Month: May 2024

CHAMBER WORKS

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 651

Here is another in the series of three CDs put out by Move, all dedicated to the works of Australian composer Lachlan Brown. These chamber scores are a bit of a mixed bag as far as format is concerned. You have four piano solos – three performed by Len Vorster, one by the composer. Brown’s String Quartet No. 1 is preceded by a brief piece for the same format (different performers) and a similar short work for guitar quartet. Two duets appear, one for harp and cello, the other for violin and piano. As well, two other solo tracks are included – one for organ, one for harp.

First of the piano solos is Vorster’s reading of Little Emily in the Garden which has a series of stepwise descending 7th chords as its main motif and stands as a sanitised piece of post-Impressionist composition, not exploring new ground but happy in its quiet sprightliness. Pushing the painting nomenclature even more closely is Monet’s Garden which is very close to a Debussy prelude/esquisse with carefully pointed arpeggios along harp lines and suggestions of foliage and water droplets to animate the original paintings – those that have a definite scene rather than the water-only mammoths I think saw decades ago in the Jeu de Paume (or perhaps it was l’Orangerie).

Third in the piano solos is A New Day, played by the composer. This is a restrained ramble tending to wander around a falling Major 2nd motif, generally confined to the middle and lower reaches of the instrument. What you hear sounds quite conventional, not virtuosic but a gentle lyric with limited ambition in a regular diatonic framework. Finally, Vorster returns for the most substantial of these products: A Passing Cloud – near 6 minutes of placid slow-waltzing that gets an idea, toys with it for a fair while, then moves to something else. It’s all rather like a Satie composition without the quirkiness of melody.

Beginning the album are harp Megan Reeve and cello Zoe Knighton with Early Spring. You might expect something bucolic, possibly suggestive of those gentle miniatures written by British composers to celebrate their own soporific countryside. Which is what you get, beginning with a gently arpeggiated supporting line from Reeve and a winding, mild melodic cello melody that could go on for miles. Knighton generates a finely shaped senior voice while Reeve enjoys two short breaks/cadenzas and has the final delicately flourished word.

George Vi and the composer present the Romance for violin and piano with earnest emotional commitment although the string line is liable to clumsy production; not in its tuning so much but in the conviction of its bowing. Mind you, the line moves into the instrument’s highest reaches pretty soon after the opening and rarely moves into the territory of the lowest, or even the D, string. Here is another, if more focused, meander for the melody line while the keyboard confines itself pretty much to background chords – like the harp in Early Spring, but more so. The final impression is of a genteel charm without much harmonic levity.

On the Promenade, the first and briefest of the quartets, employs the talents of Vi as first violin, Marianne Rothschild on second, Karen Columbine‘s viola and cello Michelle John. A neat little study in 3rds for the violins while the viola provides a rather aimless secondary melody line and the cello gives a pizzicato bass, this is – again – restrained and Anglophile in its language, leaving no lasting impression. Pavane is played by the Melbourne Guitar Quartet: Dan McKay, Jeremy Tottenham, Ben Dix, and Michael McManus. A gentle, stepping motion from all participants sets a suitably grave, processional framework, and the opening melody has what can only be called an antique charm. Not much happens as the dance works through its patterns and repetitions with some chromatic slips occurring in two spots and passages with quiet triplets emerge from the consistent 4/4 rhythm. I can’t see that any players were over-stretched by this placid sequence.

Brown’s first essay in the formal string quartet four-movement lay-out is here played by violins Kathryn Taylor and Nick Waters, viola Helen Ireland, and cello Knighton. Here is a full-blooded composition, still written in a language that was extant a century ago but the first movement, for instance, has an unexpected intensity and spatial balance that shows a solidly informed mind engaged with his work. You can hear traces of Delius in the linear spaciousness of individual lines, but then Brown has cited the English writer as an influence. Mind you, the score starts off with some chord clusters that aggregate promisingly, but the whole breadth of these pages sticks to an orthodox tonality.

After the initial ‘Moderately’, the second movement is headed ‘With gravity and intensity’ and reminds you of the ardent chorale-like steps in the late Beethovens. Brown is keen on resolving his chord progressions quickly so that nothing hints at dissonance, apart from a slight subordinate semiquaver rustling right at the end – as though the devil is not quite muffled in this peaceful, hymn-suggestive atmosphere. For all that, the lower voices enjoy little prominence and the real action comes from the top violin.

