SIDEKICK
Move Records MCD 648
This duo has been around the country – and overseas – for some time. At this point, both musicians are studying – as a guitar duo – at the Juilliard School in New York where their craft will continue to be honed to an even finer point. As is inevitable, these musicians have won prizes from operations like the Guitar Foundation of America, the Adelaide International Guitar Festival, and the Concert Artists Guild Competition. The brothers’ second CD, as far as I can tell, oscillates between Brazilian/Spanish voices and home-grown ones, with sideways glances at one of serious music’s best-known vignettes in Debussy’s Claire de lune, and Welsh composer Katie Jenkins‘ Sidekick, written specifically for these players by a co-student at the famous American academy.
Ziggy and Miles begin their excursions with Jongo, a rhythmically clever piece by Brazilian guitarist Paulo Bellinati; it alternates 6/8 with 3/4 in a time-honoured Latin tradition and bases its development on a catchy D Major tune that doesn’t venture outside its home key. We hear a cut version of this arrangement because the musicians omit about a minutes’ worth of ‘percussion work towards the piece’s ending where performers have the option of snapping strings at various points along the neck/fretboard or slapping the instrument’s side, outlining the same rhythmic interplay that has featured so far in the piece.
It all makes for a nice study in ensemble and this duo comes up trumps, even if the last bar’s arpeggiated chord is prepared by a carefully-considered chain of what you’d expect would be rapid acciaccature. Still, its determination leaves you in no doubt that we’ve reached the end of this frolic.
This is followed by the three-movement Tonadilla of Rodrigo. which you can find on YouTube, the Johnston brothers giving a most focused reading of this brightly textured suite. The initial Allegretto ma non troppo sets up the composer’s trademark 2nds, placing E in one instrument against E flat in the other, the bitonal suggestion a continuous spur as the players exchange material and unite for full-blooded rasgueado chords with sparkling clarity.
The second movement Minuetto pomposo doesn’t really get affected until a fair way in, beginning with a delectable alternation of material and spice added by ‘wrong-note’ chords like the opening D Major chord in Guitar 1 set against an F sharp minor triad on Guitar 2; this polarity persists but it’s not that remarkable – just a muted form of bitonality. The stately section starts well into the piece’s centre with a definite change of character, into the minor if anywhere, and a definite strut to the rhythmic motion. A series of concerted common chords (recalling bars 11 and 12 of the opening segment) follow a cadenza for Miles Johnston, and we return to the opening material and a curt conclusion.
Then the concluding Allegro vivace is an infectious rondo, notable for some stunning scale passages from both players. Here, the harmonic spikiness is underplayed although Rodrigo can’t bring himself to complete orthodoxy. But these pages exemplify the finer points of this duo’s abilities – from the carefully managed rubato and decelerandi to the fine timbral eloquence from Ziggy Johnston in a mid-movement minor mode bass-line solo, and the combined effervescence of the concluding bars’ semiquaver unison run.
Now we come to the CD’s longest track in Granados’ Ochos valses poeticos, written sometime between 1886 and 1894 for piano solo. All of them have been transcribed for two guitars, some of them by several arrangers, but the Johnstons have chosen the version assembled by the duo of Christian Gruber and Peter Maklar. In fact, the waltzes are preceded by a bright march-like introduction and the first of the dances recurs as a postlude to the whole collection. Right from the start, you’re aware of transpositions across bars 10-12 where the piano in alt can’t be handled by the guitar; as well, you hear a few supernumerary bass notes starting 13 bars from the introduction’s bridge/conclusion. But the players capture effectively the good-humoured charm of this preface.
Most of the waltzes are a page long in the original; repetitions abound, as they do in Chopin and Brahms, and the Johnstons give great pleasure in their ease of delivery and supple gradations of tempo and timbre. You can’t fault them for accuracy either with many striking passages of close duet. For all that, the waltzes are amiable salon matter, their phrases falling neatly into four-bar patterns with nothing needlingly sharp to their gentle progress. Certainly, the first Melodioso holds the most memorable melody, well worth revisiting at the conclusion to Waltz 8’s Presto in contrasting 6/8 and 3/4 (only an unadventurous two bars’ worth of this).
