Author: cliveoconnell

OVER UNDER

Luke Severn, Evan Fein

Move Records MCD 611

This disc comes out of a long-term, long-distance relationship between Australian cellist/conductor Severn and American pianist/composer Fein. A marriage of two aesthetics has apparently come about here and the musicians have a fairly well-established performance history (USA in 2019, Australia in 2022) from which comes one of the two works recorded here: Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor. Following the California/New York accounts of Fein’s first Cello Sonata, they’ve set down here the other constituent of their Melbourne/Bendigo/Frankston recitals: Fein’s second essay in the form.

And that’s all there is: 28′ 55″ for the Fein, 28′ 34″ for the Brahms; near-equivalent in temporal terms. But, while you can admire the American’s work for its coherence and bursts of brilliant writing, its thunder is stolen by the Brahms reading which is distinctive in its vision and delivery. Which is the chief problem with this pairing: much as you’d like to find high merit in the Fein, the other outclasses it, to the extent that you wonder why the composer didn’t think to give his work a less striking companion.

The modern work is in four movements: Serene, warm; Redemptive, resonant; Molto scherzando; Lively, playful. It begins with a simple rising two-note cell in the cello that expands on itself. Straight away we’re in a benign atmosphere of something approaching hymn music, broadening to a firm declamation couched in a harmony that Brahms would have found comfortable, if eccentric. Then the work seems to meander into an episode rich in piano triplets, shared with the cello, and a development that moves into new material, both instruments in a close interface.

Once again, the declamation arises and we’re in late Romantic territory – both firmly assertive and ruminative as the opening cell recurs and the exposition’s processes are revisited. This is a music of alternating moods which, near the end, seems to see the triumph of the serene. But not so: Fein ends with a presto flourish for both players; it’s almost as though he’s providing a contrast with the placid rhythmic tenor of his movement’s procedure up till now.

When it comes to redemptive music, I’m not sure what to expect; it could be anything from the Dies irae to L’Ascension, and a world or six of religious music in between. Here, we have a slow sequence of repeated chords in the keyboard under the cello outlining a well-woven melody that stretches for some length towards a climax, that breaks off and then resumes its path with cello and piano more synchronised in their thinking, although the keyboard’s initial repetitions seem to be the spur to action. We are led to a consoling stretch of diatonic affirmation that ends up resembling a Bloch cantillation.

A sequence of common chords leads back to the opening repeated chords under the meandering string line; the same crisis, with the keyboard sustaining its support for a final mellifluously brooding semi-cadence. In these pages, the emphasis for me fell more on the resonant, the performers reaching two points of impressive suspense, as well as a brace of powerful statements that emphasized the possibilities for broad statements. For all that, the harmonic language is, in the main, orthodox; we just have to accept this mode of contemporary composition that is content with titillating the past, not building on it.

The following scherzo strikes me as far from molto, possibly hampered by a rhythmic irregularity/juxtaposition that obtains from the opening but gives way to a smooth body of play across the movement’s centre before returning to round out this simple ternary structure. The instruments are busy with some clever canonic scale descents that inevitably bring Shostakovich to mind, if without that composer’s verve and ferocity. Still, I did like the cello’s final ‘bent’-note slight portamento.

Further reminiscences come bursting in at the finale’s opening, chiefly of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the animals with the piano’s high-register tinkling while the string line follows its restrained jollity before swinging into an amiable, crowd-pleasing melody. Much of what follows appear to be variants on these two elements with some late attempts at post-impressionist harmonic adventurousness. But Fein doesn’t stray too far from well-trodden paths; just when you think he’s heading in a dissonant direction with an unexpected modulation, he hauls us back to the plain-speaking path of diatonicism. Listen to the final minute or so which is an excellent example of leading towards calm acceptance before a semi-aggressive, if defiantly positive, resolution.

I need hardly record the players’ obvious intensity and painstaking care with Fein’s score. Is either of them taxed by this music-making? Not that much, although some parts of the last two movements have their pressure-points. Yet the sonata presents as rather lightweight, for all the grandiose passages in the opening movements. Certainly, Fein has produced a highly competent work yet it doesn’t hold much that could be termed striking or original. Even its passion is tautly leashed and its appurtenances fail to catch this listener’s interest.

