CONTRA
Move Records MCD 644
IMPULSES
Move Records MCD 645
No sooner does Move put out one guitar duo recording than another comes hot on its heels. The Contra ensemble comprises Hamish Strathdee and Emma-Shay Gallenti-Guilfoyle, musicians who met as students 12 years ago. In this brief collaboration, they perform four works: Segovia’s slight Divertimento, an arrangement by Angelo Gilardino (the recently-deceased Italian guitarist/musicologist) of Puccini’s bagatelle for strings Crisantemi of 1890, three pieces by Australian Phillip Houghton (the first from 1976, the latter two from 1990), and Alexandre Tansman’s Variations on a Theme of Scriabin, originally a solo work written in 1972 for Segovia and here arranged for two by German guitarist Tilman Hoppstock.
Simultaneously, Strathdee has produced an EP of his own, on which he performs some works that inspired and ‘accompanied’ him across his student and professional years. These meaningful Impulses include two movements from Bach’s Keyboard Partita No. 1: the Saraband and Gigue as arranged by Hoppstock. As well, the disc contains Leo Brouwer’s 1996 Hika, In memoriam Toru Takemitsu, and a flamboyant piece of virtuosity in Napoleon Coste’s Le Depart, fantaisie dramatique Op 31 of 1856 which, like Beethoven’s sonata, also features a return.
Both CDs are rather short: Contra lasts 26’24”, Impulses 19’0″. Quality in small doses, you’d expect. And that’s the way the duo disc begins. Not that Segovia’s small-scale Divertimento makes claims to depth but these executants give it a handsome outing with a freshness of delivery – dynamic variation, linear attack (or its absence), rubato at logical points – that demonstrates a flawless confidence in each other and an affection for this F Major bagatelle. You can best read the collegiality in bars 15 and 16 when the imitations and counterpoint stop for a moment and the pair play a series of chords together – a generous balance obtaining here as it does in the piece’s four final bars which serve as a crisp chaser to the exercise.
As far as an arrangement goes, Gilardino’s work on Puccini’s Chrysanthemums shows a staid mind at work, Guitar 1 generally getting the top violin lines, Guitar 2 taking on viola and cello, although that can vary e.g. Guitar 1 taking up the cello’s bass note (F sharp in the original) across bars 57 to 62, and taking the viola part at bar 92 and beyond. As you’d expect, the piece’s fabric is necessarily changed, these performers not having the luxury of drawing out melody lines or being able to muffle accompanying semiquavers which are a feature of the middle segment starting at bar 32. Still, their treatment is consistent in its elegiac nature and takes its time negotiating the structural cracks.
The Mantis and the Moon is the first of Houghton’s Three Duets and it falls into two unequal parts, even if there are hints of a combination at the end. The opening is a march with triplet underpinning: quite brash, aggressive, with clear suggestions of the insect’s stridulations (to my over-active sensibility). This Prokofiev-style abruptness suddenly changes to a new landscape of an angular melody lying over a muted regular quaver support which stands in for a placid moonscape, with some suggestive antenna-waving in the final measures.
Lament is an elegy for one of Houghton’s friends, the composer/pianist Andrew Uren who died in 1989. The piece works as a threnody above a slow, constant bass; its atmosphere is funereal, verging on dirge-like but leavened by a strong melodic line that reaches a fierce highpoint before sinking back into the sombre inevitability of the piece’s opening. Alchemy is all movement and flashes of colour, operating over a sort of continuous undercurrent of triplets. Its 6/8 motion transforms into hemiola-like 2 crotchets in the bar at the end – a striking passage with vehement chords from both players. Houghton imagined his performers sparking off each other, the music mutating throughout – and so it does, although you can’t avoid the suggestions of the old scientific search for gold formed from disparate elements.
Finally, we’re treated to Tansman’s set of six variations on Scriabin’s 12-bar Prelude Op. 16 No. 4, originally in the recherche key of E flat minor. The Polish composer begins by moving the key to B minor (which I think Hoppstock has followed) and dividing the original between the players. I can’t see much difference from the original in the first two variations beyond a doubling of the melodic line. As well as an added richness of chording (all in keeping with Tansman) that operates throughout the longer Variation 3, the work gains from a sense of ease where the original’s responsibilities are shared.