But the inner pieces have considerable charm under the Johnstons’ care: the gentle, ascending chromatic pattern of the second Tempo di valse noble; the slightly off-kilter shape of the following Valse lente with its groups of three four-bar phrases; an abrupt muffled pizzicato effect in the Allegro umoristico at bars 21 to 24, and later at bars 29 to 32 which are treated with precision by both players in turn; a telling Viennese-style hesitancy applied in Waltz 5, meltingly effective at bars 11 to 18 the first time round; followed by a carefully shaped Quasi ad libitum where the performers take their time but do so with a single mind; the impeccable realization of Gruber and Maklar’s division of labour in the Valse 7 Vivo, even if the piano’s full-blooded chords (e.g., bars 6 and 8) have been thinned out.
The set displays the brothers’ command of Granados’ none-too-complex emotional landscape in these unsophisticated bagatelles. Even the more introspective waltzes (Nos. 3 and 6) make no bones about the modesty of their forays into a (slightly) darker world. Still, the pieces meld successfully into each other, in this instance because of the interpreters’ uniform interpretative vision.
I’ve not much to say about the Johnstons’ transcription of Debussy’s famous piano extract from the Suite bergamasque. Their approach emphasizes the pages’ innate calm, even at the En animant change of key for six bars at the work’s climax. And the transcription manages to keep the melody line prominent – although that might be due to the players’ subtle treatment of the splayed chords/arpeggios at the un poco mosso from bar 27 on. An agreable 5 minutes’ worth.
Most senior of the three contemporary voices is Nigel Westlake‘s Songs from the forest in its original duo guitar form of 1994. I’ve heard the Grigoryan brothers play this work, possibly at Monash University – more a matter of history than actual reminiscence. It has a catchy opening gambit in the best Westlake style and the composer brings this back to round off his sonically effective score. Interpreters are kept busy with a wealth of effects and rhythmic slips and slides, demonstrating Westlake’s insights into his instruments’ capabilities. As expected, the Johnstons find the mellifluous melodic passages and the mildly aggressive interludes suit their partnership down to the ground and – if anything – the work accelerates in interest the further it advances.
Jenkins wrote Sidekick in 2021 during the COVID outbreak at the invitation of the Johnstons. It is intended to be a reflection of the brothers’ relationship, both fraternal and professional – which immediately presents interpretative problems. Which one is the sidekick – Miles or Ziggy? Or are they both each other’s offsider? I guess that Jenkins doesn’t have any narrative in mind; she’s not committing to a story like Macbeth, Don Juan or Till Eulenspiegel but potentially essaying a pair of thumbnails like Lavine or Pickwick. Yes, certain moments present intimations of sequential thoughts racing between the instruments, or even complementary ideas that find common expression, as well as times of divergence from each other.
All the same, the composer is at some pains to outline a kind of aesthetic compatibility where competing flurries of action lead to a common end, quietly fusing into a shared output. The experience is heightened by listening to the track through headphones where the two voices are spatially separate. But that’s the case for the whole CD, by which means you can detect the labour division – or better, the sharing of responsibility. Jenkins’ language is pleasantly catholic, moving into old-fashioned harmony near the piece’s conclusion but tracing a lightly acerbic path in its central pages.
Written last year, Ken Murray’s Trin Warren Tam-boree depicts wetlands in the north-west of Melbourne’s Royal Park; specifically, the bellbird waterhole that sits there, just behind those yellow and red slanted pillars that mark the Tullamarine Freeway’s starting point. Also written for the Johnston brothers, this presents as a meditation on the area’s restless placidity, the piece’s forward motion dominated for the greater part of its length by a minor 2nd oscillation: D-C sharp-D, for example. Over this underpinning, the players outline Murray’s wide-ranging melodic output, the whole complex packed with incident but not alarmingly so. This is an expertly pitched soundscape, created by one of the city’s leading guitarists and a solid contribution to the still-slim catalogue of serious Australian music for duo guitar.
Here is a welcome exposition of the Johnstons’ obvious talents, well placed in a field of musical practice that is not quite unknown or unrepresented but has rarely been graced with such expertise in execution. Admittedly, a substantial track (Granados) and a slight one (Debussy) are arrangements, but the execution of those and the original two-guitar works is exceptionally fine. This CD was recorded at the Skillman Studio in New York and the artists have been well-served by an operational team which captured every detail of their polished interpretations.
O'Connell the Music 