Month: January 2024

THE SPARROW AND THE MEAD HALL

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Records MD 3471

The latest in Move Records’ collection of Michael Kieran Harvey’s products – as a performer and composer, often enough both – covers some of the ground covered in the COVID year of 2021. First come Four Ballades for piano; then Sonata, No. 7, called The Sparrow and the Mead Hall, which takes its impetus from an Epictetus dictum; another personal piece, Lawyers are Lovely Misunderstood People and We Should All Be Much Kinder to Them, which honours Hobart advocate/barrister/solicitor Craig Mackie; and an anti-opera, Death Cap Mushrooms, to a text by Harvey’s long-time collaborator Arjun von Caemmerer which takes its brief flight from the 2020 George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.

It’s not accurate to see the ballades as an extended entity rather than discrete pieces, but the composer points to a pair of links between them all. One is the use of Bach’s B flat-A-C-B natural musical signature; the other is the prevalence of a free-wheeling 12-tone series that enjoys exposure at the octave-rich start to Ballad No. 1, Stark. This row is announced in octaves and the first thing that struck me was the significance of the intervals between the initial notes, just as it obsesses number-crunchers in a transparent and willfully eccentric score like Berg’s Violin Concerto. Yet, before you have gone far in this movement, the composer-pianist’s flights have once again carried you off into his realm of ornate imagination where you can (after a few listenings) trace the intervallic sequence – or, more properly, fragments of it. That’s before you take on Harvey’s ambience which embraces so much.

He himself points to Liszt, Szymanowski, Bartok and Herbie Hancock as jumping-off points for these ballades, the investigation of any of which could take months. For example, I don’t know the Liszt ballades (all two of them) but am pretty au fait with some of the Legends with which the former have been linked by performers and editors. And, while boasting a fair acquaintance with Bartok’s piano output, the Elegies (again, both of them) have not crossed my path, at the keyboard or in the hands of anybody else. Ditto Szymanowski’s Masques (three in number) and Hancock’s 1973 album. All of which is more of a salute to Harvey’s catholicity of interest than anything else.

In spite of the two common attributes that permeate all four of these pieces, you will do your head in trying to work out the compositional processes at play.  For instance, the following Implacable ballade opens with a solid 5/4 bass sequence of chords which goes through a slight alteration in tessitura before a slight change in tempo, while all around the firm opening motivic construction disintegrates into patterns of angular quavers and clotting triplets that move into a whirlwind landscape occasionally broken up by semi-impressionist oases.

You can’t pass off Chopin’s four ballades as a sequence, like elements in a sonata. Each is emotionally discrete and - as far as I’m aware - there are no common elements shared between them; unlike Harvey’s compositions which might come under a communal umbrella. But this embrace won’t really wash because the differences between them all are vast and the shared elements are often near-impossible to find, let alone hear. When it comes to the third in the set, Quasi fantasia, the pages pass as a kind of phantasmagoria, images that rustle or thunder with even the delineation of the B-A-C-H motif in transposition hard to pick out, although the nature of the writing tells you that it must be there. 

Matters are a bit clearer in the final Fast manic bop which lives up to its name with a good deal of insistent double octaves and syncopations to invest a typically urgent energy into this finale which reminds us of Harvey’s earlier works (I’m talking of at least 20 years ago) where the impetus proved irresistible. Even in this ballade, the hectic nature of the musical progress is anchored in recognizable elements that pile up in dynamic terms before a gripping conclusion. Here again, the fecundity of this composer’s imagination is on display in a technical display that shows no breaks, no cracks in development.

With his new sonata, Harvey is in an abstract world of something between self-consciousness and good old-fashioned existentialism. He takes the Greek philosopher’s reported dictum – Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo – and uses each clause as a heading for his four movements. As you can imagine, the results are peculiar to the composer and I doubt that listeners will find easy engagement with the work’s intellectual underpinnings. For all that, the music is startlingly clear in its statement-chains as life’s progress follows the simple progress of a bird from darkness to darkness; there is no beginning and no end, is the message, and we are given the short life-flight only.

