BY THE WINDING RIVER
Move Records MCD 652
I think this is the shortest of the three CDs of Lachlan Brown’s music issued recently in one fell swoop by Move Records; By the Winding River comes in at about 44 minutes. The 13 settings are of Chinese poets: six by Tu (Du) Fu, three by Ou Yang Hsiu (Xiu), two by Su Tung P’O (Su Shi) and one each from Li Ch’ing Chao (Qingzhao) and Mai (Mei) Yao Ch’en. As for participant musicians, these have appeared on one or both of the preceding Brown CDs: tenor Lyndon Green, soprano Jenna Roubos, pianist Len Vorster, and violinist George Vi.
Kenneth Rexroth’s translations are used, with no Mahler-like interpolations from the composer, even if the promotional material for this CD mentions Mahler and Das Lied von der Erde – the go-to score for a fusion of Chinese poetry and Western music. Indeed, Brown’s first song, Chang’s Hermitage by Tu Fu, the second-longest track on the album, speaks a kind of pentatonic language in both piano and vocal lines for long stretches, the piece a steadily pulsing commentary on self-isolation and its benefits as seen by an envying visitor. The song is dynamically restrained to match the quietly angular accompaniment and a vocal part full of repeated notes. It could be likened to Ravel’s La flute enchantee except for the absence of harmonic adventure.
Both this work and the following Green Jade Plum Trees in Spring (Ou Yang Hsiu) involve Green’s plangent tenor with Vorster accompanying, opening the second track with a one-hand (right, I suspect) outlining another pentatonic-suggestive melody that meanders pleasantly before the vocal entry, signalled by a more conventional underpinning. This song falls into two parts: the first a calm observation of the season’s fruitfulness; the second, a quieter evening scene where the human (tempting girls) appear and tint the landscape with warmer, more bass-heavy textures. This split personality of content is mildly mirrored in Brown’s harmonic vocabulary which enjoys the best of both worlds – suggestive Orientalism and French harmonic richness.
With the next song, Su Tung P’O’s Spring Festival, Green and Vorster come to a more straightforward compositional landscape where, for much of the time, three strands weave around each other, the keyboard being more mobile and steady in its regular quaver progress, the harmonic language firmly major key-centric. There’s a brusque shift of tonality in the last two lines, while the last itself – a kind of envoi – is unexpectedly passionate after an otherwise staid series of observations. The tenor’s output is framed by substantial prelude and postlude excursions.
Fisherman by Ou Yang Hsiu evokes a bleak scene, Green employing a small range while Vorster sets up a chain of drooping chords in a setting that attempts to depict a vague picture of a lone fisherman who can be faintly discerned in a landscape of high reeds, shrouding rain and secreting mist. This piece has a surprising effect: clear in every respect but emotionally veiled.
Apart from a short hymn-like passage near its conclusion, Farewell once more to my friend (Tu Fu) maintains the same pattern across its length of a left-hand rising arpeggio in pentatonic mode which works as a kind of binding cord for a lyric which is essentially nostalgic and regretful, the poet/singer happy for the meeting but almost in despair now that the good times have come to an end, probably never to be repeated. Brown doesn’t wallow in these depressing observations, although his low-pitched setting of the final line mirrors the poet’s pointed nihilism.
A change of pace now as soprano Roubos sings We Are Apart by Li Ch’ing Chao, the only female poet to grace the disc but her lines generate the composer’s longest response, albeit the concluding postlude is remarkably long. Here is an art song with no nationalistic colourations which might have been produced by a Delius aficionado if not for the chains of thirds that occur in Vorster’s right hand. Here you notice a peculiarity of Brown’s vocal line – repeated notes as the syllables glide past. You hear flickers of movement at some lines’ endings but you also come across a single note used for an entire line of these touching verses. The piano enjoys an extended solo before the final quatrain which finishes off the poet’s juxtaposition of nature and longing with luminous grief – and that, I suppose, is the rationale behind the lengthy concluding piano solo which offers its own harmonic ambiguity.
After this, naturally, we hear the CD’s shortest track in a playful Mai Yao Ch’en frippery, An excuse for not returning the visit of a friend. The reason for this social embarrassment is that the poet’s children are clinging to him – apparently not in fear but from that perverse affection which insists that a parent keep his focus where it belongs. Brown gives Vorster a lightly tripping accompaniment while Roubos vaults through her apology which at the end sounds ever so slightly manic.
Another Tu Fu meditation follows, this time Snow Storm which is unrelievedly negative, a series of observations of the natural world’s harshness and the futility of human contact. Brown’s piano accompaniment presents as a chain of ascending and sometimes descending arpeggio-type figures while Green’s tenor sets out a pretty dreary monologue with an odd attempt at word-painting on the word ‘coiling’. Its unfinished conclusion is echoed in the following The Spring will never reach me (Ou Yang Hsiu again) where Vorster’s piano ends the song with a kind of half-close. Here, Vi’s violin sounds as though it is being played at some distance from the central participants, oscillating between offering a linear support to piano,. then singer, then back again, etc. The harmonic vocabulary is bare but liable to resolve into concordances across this lyric of regretful nostalgia and longing for home in a bleak, unfriendly environment.
That delight in postludes becomes even more clear in Brown’s setting of another Tu Fu poem, By the winding river in which the instrumental post-lied commentary takes up almost half the track. Yet again, you are conscious of the composer’s preference for delivering whole lines on a single note; indeed, there are few requirements of Green to leap about his compass – just a spaced-out common chord or the shift of a 2nd but nothing to disturb the temperate self-questioning of the text which contrasts the universal quest for happiness with the writer’s own sacrifices for the sake of a career. As for the vocabulary, you can detect traces of Delius and Faure but the harmonic structures are simple when set alongside the chromatic slurries of these two formidable masters.
Nothing new arises with the setting of Su Tung P’O’s A walk in the Country. The piano provides a quaver support that stays in the same major key for much of the song while Green follows a (by now) predictable path with plenty of repeated notes and small excursions like the last two lines that involve two notes. The song moves pretty rapidly through the set lines and sets no problems for either executant. Much the same can be noted about the penultimate track, The House by the River (Tu Fu), in which the main interest comes from the initial rising tetrachord figure in Vorster’s part, across which Green sets out another quasi-recitative with few moments of linear curvature; see the last two lines (again) which phase out in a near-monotone before a postlude with one (possibly two) moments of harmonic interest, the merest frissons of change from the predictable.
Finally, Tu Fu’s South Wind involves both singers. Green sings the 8-line text, then Roubos joins him for a repeat, omitting one line for reasons that I can’t quite fathom. Suddenly we are translated to an atmosphere that is packed with Mendelssohnian sweetness, including some melting linear vocal 6ths and a fluent barcarolle-like accompaniment to this rather saccharine Spring scene complete with blossoms and coupling birdlife. It’s an amiable enough song and comes to me straight from the 1840s, making an odd conclusion to this collection that has veered most of the time to modal and pentatonic frugality.
What does all this amount to, once the 13 songs are over? Brown lives up to his claim of writing music in Romantic and Impressionist styles, and his take on Chinese poetry fits in with his chosen vocabularies. But the music is not original, despite some attempts to summon up your Oriental taste-buds. He is content to follow his masters – Mahler, Debussy, Delius – but he isn’t offering much else beyond imitation and faint reflection. As with the two preceding CDs recently issued of Brown’s music, you’ll find nothing to offend and not much to excite – just pleasant music performed with sympathy by under-stretched interpreters.
O'Connell the Music 