Author: cliveoconnell

LIGHT IN DARK

Jennifer Enchelmaier

Move Records MD 3465

One of the oddest anthologies I’ve come across, this CD features all the (till-now) known piano solo music by Tom Henry, a Melbourne-based composer who began his career path as a flautist before changing to the more idealistic, top-of-the-class transcendental role of a composer.   He has an ideal interpreter in Enchelmaier who lavishes her skills on rich and poor alike – or perhaps it would be better to distinguish between the junior and the elder, the tyro and the proficient, the smooth and the rough.  What is apparent is that Henry travelled through a not-uncommon creative trajectory that began with imitations of the masters, then switched overnight to a cracker-jack contemporary style which takes the wind out of your sails through its stark contrast.

But then, this vault between light and dark (you choose) is not at all clear-cut.   Enchelmaier begins with 14 pieces stretching from 2003 to 2006.   They come in various groups: three Songs without words (2003-2006), three Studies for modern times (2005) and three Ecstatic preludes from that same year, a slightly puzzling brace from the composer’s 2006 Pieces for children (originally three in number, but A Funny Game has been omitted  –  hence the descriptor here of From ‘Pieces for children’).   Then there are the Three short pieces for piano of 2005 which take on the function of a midriff punch after what we’ve heard so far because they sound like Webern of the Variations for Piano alternating with Schoenberg of the Drei Klavierstucke.   And these lead into the Piano Sonata No. 1, written for Michael Kieran Harvey and an excellent vehicle for that pianist/composer’s scintillating skills.  This is followed by the forward-leaning Three pieces for piano of 2010, and the one-movement Piano Sonata No. 2 written four years ago and less elliptical than its predecessor in the form from 2006.

We start with the Ecstatic preludes No. 1 – Like an omen.   Well it’s ominous enough, taking its opening cell – a clipped, falling interval – and putting it through some unremarkable, post-Rachmaninov harmonic changes.   No, not so much ominous; more, a prophecy emanating from a Tarot reading.   Sensual and languid depends for its mood-setting on surging scales that aren’t allowed to take over the message which is a carefully circumscribed melody that suggests the eroticism of Saint-Saens.   Finally, Calm and flowing presents as something of a study for the right hand which reserves its melodic interest for the middle two notes of every quaver group of four; as I’ve mentioned before, this is written in a style that suggests Rachmaninov but without the surprises, harmonic or lyrically transporting.

Pop song is the first of the Studies for modern times; not too modern, I’d suggest, as its language is lush and harmonically too subtle for anything I’ve heard from the gutter-mouthed rappers that captured the imaginations of my students and too frisky in its instrumental range to compete with the musical debris that spews from my gym’s sound-system.   Not to mention that the vocal range required to sing this piece would be beyond the abilities of anyone currently performing on any ‘pop’ stage.   The death of Pope John Paul II prompted April 2005 which manages to sound optimistic and elegiac at the same time.   Henry imposes a fair amount of bell-ringing on us with a running scale figure doing the peals while a few chorale-suggestive figures range across the keyboard; it’s not La cathedrale engloutie (the pace is too rapid for Debussy’s lush washes) but the liturgical suggestions are there for those unkind enough to find them.    And the composer’s forging along an harmonically conservative path seems right in line with the heritage (such as it remains) of Karol Wojtyla.    Last in this set, Film theme suggested all sorts of possibilities.   It’s got a rolling undercurrent of left-hand arpeggiations and a ‘noble’ tune in block chords that proposes all sorts of visual equivalents – the Australian bush but not too far west of the Great Dividing Range, a Mary Tyler Moore family drama, Avatar 3 in its pictorial obviousness, perhaps even a Big Sur Buddhism scenario in a cleaned-up Kerouac setting.