The assertion of past existence is both opulent and muted in Harvey’s first movement where high decorated lines contrast with emphatic bass plosives. The tentative string-plucked opening light-pricks give place to dramatic rhetoric, which could represent our individual striving to enter the world, the effort bringing on a formidable series of pre-creative efforts that come to nothing in the end, the initial texture coming back as a commentary on Epictetus’ sober evaluation of non-being: you have a sort of gestation, prodigal in its output, but finally coming round full circle, as the Buddha tells us. For all that, the pages are laced with vitality rather than navel-gazing and the main impression is of the pianist operating at two distinct levels of action; what they represent is left up to you to solve (or leave alone).

Moving to actually being in the world, Harvey labels his second movement ansioso, or eager.If you like, this is the composer in full spate, the notes pouring out in rapid virtuosic hammer-blows right across the keyboard.  It’s as if the executant wants to operate his life’s potential to full capacity, restlessly urging us to the next experience or sensation in page after page of exertion. Then, suddenly, it stops and we have returned to the opening movement’s initial stasis: single notes plucked out of the ether, as though the self is returning to its pre-conscious state. As changes of pace go, this one is hard to beat: the tumult and the shouting die and you’re left with an all-too-familiar plane of non-activity.

When it reaches the abnegation of existence, the music becomes appropriately disembodied with a sequence of tamped trills, sustained notes and a few abrupt Boulez-type stark four-member gruppetti before Harvey returns to the opening of Non fui – note-for-note, the first 9 bars. It’s a rounding out of sorts: we start out in the abstract, and so we end. This third movement is as long as its predecessor but here the style of communication is on resonances, a fermata dangling over the ending of each bar in the main body of the relevant two pages.

To end, we are faced with another movement that divides into two parts. Harvey uses the term distaccato to direct the requisite attack mode and the implied difference is essential: the right hand plays a set of three-note chords, the top note always E flat, the bottom note initially F and then moving to D flat while the inner part proposes a sort of melody. Still, the chords are repeated in a 5/4 pattern of three crotchets and a minim, occasionally leavened by a 2/4 bar of two crotchets. These aren’t brusque or classic staccato, but they are detached. Eventually, the left hand produces the by-now-familiar bass thunders and this briefest of the four movements crosses halfway through its length into the detached plucked strings mode that has run across this sonata as a dialectic connector. To my mind, this conclusion serves that creditable purpose of illustrating the indifference claimed by Epictetus (and probably by Harvey) to the passing of life: filled with light under the mead hall’s roof, but empty at both ends.

Coming to the lawyer-lauding piece, the listener is moved into a regular Harvey compositional world where the furious speed is well-matched with brusque syncopations that show what can be done with rock-jazz materials when the composer has a mind. It’s a headlong rush, something along the lines of the preceding sonata’s second movement but more aggressively jaunty, even menacing in its several frenetic moments. Harvey wrote this as a payment for lawyer Garvie’s professional services, along the lines of the post-impressionists and Cubist masters settling their cafe bills with art works now more valuable than the establishments that claimed them. It’s a genial concept but one that I can’t see being pursued in these nasty times of economic depression. All the same, it has to be said that Harvey’s piece shows the composer at his most coruscatingly brilliant.

I’ve not much to report about the anti-opera, written for the Australian National Academy of Music’s ANAM Set (2021). Its initial direction reads Muscular arrogant swaggering and the propulsive piano pulse that starts it off is eventually joined by a drum kit, vocalist Benjamin Cannings growling out von Cammaerer’s punk-poet text in one fell swoop, while Theo Pike alternates between piano and toy piano with Alex Bull generating the percussion contribution. The afore-mentioned Cannings also provides a guitar line in the work’s later stages. 