What follows – the Brahms sonata elucidation – is quite remarkable. In the CD liner notes, Fein observes that ‘we dare to hope that some of our bolder musical decisions allow audiences to enjoy this beloved sonata in a new light’. Well, to those of us with a long-standing affection for the piece (many thanks, Daniel Horrigan, for those hours of tolerant rehearsal), this reading offers many insights. The duo takes the first movement’s ma non troppo direction seriously; this is a stately progress through the first subject, its only defect coming through an over-amplification of the cello line. But Severn and Fein have a fine eye for the work’s inner accelerations and dynamic contrasts which make this allegro an absorbing experience, with a good deal of the commonly accepted bravado muted into the composer’s inimitable introspection. Only an odd misfired cello A in bar 18 disturbs the exposition’s accuracy, which is flawless on the repeat.

The most obvious of those interpolated accelerandi comes at bar 50 in the vehement build-up to the B minor explosion of bars 57-8. What follows is a masterful depiction of the descent to gloom across bars 74 to 77. Later, in the development, a gradual increase in tension starting at about bar 102 is accomplished by a simple consensus of dynamic heft working towards the fortissimo F minor resolution of bar 126. Further re-acquaintance with the artists’ approach comes in the recapitulation which follows a similar pattern of subtle speed and dynamic increases and subtractions, highpoints the cello’s vital high in bar 222, determines a dark-shaded coda approach from bar 235 on, and culminates in a moving processional across the movement’s final 20 bars.

Severn and Fein hit on the ideal approach to Brahms’ Allegretto. It is given a minuet’s lilt in the outer sections, Fein picking and choosing which staccato directions he’ll observe (all of them in the opening bars, more selective in the left hand of the second half in this section [bars 16 to 27]). Adding to this excellent clarity of delivery, the central trio from Fein is clog-free with a welcome lack of glutinous pedaling, despite the direction to sustain from bar 79 in my old Breitkopf & Hartel edition. This helps give the movement a kind of unity, ensuring a continuity of output, even if the minuet’s return still piques because of the absence of its trio’s continuous two-semiquaver-plus-quaver pattern from the keyboard and a reversion to ye old-fashioned rustic courtliness.

To end, Brahms starts out a fugue, but it doesn’t sustain its formal characteristics. Fein states the subject with plenty of detached notes; not quite abrupt enough to come under a staccato heading and still maintaining a melodic contour. And the first climacteric at bars 24 to 25 is a true Brahmsian welter, if one where the instruments maintain audibility and their lines carry distinctly right through the interleaving of lines up to bar 53’s light relief and the rubato brought into play at bar 61 where dance wins out; the same gentle hesitation that the duo employed in the previous movement’s trio. I was struck by an odd tuning error from Severn on the B in bar 72, and a Fein slip in the C minor triad of bar 93. But almost immediately, the lack of brutal teeth-marks in the closely-argued mesh from bars 115 to 123 merits strong approval for its communication of polyphonic stress rather than instrumental effort.

If Severn and Fein come close to your traditional Brahms thickness round the waist, it’s in the final pages from bar 152 and through the coda Piu presto which is, compared to the rest of the interpretation, thunderous and virtuosic in the best sense of serving the score through craft. It brings this reading to a highly satisfying consummation. In the end, it realizes that declared intention of shedding ‘a new light’ on the score which here takes on an unexpected transparency in its instrumental interplay and a welcome immediacy due to an enlightened approach to dynamic levels and care in sound production.

BACH PIANO 2

Judith Lambden

Move Records MCD 653

For the first of her Bach CDs for Move, released in 2021, Lambden presented four of the toccatas, the Italian Concerto, and the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue: a deft combination of the present-but-unexplored alongside two familiar scores. Something of the same combination obtains in this latest offering which comprises five works. Those that have general currency are the French Overture BWV 831 and the Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother BWV 992. As for the arcana – well, I have barely encountered them – they begin with the Overture in F Major BWV 820, move to the Aria variata alla maniera italiana BWV 989, and wind up in the perplexing Fantasia and Fugue in A minor BWV 944.