I can only see one point in Variation 4 where the arranger adds anything beyond some doublings and transpositions down an octave, and that’s an unexpected semi-harmonic appearing at the start of bar 6; the rest moves placidly along its lento path. Again, in the Variation 5 quasi Mazurka, you can enjoy the part-writing more readily because of the division of responsibility, particularly in a page that holds a fair share of accidentals. To end, Tansman goes fugato with some close writing that threatens to progress into something full-blown – but then the contrapunctus stops in its tracks and he rounds off the piece by re-stating Scriabin’s prelude with a subtler harmonic content and the addition of a cadence-reinforcing last bar.
This is excellent work from both Gallenti-Guilfoyle and Strathdee: a sensitively structured partnership, obvious from the shared level of responsiveness, not to mention the technical balance and simultaneity on display, Not just in this Tansman, either; I doubt if Houghton’s duets have been better served by the various artists who have performed them since Tim Kain and John Williams issued their version in 1995.
MOVING to the Strathdee solo disc, his Bach sarabande is rather languorous in approach, with a few delays in getting off this dance’s pivotal second beat. Speaking of which, the second-beat chord in bar 8 has lost some of its components in this arrangement and the upward transposition of the original’s left-hand demi-semiquavers in each half’s last bar strikes me as unsatisfying. And I, for one, would have welcomed repeats! The reading of the gigue showed the player’s clarity of output and the piece avoided becoming a study – just. Strathdee repeated the first half but not the (admittedly longer) second part. I don’t know whether it was intentional but I missed the two ornaments in bars 5 and 7. In his transcription of the entire partita, Hoppstock moved the original tonality from B flat Major to D Major; a much more congenial arrangement for this instrument’s aficionados, of course.
Has Leo Brouwer incorporated any original Takemitsu strands into his elegy/eulogy? It’s hard to tell. He begins with a set of epigraphs, detached on the page and articulated as separate units by Strathdee. But, as we move into the piece, each fragment enjoys a generous variety of treatments: arches expanding or contracting by a short interpolation or its absence; flourishes of accidental chains that end in a suspended harmonic; two bursts of brief velocissimo; a central vivace providing for an abrupt volte face in personality before the initial calm resumes. Strathdee gives a vigorous account of this last but takes his time over the meditative stretches; importantly, he makes sense of this abschied‘s emotional permutations, setting up the initial framework with obvious empathy.
One authority has linked Coste’s Le depart to the Crimean War and the piece certainly has an emphatic martial quality. It’s not hard to read what you like into the piece’s progress so that, by the time you get to the concluding Le retour: marche triomphale, it’s clear that the military have been involved. Added to which, the first edition has a date for this concluding section – December 29, 1855 – by which point the war was almost over and it’s conceivable that Coste was indulging in a bit of chauvinistic self-congratulation; if the French troops (those that survived) weren’t already home, they were on their way.
Strathdee follows the piece’s narrative with an enthusiastic embrace of its emotional switches. A fulsome Andante Largo could accompany a soldier’s farewell coloured by patriotic aspirations; it’s certainly a personal, possibly sentimental statement, and framed in a positive E Major. The interpreter gives the soprano line a wealth of expressiveness, enriched by some brief inter-note glissandi/slides. Then the fireworks begin with some martial trumpet calls at an Allegro assai of 28 bars that suggests action, if rather well-organized. A brief three-quaver chord progression leads to an Andantino in B Major and an Agitato of 10 bars (the wounded followed by a final flurry before the peace is signed?), and we’re into the somewhat overlong E minor march, which continues the piece’s inspiration of serving as a brilliant display-piece for its creator – and later guitarists (a lot of them) – to display dexterity and responsiveness across this fine flower of mid-19th century Romanticism.
Le depart works well as a finale to Strathdee’s mini-recital which moves across a vast period of history with success. One of the finer factors of both CDs is that neither hits the all-too-familiar Spanish/Latin American repertoire that has been flogged mercilessly by guitarists for decades. You are spared the transcriptions of Granados, Albeniz or Falla; there’s not even a Piazzolla mundanity bringing up the rear. In fact, the only Spanish piece offered is an actual guitar duo written by the dominant figure in guitar across the last century.
It’s also worth noting that the more arresting sequences on both discs are semi-contemporary: Brouwer’s salute to his dead friend, and Houghton’s triptych. Still, the duo has (I hope) much more up their communal sleeve and you’d have to be confident that their next recording will be a more sustained experience for us all.
O'Connell the Music 