The work is a satirical slap in the face of Canberra’s politicians (with a side-kick at Trump) and the group mindlessness of American law and order when seen at its worst. For Harvey, this serves as a protest that takes on the mindless head-banger violence reinforcing prejudice and stupidity in this country (see Artarmon) and throughout the territories run by our great ally. While full of justifiable rage, the track makes an unnerving finale to what has been, up to this point, remarkable music-making of high quality.

Death-Cap Mushrooms is dedicated in its score to Hannah Pike; in the CD leaflet, the dedication is to Theo Pike. According to the Australian Music Centre’s site, Hannah and Bull played the premiere performance at ANAM on October 26, 2021; Theo is credited in the leaflet.  It’s all rather confusing, but not a vital distraction to any auditor who enjoys the slightly outrageous.

SHICHISEKI

Michael Kieran Harvey, Miwako Abe, Alister Barker, Martin Niedermair

Move Records MD 3470

As I understand it, this latest release in Move’s Michal Kieran Harvey Collection draws on recordings that have been made over the last 15 years or so, now brought out of the company’s archives and here released for the first time. Harvey is performing works by four contemporary writers – Kanako Okamoto from Japan, as well as Australians Andrian Pertout, Mark Pollard and Gabriella Vici – as well as three songs used in Barrie Kosky’s adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart: Bach’s Agnus Dei from the B minor Mass, Purcell’s Music for a while that comes from his stage music for Oedipus, and Wolf’s Verborgenheit which is one of the Morike Lieder.

Harvey contributes to each track, collaborating with violinist Miwako Abe in Okamoto’s Shichiseki of 2008 from which we hear the Romance first movement, and Pollard’s Beating the rusty nail of 2006; later working alongside cellist Alister Barker for Pertout’s 2007 Rishis and saints: for violoncello and prepared pianoforte, as well as accompanying cabaret tenor Martin Niedermair in the three Kosky-invested songs. He is soloist in Pertout’s Cinq petites melodies: for pianoforte of 2008 and Vici’s Piano Sonata written in 2020.

Most of this music saw Harvey participate in its first performance. Pollard’s work was first heard at the Perth International Arts Festival, inaugurated by Abe (its commissioner) and Harvey; ditto, Okamoto’s title track.  Pertout’s little melodies were premiered by Harvey in the Tasmania Conservatorium of Music and he recorded Vici’s sonata on the eve of the COVID pandemic. Barker and Harvey were co-presenters of Pertout’s Rishis and saints on its debut performance at the Resonance Music Series sponsored by the Bayside City Council. And, of course, Niedermair and Harvey worked together on Kosky’s theatre piece during its Malthouse presentation in Melbourne.

The disc begins with Okamoto’s movement: the first of two exemplifying peace, the second illustrative of anger. This is in line with the underpinning legend pf Vega and Altair being allowed to meet once a year by an Emperor angry at their clandestine marriage. So Okamoto is presenting us with (I think) a representation of the stars’ falling in love and being happy in their connubial bliss until the interference of secular authority who wanted to put the female forced (Vega) to work once again. This once-a-year meeting resulted in the (earthly) Shichiseki celebration in Japan held annually on July 7th.

The Romance has Harvey setting the scene high in the piano before Abe enters with a long arc of self-pivoting melody. A sequence of piano chords prefaces some impassioned repeated double-stops before a real duet opens out with the keyboard rumbling continuously under a series of rising violin ejaculations that pause each time on a striking 2nd or 7th that suggests strife and astral discord rather than spherical harmony. A scale-rich piano cadenza leads to a high-pitched petering out, like a satellite signal, followed by another violin solo.

What follows is a reversal of an earlier procedure, Abe supplying a high descending single-note support while Harvey coruscates with his inimitable flair and incisiveness before the violin flies alone to a high-altitude melismatic conclusion. The piece has great appeal for its wide-ranging emotional breadth and a searching-out of each instrument’s sonorous potential, as well as a fair allocation of responsibilities, even if Abe enjoys the more striking performance ambience.