Unlike a few recent publications on this label, Lambden’s CD runs a substantial length at 76 minutes (actually, adding up the individual tracks, I believe that it comes in closer to 79); nearly 33 of these are taken up with the first eight tracks: the French Overture, or Overture in the French style which is the longest suite in Bach’s keyboard catalogue. Immediately, you can see that this offering is a continuation of the pianist’s 2021 disc; there’s an authority at work but the performance is not a perfectly bland surface with everything in its allotted place. You can hear patches – no, seconds – of unevenness: glossed over notes in brief runs during the Ouverture‘s stately preamble (e.g., second time through, last three right-hand notes of bar 14), a slight slowing down as the voices accrete in the 6/8 fugal-gigue that follows.

And there are also interpolated passages of play that deliberately slow down the rhythmic inevitability beloved of contemporary performers who operate their Bach craft with metronomic regularity. You can hear plenty of examples in Lambden’s progress through this marvel, as at halfway through bar 85 when she simply changes gears, or the slight accelerations that push the envelope, like in bar 115 and beyond. The return of the stately opening impresses as more individual and imaginative with a more free approach to metrical regularity. I don’t want to complain too much but the executant refrains from repeating bars 20 to 163; yes, it’s exhausting for the pianist but there are so many linear delights to be savoured in these pages.

Still, this suit-yourself approach is everywhere in the following Courante which is packed with small pauses throughout, in both hands. The fluency is hard to cotton on to until the first half’s repeat where you learn to make adjustments for the piece’s occasionally fitful outline. During the Gavotte I‘s left-hand semiquaver groupings, you can detect some notes being articulated unevenly the first time round. on the return, nothing is out of place, each group sounding true and clear. Lambden treats the pair of Passepieds with a similar studied nonchalance which results in a certain amount of latitude with ornaments, as the start of bar 28 on each of its three appearances.

But there’s something to be said for this room-space. For sure, when the musician is taking time to insert acciaccature, mordents and appoggiature, you won’t be able to dance this suite with absolute certainty; but is Bach writing for potential footloose and fancy-free Leipzigers, or just using the form? The latter, of course., so Lambden is quite at liberty to pause where she sees a hiatus point, or – consoling the dodgy pianists among us – where the going gets a tad tough. I’ve got nothing but praise for the mobile Sarabande which is given without exaggerated gravity, notably in the thick (relatively) chords of bars 24 and 25.

The Bourrees enjoy direct treatment, especially the first where the opening detached note approach rouses us from a bucolic torpor. Still, there is the occasional missed (or misfired, probably) note and the slight ritardandi in Bourree II puzzle more than please. The Gigue that follows is handled with excellent calm; nothing is hammered in this chaste framework and the outlook is almost placid, even if a few (two?) notes go missing in the little bursts of semi-scalar fioriture/demi-semiquavers. Finally, the Echo swaggers past amiably, my only problem Lambden’s lengthening some of the bass quavers (bars 22 to 25, then bars 54 to 57) which brings to mind, in a small way, Busoni’s Bach transcription exaggerations.

This large-scale work is followed by a small relative in the BWV 820. Its short Ouverture is packed with ornaments in its opening 13 bars, a few of them wisely omitted here. Then the 3/8 burst into fugato energy comes across with quiet security that is rarely ruffled – although I’m coming round to thinking that those short breathing-spaces (scarcely that, in fact) are Lambden’s system of punctuating the work’s thrust, avoiding the Tic-toc-choc metallic assembly-line approach. In the Entree, this player introduces a great many more dotted quaver-semiquaver patterns than occur in my admittedly antique Breitkopf und Hartel score. Nevertheless, here the slow march holds the right Charpentier strut in its slight two-part sinews.