From ‘Pieces for Children’ involves A sad story and Barcarolle.  You might find signs of Schumann here, although Mendelssohn is more the go despite some harmonic slips and slides.   The story has a melancholy fluency to it but it could be played at sight by a reasonably competent pianist; Enchelmaier spices the outline with clever phrasing and sympathetic dynamics.   As for the Venetian scene, you look in vain for any complexities; the pulse is regular and the right hand melodic outline is not distinctive enough to distract from the piece’s lack of adventure or colour, despite some sudden swerves into a new tonality – for a moment.

Henry admits to a collegiality with Mendelssohn in introducing his Songs without words and the three small-frame works share a certain picturesque reflectiveness with the German composer’s miniatures.   Remembrance is upper-level lounge music with a wealth of added 7th chords and a definite lyrical shape; I was distracted by an odd resemblance in the work’s emotional character to Joseph Kosma’s Autumn Leaves  –  not that there’s anything wrong with that.   More blues-inflected chord work emerges in Nocturne, a simple ternary shape with a very long central section (in relation to its surrounds) but the initial flourish is attractive enough to tolerate repetitions.   New York comes over as a sort of ambling promenade not that far removed from Loved Walked In but bedevilled by its unchanging movement of block chords, occasionally spiced up with some arpeggiations; it’s certainly a very benign view of a city that I found menacing and unpleasant, by day and by night.

Now we come to the split where Henry’s compositional language turns into the second half of the 20th century.   Following his studies with Lawrence Whiffin (or probably during that time), Henry produced Three short pieces for piano which are aphoristic in terms of length (in particular the last Molto allegro) and unpredictable in terms of rhythm and harmony which is emphatically atonal and probably 12-tone although you can hear repeated notes and motifs that would disrupt strict application of the rules.   All of a sudden, the listener has to cope with an abstract set of soundscapes, starting with an Andante of tight-lipped stringency, followed by a Piu agitato that is my pick of the three for its expressive range and technical dexterity.   Aficionados of the Second Viennese School will find plenty of reminiscences in these all-too-brief essays.

Henry wrote his Piano Sonata No. 1 in 2006 and revised it in 2011; a fascinating fact although it’s difficult to know what to do with it.   As it comes across on this CD, the composer’s style-world has moved on from brief bursts of a 1920s vintage to short explosions of a 1950s/60s Boulez/Stockhausen variety – at least for the sonata’s scene-setting Theme which looks on paper like one of the Klavierstucken: ultra-refined dynamic markings, glancing shots before a sustained crotchet or minim, subdivisions of rhythm like a quintuplet that’s as much rests as it is notes, leaps of 7ths and 9ths: the whole panoply of serialized physical jerks, although, as I say, I don’t think the principles are being applied in too doctrinaire a fashion.

The following Variations movement is probably divided into six sections, their material emanating from the thematic material of Movement 1.    You can find common intervallic vaults, I suppose, but the music is chameleonic and, despite the divisions, its progress is continuous.    Also, Henry is fond of the direction recitativo; that gives his interpreter all the leeway necessary to handle whimsical creative flights as she pleases.    In fact, most of these sectional indicators aren’t that helpful to the ear: what Henry calls Molto calmo e ritmato requires a large amount of creative listening, as does quasi una Habanera and, later, Violente.  However, you can take pleasure in the pockets of high-pitched pointillism across this variations sequence, as well as Henry’s ear for the dramatic gesture and the pointed repetition.

The finale , Molto perpetuo, presents in two versions: one where the linear rhythmic values are prescribed, the other a sort of breakdown into consecutive quavers.   Whichever one you pick, the results follow a different vocabulary to that obtaining in the preceding two movements.    It winds up being diatonic in character towards the end after a  moderately athletic main body.    At times, I was reminded of an old-time passacaglia where the bass is emphatic and definitely placed while quavers follow their predictable path on top.    In fact, about half-way through, the texture is satisfyingly complex with three layers in full operation.  But this is not your usual perpetual motion rush as Enchelmaier exercises plenty of rubato and dramatic emphases, especially in the last minute where the work seeks the security of a tonal resolution,   This you can receive as a haven or a restoration of the natural order; or you can wonder why, after showing mastery of a contemporary compositional style, the work peters out in a kind of surrender to the tonic.