For his next stage, ‘With movement, like a changeable wind’, the composer has invested a good deal of his effort; in fact, this segment alone is equivalent in time to the other three combined, being close to 12 minutes long. To my ears, it appears to fall into four chapters, the last echoing the first, with a concord-establishing coda. Along the way, we encounter passages in rich thirds for the upper lines, later lowered; another of Brown’s floating melodies that seems to operate around the most nebulous of axes; some thick contrapuntal pages that could have been attributable to an entrant in the Cobbett Prize; and whole sentences that promise stringency but eventually come down on the side of righteous resolution.

It’s an intriguing set of pages, more so than much else on the CD, probably because of its breadth and emotional concentration; not to mention the clear commitment and intonational clarity of its interpreters, viola and cello being long-time collaborators in the Flinders Quartet. And finally, we arrive at the fourth movement, ‘With easy movement, like a pleasant dance’, which is rich in concordant 3rds and 6ths for the violins and smooth sustained-note duets for the lower voices. It is pleasant and free from stress with not much argument and a fairly intact repeat in this ternary-shaped movement (not uncommon across this writer’s output).

Finally, you have the two non-piano solos: Snowcaps from James Leitch playing an unspecified organ, and Gentle Rain which lasts no time at all on Reeve’s harp. The first of these is the second-longest track here and another surprise for its harmonic writing which is packed with 2nds and 7ths, along with parallel chords of some complexity that suggest Messiaen but without the hysteria – not too many traces of alleluias sereins – but you encounter a hard-minded embrace of the instrument’s potential for dissonance similar to passages you can find in Jolivet.

This organ construct takes up a wide, sonorous canvas and Leitch exploits his instrument’s registrational potential with high efficiency, so that he makes a fine case for the piece’s melodic construction and coherence. On a smaller scale, Reeve makes easy work of the harp solo which maintains a falling series of 4ths as an upper ostinato throughout; it’s occasionally mirrored in the lower strings but the impact of this carefully crafted bagatelle has an unmistakable reference to its title, each scintillation droppeth effectively.

On this CD, I found more originality than on Brown’s The Night Sky Glory collection of vocal works. Some of the tracks leave little impression, yet you can see indications that the composer’s vision is not as easily defined as you’d think. He may have confided to us his empathy with Delius, Mahler and Debussy – and you can find traces of others in his output – but works like his string quartet, Gentle Rain and Snowcaps demonstrate a clarity and individuality that rouse your interest and generate hopes for further essays with similar adventurousness.

THE NIGHT SKY GLORY

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 650

The good people at Move have just published three CDs devoted to the work of Australian composer Lachlan Brown who – as far as the internet is concerned – remains an enigma. That is to say, I can’t find any information about him apart from what is on the Move website – and that’s very meagre. So you’d have to expect something out of the box from a writer who manages to get the country’s prime Australian composition promoter to publish a set of recordings – put out simultaneously, what’s more – that features a performing group involving some high-profile musicians.

This first offering features pianist Len Vorster, soprano Jenna Roubos, soprano/altos Holly Haines and Alison Rae-Jones and Elspeth Bawden, treble Jimmy Hilton, tenors Timothy Reynolds and Alastair Cooper-Golec and Lyndon Green, the composer himself doubling as tenor and bass, harp Megan Reeve, violins George Vi and Marianne Rothschild, viola Karen Columbine, cello Michelle John, and organ Lachlan Redd. As you can see, some of these participants have been (and continue to be) significant members of the country’s (mainly Melbourne’s) musical community.

But what of the music they reproduce? One of the few ‘facts’ we can learn about Brown is that he has been influenced by Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, Delius and Faure: a worthy clutch of late Romantic and Impressionist writers – in fact, a few of them sit on the cusp between those schools/groups/ delineations. But I become instantly wary when such names are presented, chiefly because I suspect that what we are going to hear is derivative – not so much influences as imitations. Further, is any composer in current operation harking back this far? All pay homage to Bach, but is anyone writing continuously in his style? Or that of Beethoven? Or Wagner? Still, you could pursue this topic into odd corners where composers are happy to boast an affinity with Schoenberg or Stravinsky (but never Hindemith), while the fad for Cage, Stockhausen or Boulez is well and truly over. Now, the trend is towards Radiohead, Philip Glass or Lady Gaga.

Back to Brown and his first track. a Rilke setting: Fruhling ist wiedergekommen which is the 21st of the Sonnets to Orpheus, here carried out by Roubos and Vorster. Well, it’s sort of that particular sonnet with the first part revisited at the end for the sake of balance, I suppose, and a few lines and a stanza, at least omitted. The musical language is a cross between 19th century operatic cadenza and post-Schumann lied, both A parts of this ternary composition opening with a sort of vocalise. This is amiable, salonesque music which manages to sound open-hearted and optimistic, like the poem.