Not much to report about the Menuet-plus-Trio, Bourree or Gigue. As with the post-Ouverture dances in the BWV 831, Lambden observes every repeat faithfully, offering a piano repeat on the odd occasion but for the most part retaining those ornaments that she introduces first time through. Mind you, these three dance movements are brief and lacking in digital complications; Lambden’s slight rhythmic relaxations prove handy enough in adding some quirkiness to what are simple and internally repetitive structures.

Some desperates have been pointing to the Capriccio as one of the first examples of tone-poem narrative in Western music. Not really: it had plenty of choral and instrumental antecedents. But its brief pages hold some moving emotional content, especially in the Friends, Dangers, Lament and Farewell segments, Lambden making affecting work of the first, third and fourth of these scenes while somehow suggesting the Goldbergs‘ penultimate Quodlibet in the angular second. Especially honest is the melancholy character realized in the Lament mini-passacaglia, and the well-there-he-goes stolidity of the brief Abschied.

About the two concluding Postilion movements, I’m not so sure. There’s nothing urgent about the Aria which doesn’t propose a speedy journey but more of a leisurely jog as the octave jumps that are intended to imitate the driver’s instrument have no bite or energy. The Fugue would have gained from a more rapid tempo and a good deal more energy in the thicker meshes (bars 27 to 38, for example; even bars 45 to 47). Still, Lambden works through this last with careful craft, making as much as possible from one of the least satisfying final bars in the composer’s output.

Once again, the performer indulges in more hesitations and pauses while she works through the Aria variata’s unremarkable arches, laden on during the repeats with ornaments delineated in my edition. It sets up a ruminative atmosphere which is probably for the best with this undistinguished material. The trouble is that few of the following 10 variations have much to delight in them, but more an unusual number of disappointments, like Variation 2 with its going-nowhere triplets (bars 5 and 6); ditto Variation 3‘s bar 7; the aimless right-hand repetitions of shape and actual notes across Variation 5. In fact, it seems that inspiration flagged pretty consistently in the third bar of each variation’s second part. So much so, that it’s a relief to get back to the Aria‘s paraphrase in the final Variation 10.

It seems to me that Lambden is not really challenged by this work, its twists and turns rarely unpredictable – on a par with the preceding Capriccio. But her reading is composed and undemonstrative, the strands well balanced and distinctive, if some of the phrasing shapes sound a tad contrived and the short suspension of action for the sake of a grace note starts to grate in the repeats. Speaking of which, the second part of Variation 9 is not played again: a shock in continuity as every other part of this work is given a second run-through.

To end, we are offered the BWV 944, which opens with a fantasia that you improvise yourself on a series of 18-and-a-half chords, with the between-staves interpolation ‘Arpeggio’. Some publications spell it out with arpeggios travelling from one hand to the other; Lambden goes the same route but arpeggiates in contrary motion simultaneously. Nothing unusual in that, although it’s a rather ordinary way of negotiating the problem. Still, you can go a long way before you find somebody with an original take on these 10 bars, e.g. not just splaying out the chords or maintaining their written range.

The fugue opens bravely and confidently but the arrival of the third voice in bar 18 sees some initial fumbling and, by the time we get all bass-operative at bar 38, the pace has slowed, only to pick up a little further on. Also, the executant seems to slow down to accommodate a cadential trill too often for comfort. She finds the going tough from about bar 106 on to the bass pedal B that lasts for 4-and-two-third bars at the work’s centre; the polyphonic interplay here sounds laboured – which it is but it shouldn’t come across that way.

Near the end, the spirit of Liszt/Busoni takes over and there is a pronounced acceleration from about 19 bars before the conclusion, the dynamic level moves into a near fortissimo level, and the approach to the fugue’s concluding bars smacks of the grandiose. Mind you, the player can hardly be blamed for a touch of triumphalism after this active, long web of fabric. It makes for an unexpectedly assertive last word to this disc that is for the greater part characterized by restraint and a pliant, relaxed approach to rhythmic regularity. These offerings bring together an interesting range of works – from the highly demanding to the simple – and reinforce Lambden’s standing as a sincere and informed interpreter of Bach’s keyboard catalogue.