Pertout’s piano bagatelles were created as a homage to Elliott Carter on his 100th birthday.  They use Mayan mythology alongside dance rhythms from Latin and South American cultures, all of which will mean more to the Chilean-born composer than to those of us inextricably bound up with an Anglo-centric transplanted musical culture.  Pertout gives his pieces French titles connecting colours with compass directions, e.g. Noir de l’ouest, Aqua du centre. This, plus the references to specific rhythms – Festejo, Toque de Sao Bento Grande – has the virtue of specificity couched in an alien language. Still, it means something to the writer and the rest of us must make the best of it.

For his first offering, Noir de l’ouest, Pertout uses two rhythms: Lando and Festejo, both distinct in content if not in tempo and, in the best miniature fashion, over before much has registered.  Jaune du sud employs Zamba and Chacarera, and these are very disparate despite sharing the same 6/8 time-signature; as well, the Zamba gets much more space than its companion with a high tessitura before a more solid and racy concluding section. Possibly I picked the turn from Plena to Bomba in the third Aqua du centre when the distribution of labour changed from right hand decoration over a mid-level melodic mass to the reverse; an alteration in texture more than a split.

Something similar came across in Rouge de l’est where the Toque de Sao Bento Grande led by way of a cadenza-like series of rising gruppetti into the Samba Partido Alto which glittered at the piano’s top reaches while the Toque had made much of the instrument’s low-to-middle register. Finally, the Blanc du nord makes a simple rhythmic shift from a 6/8 Bembe to a Guaguanco in 2/2 (albeit a fast and complicated one). Throughout, you hear traces of dance patterns but never anything as blatant as a heavily accented series of consecutive bars. But these short pieces are expertly written and articulated with a ringing clarity.

Pollard takes his impetus from blues and funk, with a rhythmic infusion from Taiko drumming. Well, the first is present in some chords from Abe’s violin, the funk in this case is irregular rock and its manifold repetitions of melodic, harmonic and dynamic patterns, and the Japanese element escapes me because my experiences with this form have been formed by occasional visits to Melbourne from Sydney’s Ian Cleworth and his Taikoz ensemble and those nights featured your normal range of time-signatures, not the jumpy quaver alterations of Pollard’s opening and closing pages – 7/8, 5/8, 3/8. 4/8 – surrounding a soft, placid middle. The composer suggests that he is beating out your usual systems of performance into new (possibly flattened) shapes. It’s vehement enough and the performers seem to be in sync throughout; whether you’re experiencing alternative modes of communication depends on your musical knowledge, I’d guess. Admire the players, sure, but the music-making doesn’t strike me as living up to its aspirations.

Pertout’s second work seems redundant in its title; as far as I recollect, a rishi is a saint. Whatever the definitional problems, Pertout has moved into another cultural world, albeit one closer to this country than the Americas. His one-movement composition was tailored for the talents of Barker and Harvey, who both get off to a frenetic, pattering start in a specific Indian tala before graduating to others. Both instruments begin with a repeated A that slowly moves out semi-tonally, a system that is further complicated by the prepared nature of the keyboard and a percussive rattling that I imagine is not generated inside the instrument but achieved with a stick. 

About a quarter in, and the percussively insistent rhythmic pulse changes to a slower and more meditative ambience, the cello providing the supporting rhythmic one-note pulse while the piano explores its topmost notes.  If you had the patience/energy, you could follow the composer’s employment of three variants to the triputa tala, but I find it hard to separate one grouping’s start from another. Further change brings us to a rapid, descending scale pattern, delivered almost at the pace of the opening, leading to an amalgam of the descending scale-mode and the percussive tapping of the work’s first section. I believe we end with the repeated A that kicked off the score, this time more ‘friendly’ as the players frisk around with interlocking scale patterns.