Vorster and tenor Cooper-Golec then present a Victor Hugo setting: Hier soir, which is fully Romantic but lacking in subtlety. It’s as if Baudelaire had never been born. As for the setting, it treads a conservative line in chromatic sliding, except for some questionable moments at the end of the first stanza. Cooper-Golec’s tiumbre is a touch over-nasal for a piece that might have been better suited to a baritone; as it is, the song sounds like a kind of plaint rather than an assertion of devotion. The whole reminds me of Duparc but without much attraction in its melodic curve.

Brown then takes on a well-known set of verses in Heine’s Auf Flugeln des Gesanges, forever associated with Mendelssohn who set the poem in his Op. 34 Six Songs. This new version employs two tenors – Reynolds and Green – with the string quartet mentioned above, the lower strings pizzicato while Vi weaves a third line around the intertwining vocal chain of 3rds and 6ths. It’s very mellifluous and just as richly conservative as Mendelssohn’s work in its vocal demands and its harmonic vocabulary.

Next come a pair of actual vocalises. The first involves Roubos and harpist Reeve and is an amiable enough exercise with a fetching vocal line above instrumental arpeggios, mainly (always?) rising. Brown stays fixed in a completely predictable metre with a few gestures towards late French Romantic modernity. To their credit, both artists handle this slender piece with sympathy. The second uses the boy treble Hilton with Redd providing supporting chords on an unattributed organ while the singer follows a melodic path of no particular character, alternating a step-wise melodic motion and a widely-spaced arpeggio three-note pattern. Again, there’s nothing here that speaks to any of Brown’s influencers, except possibly some suggestions of Faure of the Requiem.

Rilke enjoys another outing through Schon horch, also from the Orphean sonnets – No. 25 in the cycle – and Cooper-Golec and Vorster return for this number. Here we might be stepping into the 20th century with some efficient Delian slides and a setting of some drama, particularly for the singer who is tested across a wide tessitura. If it suggests anything, it’s one of Berg’s early songs, chiefly for the solidity of its piano material. But I can’t find much of a link between the text and the music; my fault, of course, that I never embraced the German poet’s taxing imagery.

We now arrive at the CD’s title-work, which is another vocalise for what I assume are multi-track voices. Only two are cited. Haines and Brown. but both are credited with double vocal types: soprano/alto, and tenor/bass. What we hear is a series of four-part (or are there more?) chords, revolving around a mobile axis in yet another very circumscribed harmonic ramble. Again, you’re reminded of Delius in a vague sense, but I don’t know the English master’s choral scores well enough to play pinpoint the similarity.

The composer is still indulging in vocalise for the next three tracks: Meditations for choir III, IV and V. The pairs of singers (each contributing at least two vocal strands) have no words, just an open vowel sound as they slowly meander around a rather ordinary sequence of chords. Rae-Jones and Brown are the personnel for the first two of this clutch, the No IV having more interest for the momentary individuality of line at its centre. The last, involving Bawden and Brown, builds slowly to a fine climax, and impressed for its multi-choral effects, but by this point my attention was wandering in an aural landscape where the elements were proving interchangeable..

More harmonic originality appears in a brace of Forest Voices from multi-phonicised Haines and Brown, still textless. The writing is loaded with droning open 5ths and some biting 2nds and 7ths that speak a language that is more contemporary than anything we’ve come across this far. Further, these pieces have a definite atmosphere: the forest they depict is no sweetly-wooded series of groves but something more menacing and aggressive.

To end, we have Night Falls in the Forest which continues the atmospheric suggestions of the preceding two tracks but much less stridently. Bawden’s soprano and alto have the melodic running although Brown’s tenor and bass are not stuck in the subsidiary positions they held in the Voices tracks. But seven tracks in a row of harmonic shifts and vocalisations seems to me to be too much of a moderately good thing.

When facing modern composition, I’m still sympathetic to Stockhausen’s saying that he asks ‘two things of a composer: invention, and that he astonish me.’ That’s still a tall order which might be more useful if the combination was actually a pair of alternatives. Brown’s music is not impressive for its inventiveness but moves along well-trodden paths, compositional tropes that are very common territory. Much of it is pleasant and deft in its organization but it ignores most of what has happened in Western music over the last 120 years. As for the question of astonishment, it does not arise. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to experiencing further facets of the composer’s creativity in the other two Move CDs that were issued alongside this one.