TANGO FANTASY

Ken Herrera

Move Records MCD 649

The composer/pianist presents four of his works on this disc: two short isolated pieces, and a pair of collections, finishing with the five-movement, 33-minute-long Tango Fantasy. Herrera studied piano at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, then moved into composition. He appears to be self-taught in this latter field and – unfortunately – it shows. You’re not getting many contemporary sounds here; Herrera is content to manipulate a harmonic vocabulary of rudimentary proportions and his professed devotion to the tango is not persuasive when it comes to putting that particular dance into his own language,

For instance, the opening Tango Waltz begins with some flourishes that might suggest a tango but, 30 seconds in, the piece has settled into a 3/4 rhythm. Following this straightforward move to waltz-time, Herrera doesn’t move out of it. Furthermore, the melodic content is rather wayward; sure, there are repetitions of his basic tune, punctuated by episodes that have little relation to anything but themselves. Apart from a well-pedalled scale eruption about two-thirds of the way through, there’s not much here to raise expectations of virtuosity; some flourishes are welcome but the 2018 piece is couched in a pre-Nino Rota/Fellini atmospheric without the original’s spartan melancholy.

Pairing up with this waltz is the album’s other brevity, Herrera’s Third Nocturne from 2012 which aims to suggest a Latin American night spot complete with its atmosphere-establishing piano in a blending of bossa nova and blues. Well, you get the first-mentioned’s rhythm, all right – it obtains throughout – but the blues consists of some predictable chords and not much besides. Our nocturne isn’t in the Field/Chopin line but more along the lines of something you might hear at a cocktail bar; sadly, not one where you’re tempted to tip the pianist. As with the waltz, the piece sounds aimless in its right hand which wanders at its own sweet will in a chain of 7th chords and tinklings.

Herrera’s first major construct is a Suite dating from 2013. The inspiration comes from Bach – a laudable aspiration, although the shape of the collection puts it closer to Grieg’s Holberg or even the Karelia of Sibelius although its four elements are given non-suggestive tempo titles: Allegro, Allegro, Andantino, Presto. The first is proposed as an introductory toccata but the only shadow of that form comes close to the end in a quasi-improvisatory passage that recalls some of the foibles of Sweelinck. For the most part, it proceeds like a fitful study with left-hand cross-overs for excitement, building to a loud highpoint rather early in proceedings but, like a Buxtehude toccata,. owning several sections.

At the end of this opening, you’re also left with several questions about the movement’s harmonic shape which tends to follow a predictable path, if sometimes an ungainly one because it veers off from its own patterns more than little self-consciously. We’re in much more solid Bach territory with the second Allegro which begins like one of the Inventions but lacks the rigour to follow a simple contrapuntal matrix, the left-hand settling into a bass role where you expected a mirroring of the initial statement. Progress is sometimes quirky, but not in an adventurous way – for instance, a sequential pattern is held up for a moment when a repetition is interpolated so that you’re left feeling unbalanced when the sequence is resumed. Later, when the left hand gets hold of the initial line, the treble provides a functional harmonic accompaniment rather than a complement. At about the 1’30” point, we enter a new world of repeated chords for a moment, returning almost instantly to the suggested/unrealized linear interplay of the opening.

Herrera sees this as a lively dance movement; to me, it’s more in the nature of a march in that I can’t see any potential choreography beyond a military stamp. When it comes to the obligatory slow movement, we are offered an Andantino that opens with a simple old-fashioned melody, followed by a series of episodes that numb with their predictability in terms of shape and modulations. Added to which, the composer reaches some points where inspiration is at a premium and we experience a good deal of repetition and note-spinning, e.g. at about the 3′ 50″ mark and at 5′ 00″. An abruptly determined conclusion sits at odds with the placid opening; it’s as though the writer has turned semi-aggressive and avoided a tempering of his mood.