I appreciate Pertout’s energetic disposition of his material, as well as the vivacity with which Barker and Harvey address their work. Very few Australian composers have attempted to incorporate the intricacies of Carnatic rhythms into their own creativity, many of those extra-national writers from the 1960s on looking to easier fields like the Japanese or Indonesian musical languages – not to the mention Australian Aboriginal sounds which have been confined to the textural rather than the rhythmic. Kudos to Pertout for the incursion, then, and a final observation that his rishis must have effervescent minds and bodies if this piece is intended to depict their physical-philosophic status.

Niedermair takes easy options in Purcell’s well-known aria, mainly with breathing where short phrases feature some unexpected breaks. He and Harvy take their time over the bar 13-14 setting of ‘eas’d’ and bars 35-36 where ‘all, all’ seems to be heading for a full-stop. As well, the last 8-note vocal line is taken over by the piano, possibly for dramatic reasons. The singer’s voice is amiable and breathy, not urging itself to take on too many of the song’s high notes, hence worthy to stand alongside Sting’s readings of Dowland.

When it comes to the Wolf song, we enter new ground. Niedermair starts alone, without the two-bar piano prelude, and with no reference to the original vocal line’s sliding semitones but with a freedom of rhythm that would have surprised the composer.  Harvey joins in at bar 7 and interpolates some extra bars through the central strophes, presumably to give the singer time to collect himself. At the final reprise, Lass. o Welt, the piano moves into its upper reaches and contributes a skeletal support until the final bar which is left to the singer alone. Here again, the approach is cabaret; lieder aficionados get no comfort here.

Oddest of all is the Bach Mass segment where Niedermair moves into falsetto voice, giving a fairly decent representation of the alto solo that opens the Agnus Dei. He abandons the vocal line at one stage to recite some of Poe’s narrative; later, he takes advantage of the mid-movement caesura to give us Poe unaccompanied, then resumes the aria, Harvey filling in the vocal and instrumental lines as he sees fit, and speeding up the pace to disrupt the reverential nature of the original – which would be in the nature of the drama being presented, you’d expect. Niedermair comes across with much more vocal security than anticipated in his artificial production mode – on pitch and generally faithful to Bach’s melodic contours.

Last comes Vici’s three movement sonata, the disc’s longest entity. In her first movement – Fantasie. Adagio misterioso – the greater part is taken up with a powerful flurry in a harmonic vocabulary that suggests Scriabin, even if the material sounds more diffuse than that of the Russian. Harvey is a magniloquent apologist for these powerful, virtuosic pages, staying within the composer’s later Romantic dynamic range and presenting a vibrant interpretation, subduing his attack for the concluding slow segment which reverts to a language that is essentially tonal, if with dissonant accretions. Vici works on a large canvas here, the executant stretched although Harvey sounds as if he’s coping with impressive command.

A short Allegretto con grazia follows, taking the shape of a minuet-and-trio movement with a wry humour underpinning its progress.  These pages are reminiscent of many another reversion to Classical forms, in this case illuminated by a sophisticated harmonic array – loaded with contradictions to its melodic simplicity but made quietly appealing thanks to Harvey’s balanced treatment. 

For this pianist, Vici’s finale – Toccata. Allegro vivace – is an ideal vehicle, reminiscent in some ways of Harvey’s own compositions. The movement is episodic, time taken out for placid oases in between pages of driving energy and insistence. Parts of the more virtuosic pages are engrossing, as at the harnessed freneticism of the opening where the composer seems to be balancing three levels at once. Further, the piece takes on characteristics of every toccata you’ve heard – from Buxtehude’s alternations to Khachaturian’s inexorable drive with a dollop of Bartok’s Allegro barbaro in the mix.  As with the sonata’s other segments, a prime tonality obtains, supporting a wealth of action but Vici’s is an individual voice, if one whose career and characteristics remain elusive.