HAYDN REEDER SOLOS DUOS TRIOS
Move Records MCD 666
A retrospective for Haydn Reeder in some ways, this CD contains two trios – one in two parts scored for your classic piano trio; the other a single movement combining flutes, viola and harp – a pair of duos for flute and violin, then violin and cello, followed by a welter of solos, pretty much all for piano with a solitary exception for cello. One of the five keyboard solos comprises a set of six rapid studies, but the disc’s sixteen tracks are generally short: all the piano pieces come in at less than five minutes each, two of the studies not getting to sixty seconds. It’s not the slimmest collection I’ve come across on CD but at a little over 56 minutes, you’d be expecting fair quality.
Some of the performers are well-known, like cellist Rosanne Hunt, violinist Susan Pierotti, flautist Johanna Selleck, and pianist Danae Killian. Some have been local presences for several years, like violin Philip Nixon from Orchestra Victoria and violist Barbara Hornung whom I last heard three years ago on Johanna Selleck’s Becoming CD, also from Move Records. The Six Studies are entrusted to Elton Sun, winner of last year’s Young Lev Vlassenko Competition in Brisbane but information about him is hard to track down.; according to Reeder’s CD leaflet, he was 12 when recording these pieces.
As retrospectives go, this is a fairly wide-ranging one covering 25 years’ activity. The oldest of Reeder’s works we hear is the Tolling Bell Song piano solo of 1998; then skip forward eight years for the Two Pieces for Piano Trio. Sun’s readings of the studies come from 2014, while the Lines in a Landscape trio dates from 2016 and is the longest track here at 7’20”. Waxing and Waning, the violin/flute duet, was written in 2019 while everything else comes from 2021 (Rondo, piano solo), 2022 (Wheels Piece, another piano solo), or 2023 (Surrounding the Cello solo, and The Spinning and Weaving of Destiny for solo piano). Still, the first works by the composer I can trace come from 1970, so we’re hearing mature chamber music – well, middle-to-late period material.
Matters open with the two piano trio pieces. The first, Growth and Transformation, has it all in the title. It begins with piano notes which the strings take over; you’ve got to go somewhere from here. And Reeder does with increasingly more complex aphorisms, punctuated by lacunae, until we reach an instrumental interplay of pizzicato and staccato line-crossing. My only problem is that I’m not quick enough to realize what is being transformed, although the growth is apparent. This small sample of musical biology brings us Philip Nixon’s violin, Rosanne Hunt’s cello and Danae Killian’s piano, giving full voice to Reeder’s angular, atonal counterpoint.
The same artists work through Flowering of the Resonances, which opens with a series of thick chords from Killian in a sort of Donaueschingen vallee des cloches. The string instruments enter with a series of vehement brief attack-motifs and Reeder builds his piece around textures rather than any overt development I could find. Again, much of the progress is by short bursts of colour with plenty of room for tremolando and sforzando bolts from a clear sky. The results offer a series of instrumental colours, all three eventually weaving around each other softly near the end.
Selleck opens Lines in a Landscape on alto flute and ends the work on a concert instrument. The main interest here is her partnership with Hornung’s viola as their instrumental parts urge each other forward, in the early stages playing at least twice in unison. Mestrovic’s harp isn’t secondary in interest, her role coming into solitary prominence at specific points, but you couldn’t call her contribution linear. Reeder speaks of the songlines of our First Nations people and there is probably a case to be made for such an image in this music if only I could remember my Chatwin. As things stand, this trio is of a piece with its two predecessors in its calm abstraction, although the latter score is somehow more discursive, even if its setting is the horizonless Outback.
Naturally, the textural interplay is more easy to read in the Waxing and Waning duo, here performed by Selleck and Pierotti. The composer sets up his material very clearly and you can follow his intervallic and chordal workings without befuddlement, mainly because he varies the players’ attack and output with an eye for dynamic contrast, as well as living up to his title’s promise in outlining increases and decreases of activity through a transparent environment so that you are aware of every flutter and trill, no matter how faint. It’s yet another instance of Reeder’s ability to construct a scenario with simple means but maintaining your attention by not wearing out his welcome: being discreet in the best possible way.