When we reach the Presto, Herrera points to the gigue conclusions to Bach keyboard suites and proposes a further historical reach by wanting to summon up the Irish jig spirit as well. He opens bravely, with a flourish that hints at Litolff’s Concerto Symphonique No. 4 Scherzo before we reach a melody peppered with hemiolas. Before long, the jig has turned into a momentary waltz, then coming back to jig with some slight suggestions of a blues chord or two. A descent to the bass register moves us back into the land of the totally expectable, followed by a rise in alt – and we’re back to Litolff, albeit rather laboured. A chromatic rise brings us to a reprise of the opening material, and a soft-dynamic ending with preparatory booming bass and ornamental sextuplets on top.

This is the most effective of the suite’s movements, mainly because of its energy and occasional charm, yet it still leaves an impression of beating the bounds through interludes – to the point where the exercise sounds like a disjunct rondo.

But there’s more. Herrera’s final offering is the 2016 Tango Fantasy in five movements that begins with a solid Andante – Allegro – Allegretto – Presto sequence. The opening is a sort of recitative, beginning with a single line that acquires another as well as some gruff bass burps before reaching for some chord chains that would have satisfied more if the composer had been more severely self-critical, giving coherence to his modulations and animating the piece by using his instrument’s outer reaches with some purpose.

The remaining three sections are all tangos, taken at various speeds, the fourth being something of a recapitulation of the second although the pace doesn’t justify the Presto label. I found it difficult to detect how the Allegretto was related to anything else, although it opened in a quasi-improvisatory manner that suggested the piece’s first pages/bars. But a great deal of territory is covered by the fantasy nomenclature, so – as with Chopin and Schumann – you just have to go with the prevailing flow. We now come to a Vals – Allegro vivo which follows a similar Rota-type insouciance as we heard in the opening Tango Waltz; the main tune opens deftly enough but fails to live up to its promise with a rather aimless consequent to its initial statement. Here the intention is clearly to spike up the piece’s orthodox harmonic scheme with some wrong-note interpolations. That might have come off if the overwhelming tenor of the movement was not so traditional at its many harmonic fulcrum points. Added to this, some of the movement’ phrases didn’t balance; and you’d be working hard to find much vivo in these pages.

Now attention turns to the Milonga, the tango’s precursor; this movement is also set up as a Presto, which it isn’t. Here is a harmonically orthodox dance with some traces of the habanera’s triplets and at least four passages of fortissimo writing that come straight from the Lisztian handbook of virtuosity if not as dynamically sustained or as digitally taxing as in the Hungarian master’s workplace. An Andantino opens questioningly but follows an inchoate path, taking its time before settling into a languorous tango, then seeming to doodle a melodic path leading in no particular direction. In fact, this whole movement struck me as aimless if centred on a minor tonality (G?) – as is so much of the music on this CD – before a concluding over-emphasized tierce de Picardie.

at the start of the concluding Presto, Herrera introduces a key motif of five consecutive semiquavers rattled out like automatic fire before moving into a Piazzolla-reminiscent melody that gives a format to this rondo-tango which comes equipped with a substantial coda. Again, I’d question the tempo direction which, to my ear, sounds in actuality more like a tempo di marcia. But the real problem comes not from the piece’s impetus, which is well-sustained, but from the diffuse nature of its harmonic ramblings which lead into some thorny thickets before moving back into diatonic safety.

Nothing wrong with being a tango tragic. Never forget that splendid man-of-letters Clive James and his installation of a special room in which he could practise this specific dance: that’s enthusiasm. But, for a composer, you have to add something original to a field that boasts the riches of Albeniz in D, Por una cabeza, La Cumparsita, Besame mucho, and even Libertango. This CD is the work of a talent that appears devoted to this specific form but his output needs more focus, not to mention more sophistication.

TREING TO REMEMBER WHAT I CHOSE TO FORGET

Trish Dean, Graeme Jennings, Alex Raineri

Move Records MCD 642

Yet another compositional voice that has passed me by, Millward is best known for his collaborations with film makers and stage artists, although chamber music is a respectable element in his catalogued output. His language runs to the jazz/popular/sonic art vocabularies and his performances seem to tend to pre-recorded. In fact, much of his work has been recorded on three CDs, including a piano works collection by Sally Mays. Matters are further complicated by several works being sub-sets or spin-offs from larger constructs; it’s an instance of cross-transference, something like trying to chart Sculthorpe’s string quartets.

