient for any birthday observance.
O'Connell the Music 