Just as easy to comprehend is the following Wheels within Wheels for violin and cello. Pierotti and Hunt circle around each other but the movement only presents as regular in a sustained passage at the centre of the piece where the lines are simultaneous, if not congruent in their notation or direction. For most of the time, the wheels intersect but break off, the patterns momentarily circular but more suggestive of plot-lines rather than anything mechanical. It’s suggestive of a consciousness you have of parts of a complex becoming visible, then being shut off, or replaced by something similar but somehow askew. The effect is slightly unsettling but also refreshing in its open-endedness.
What follows these ensemble pieces is a chain of six solos, mainly for piano. Killian opens the sequence with the CD’s earliest piece, Tolling Bell Song, which is something of a single-minded construct comprising sustained initial sounds with arpeggio-like companion-notes radiating off from the initial stroke. Reeder offers rhythmic differentiation by alternating 2/4 bars with irregular semiquaver ‘fillers’ in 10/16 measures, for example, although even these have their initial bell-type strikes. Yet again, you’re reminded of Ravel, if in a vocabulary that is fifty years further along the historical track.
Sun’s readings of the studies are quietly competent. None of the six is particularly demonstrative or confrontational, all being interrupted, to a greater or lesser extent, by fermate or pauses in the action. As with the duos, Reeder presents his material at the outset and moves gradually (sometimes imperceptibly) into a sort of development, which could be a simple process of adding notes to a melody strand, as in No. 1, or swerving to an opposing piece of materiel, e.g. No. 4. These bagatelles are distinct in character and, to his credit, Reeder speaks in his own voice throughout, not really bringing to mind any significant precedents. And he has found a sympathetic interpreter in this young pianist who outlines each study with composed authority.
Killian opens Wheels Piece with another of the composer’s single-line patterns of five notes that rises, then falls back on itself before another line joins and we enter a now-familiar field of two-line counterpoint with caesurae. The rhythmic movement becomes more insistent and we return to the environs of the Tolling Bell Song with single resonant notes sustained while secondary arpeggio patterns radiate out from them. Then we return to the rising pattern from the opening which is now both assertive and shadowy before the rotation stops in a finishing upward flourish – the wheels have come off?
With The Weaving and Spinning of Destiny, Killian takes us immediately into Meine Ruh’ ist hin territory with a repeated simultaneous arpeggio-type pattern in both hands which moves into some by-now-familiar Reeder vocabulary with sudden stops and repetitions-with-accretions, the complex leading to abrupt bumps, both fortissimo and pianissimo, spiced by some repeated note ostinati. Some bass chords are splayed out until they are reduced to their single top note which is repeated, fading into an inaudible space. This may be the composer’s outline of a personal destiny, or it could be applied to us all but I find philosophy’s big subjects impossible to get a handle on; I’d be lost in Also sprach Zarathustra if it weren’t for Strauss’s signposts and the only dissertation/dialogue of some elevation that means much to me is Bernstein’s party-piece Serenade.
Rosanne Hunt gives a spirited performance of the solo Surrounding the Cello which contrasts a downward-moving initial motif with a set of aggressive double-stop intervals that can move in either direction. Reeder sets some technical hurdles here including (I think) sul tasto work and a moment or two or sul ponticello, your odd scrape and harmonic (I assume intentional). Nothing too outrageous, though, and all carefully compartmentalized thanks to the composer’s insertion of aural station-stops. It strikes me that it’s not so much a question of surrounding the cello but more seeing what it can do – a sort of a propos the cello.
Finally, Killian returns with Rondo, which I found the most difficult of the pieces to imbibe. It begins with shades – as the composer informs us – of Berg (the Piano Sonata opening?) and Schoenberg (Op. 11?), but moves out into more diffuse areas which pile up on top of each other. About a third of the way in, the tonality seems more ‘white-note’ than anything else in a stentorian declamation before we hear bass chords-plus-melody under high-tessitura decorative chord-sparks. The bass/middle register texture remains present for some time before a sudden burst of double-handed furioso which itself shifts into pointillistic staccato in both hands that brings the piece to an enigmatic, Scarbo-like open end.
You could call Reeder a middle voice in the development of Australian music, I feel, because he is not of the melody-rules-and-the-more-diatonic-the-better sept, nor is he part of the look-at-me-and-my-daring tribe. His language is calm, controlled and belongs to those logical, clear-headed and emotionally controlled ranks that work at composition with an awareness of responsibility to communicate with an informed band of listeners. I’m welcoming this CD as disseminating the work of a gifted contemporary writer who speaks to us with remarkable clarity.
O'Connell the Music 