Still, this recording is Millward’s first for Move Records and it features three exceptional musicians. Despite the suggestive titles – Trying to Remember What I Chose to Forget; Contact – Connect – Tracer; Sadness to Madness – all three of the works presented are good old-fashioned duo sonatas. Pianist Alex Raineri is the constant thread in all three works; violinist Graeme Jennings performs the 2019 violin sonata (Trying to Remember . . . ), then tries his viola hand at the second (Connect etc.), written in 2021; Ensemble Q’s Trish Dean manages the two-movement cello sonata which came to fruition last year.

To begin, I’m having trouble with the composer’s CD title which applies not just to the violin sonata but also to the other two works. In essence, Millward is facing us with sounds that he has in his memory as well as sounds that he has chosen to obliterate from his memory – which is a mental tour de force that you confront at your peril. What is being proposed is a scouring confrontation with the self where you easily take into account the positive facets of your personality/identity, at the same time as facing up to events or characteristics that cast you in a less-than-flattering light. Further, Millward proposes that this admission of the traits we decide to eliminate isn’t just a personal failure but a cultural one.

I don’t think any of us would have an argument with this last projection. You only have to look at any arguments against the Voice to encounter a world of unconscious admissions of cultural failure – obvious time-honoured maltreatment dismissed in favour of self-righteousness, led by a character who seizes on Farnham’s words, ‘try and understand it’ while missing the relevance, inherited from his former career, of the lines, ‘How long can we look at each other/Down the barrel of a gun?’ So Millward has concerns with an unassailable truth: we do choose to forget – what we find uncomfortable, unpleasant, unconscionable.

How this translates into his music remains a mystery that could only be solved by a psychological journey into his compositional practice, an analysis separating the wheat from the one-time tares. But then you’re faced with discerning what the composer wants to use as material, has always wanted to use, and presents – but alongside or in between other compositional matter that has been ignored quite consciously and can now be recalled! It’s an intriguing double-take but I fear many of us won’t rise to Millward’s expectations, content in our intellectual sloth to take his work as a composite – that is, if we aren’t being confronted by an entire creative swathe that involves the formerly-repressed rising to the surface intact: not alongside, but instead of the consciously accepted inspiration for the composer’s products.

The CD’s title work opens with Partial Reflection in which Raineri’s part dominates for its block chords while Jennings presents a Hindemith-like strong, if meandering line. The contrapuntal interplay between both instruments is occasionally intense in its tautness but then gives place to some lyrically soaring flights for the string player, especially towards the movement’s conclusion while Raineri proposes an atmospherically varied backdrop. A meditative break follows in Memoire Omissions where an unhappy nocturne finds cells repeated, extended, varied, shared with sudden patches of orthodox harmony penetrating the atonal texture that dominates proceedings. A sudden burst into action from both players heightens the outward tension before a return to the opening’s melancholy reserve and a few aggressive concluding bars.

Which take us through an attacca into the final Tangled Tango. About a minute of violin cadenza reminiscent of Tzigane precedes Raineri’s entry into the partnership before the work’s progress becomes a sort of tango, if one that you wouldn’t have much luck dancing. After a dynamic climax/collapse, the players move into a tranquil zone that eventually takes up the tango rhythm en clair about 2/3rds of the way through before becoming a rather strident exercise in opposing and complementary ejaculations. A return to the tango prefaces a menacing conclusion on a looped phrase that suddenly cuts itself short. For sure, the tango (which bears an odd similarity to a polonaise at certain spots) is a miscellany of sectionalized inventiveness; as with its predecessors, I find it hard to trace the elements or to appreciate what Millward is doing with them. Adding to the unsettling character of this work, Jennings sounds under-miked in the opening movement, a second-stringer to the piano’s aggression.

On to the slightly longer (9 seconds) viola sonata and we seem to have landed in more immediately digestible territory with Raineri outlining a steady quaver pattern rather like an Alberti bass, the viola giving us a lean, meandering melodic line. Both instruments work into an angular duet that follows a steady pulse and into a well-integrated partnership. A change of mood actually means a change of output and emotional prospects with some savage double-stopping for the viola and a willful piano percussive exhibition. The closely-argued relationship of the first section is here a more frantic creature: the quaver pattern persists but much more explosively and fiercely. There is no relief: the pressure is maintained and the movement ends abruptly.

So why call it Contact? Possibly because of the duelling brought into play, both instruments intertwining but also exploding against each other’s activity. Further, the juxtaposition of moderate and rapid tempi exposes a dual arena of sorts in which the tactile scenario is pursued consistently, if under two different guises. It’s a more placid scene in the following Connect, the amiable soundscape a throwback to English impressionism. Where the viola weaves another generously lyrical line, the keyboard ranges across its compass in support as well as shifting backgrounds. The whole piece reminds me of Cyril Scott’s Lotus Land – which is probably being a bit unfair to both writers. But they share a kind of directed languor, relieved by an occasional spurt of temperament.

As for the concluding Tracer pages, I can only conclude that this refers to one instrument following the other’s path. From the opening, Raineri sets the pace while Jennings punctuates with decorative interpolations that distract from the somewhat steady keyboard progress. Then the roles are reversed and the movement soldiers on, like a hard-worked sample of kammermusik. Eventually, the moto perpetuo aspect dies off for a terse viola cadenza, before we return to the same patterns as the opening and the sonata ends on a question mark, like Petrushka.

Mind you, I could have this all wrong and Millward could be following a quasi-military inspiration; the contact-connect-tracer sequence might have something to do with warfare. But I doubt it; whatever the tracer suggestion, I don’t think it refers to bullets. Without a score, it’s impossible to discern the parallel contours (if there are any) of both instrumental lines and, while there is plenty of mimesis, it’s hard to see a continuous layering of timbres and melodies. Still, the performance is assured and clean, Jennings’ pitch invariably true and Raineri giving his part a welcome clarity, especially in the outer movements.

The cello sonata’s two movements are called, rather obviously, Sad and Mad. In the first, both performers seem to be goading each other into depression, Dean’s cello leading the way into an emphatically dour emotional landscape. Indeed, it’s a rare moment when the string voice isn’t clearly in the ascendant. A brief outburst of staccato high notes for Raineri is one of the few points of piano exposure, even if the instrument’s timbre is used deftly at either end of this movement to reinforce the cello’s low moans.

Another attacca launches us into new territory, the piano rumbling in its lowest register against a striving cello circling on itself. And suddenly we emerge into the relative light of a partnership that follows a coherent path for a few measures, only to lapse into a downward cello solo. The music takes a turn for the manic, the piano producing a chain of hand-muffled notes; followed eventually by eruptions, a high tinkling/near-harmonic that suggests mental disarrangement, if not an absence of mental control. But this is followed by a quietly balanced cello lyric, sensitively carried forward by piano chords, before the final ascent to a high sustained note that wavers (intentionally, you’d hope) into something like those woodwind multiphonics that were so popular in the 1960s.

Is this all intended to depict a crazed state with occasional facets of crisis and release? I suppose so and it’s effective in its chameleonic shifts from one phase to another and back. Certainly, it’s a fine demonstration of performance involvement from both executants who appear to be comfortable with Millward’s language and technical demands. The cello and violin sonatas share common ground, in particular a mobile dissonance that impresses for its clear sense of purpose, as opposed to the relative sweetness of the work for viola and piano. Nevertheless, the composer’s triple offering here is challenging and he is content to offer a fairly abstract set of observations to explain his field of operations; hence the diffidence of the observations above . Not a new voice, then, given the composer’s substantial academic and professional career, but one well worth knowing.

CONTRA

Contra Guitar Duo

Move Records MCD 644

IMPULSES

Hamish Strathdee

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.