Which is why the interest arises in the direction of Henry’s revision of 2011.   In this form, the work is lopsided and I wonder whether the Moto perpetuo is part of the original or an addition (or transformation?).   Or take it the other way: that the last movement is a survivor and the Theme and Variations attest to the composer’s adoption of advanced techniques in his compositional address.

Another surprise comes with the Three Pieces for Piano which seem to be homages in their different ways.   Henry acknowledges the influence of earlier writers in his Intermezzo: an attractive expressionist soundscape with some lush writing of considerable warmth interrupted by piercing outbursts of temperament and a quiet tonal ending with a faint echo of the last chord in Berg’s Sonata – a bit fanciful as a comparison but not impossible.    The CD’s title track is a series of episodes that opens with two factors in operation – a chorale, and surrounding decorations both high and low; this disintegrates in several ways, the main ones being an assumption of importance by the colourful material at either end of the keyboard, and an incorporation of the chords into a faster-moving stage of activity.    It’s an odd combination of restlessness and steady progress, but it eventually finds a quiet subterranean resting-place.    Last, Henry’s Toccata also acknowledges the past, specifically Prokofiev whose hefty 1912 gem is echoed here, and I think you can also detect a smidgen of Khatchaturian although Henry sticks with a regular pulse of quadruple-time semiquavers without any relieving triplets such as the Armenian introduced into his flashy pseudo-virtuosity.   Again, Enchelmaier avoids martellato continuity and leavens the movement forward with a pliant ritenuto or four.

The latest of Henry’s piano solo endeavours, his Piano Sonata No. 2 was commissioned for a 50th birthday and is based on the name (most of it), represented in musical notes, of the celebrater.   This piece follows the composer’s studying with Stuart Greenbaum, Head of Composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.   Certainly, you can hear a change in approach here, more in line with the harmonic smoothness in the Moto perpetuo ending the Piano Sonata No. 1 but, despite the homogeneity acquired by using the name-motif as fundamental, the work still impresses as episodic.   So it’s not really your old-time sonata form at play here but more like a rondo.   And that doesn’t really get to the heart of the business because the apparent wholescale reversions are few in number.

For instance, the sonata opens with a stately theme set out a an octave or two, this sentence moving with an effective stateliness, even grace.   That rhythmic movement then changes abruptly to a gambolling bucolic episode, somewhere between Vaughan Williams and Bartok at his least acerbic.   Here Henry sets up a pattern of rising and falling scales in both hands that takes over his forward thrust; these are especially noticeable in pages where the right hand carries out its ups and downs while the left hand generates chords that follow a scale progression, albeit more slowly.   Mind you, the derivation of this developmental matter from that opening cell is clear as day.    Not sure about what follows when an arresting trill leads into Ondine land with some voluptuous colour washes giving way to a return of the bucolic skipping toned down and the scales are replaced by ‘open’ arpeggios in the right hand that reach a highpoint about half-way through the sonata.   Another bucolic trace element and a richly Romantic meditation with a spectral recurrence of the opening noble striding in arpeggiated format before we enter the last lap with Henry employing a falling interval as his calm farewell to arms.  

It’s here that Enchelmaier comes further into the picture by singing this two-note phrase to the ejaculation He-ya in a concordance with her piano part.    This vocal line involves both a rising and falling minor third in alternation, then rising and falling perfect 5ths.   According to Henry, the  intention is to accentuate an intended atmosphere of meditative stasis, and it kind of achieves that end in a coda that even revisits the countryside, albeit in slow motion, before the movement slows to a definite ending, despite its ephemeral dynamic.   You  might have expected, after pages that exercise a kind of impressionism in their harmonic ambiguity, that Henry might leave us with an added-note chord, reinforcing the unfinished nature of spiritual experiences.   But no: when Enchelmaier breathes her last rising murmur in a space where words have no substance, the sonata resolves onto a minor chord with no interrogatory accretions.

You have to take your hat off to Henry who reveals every part of his achievements on this disc; it’s not a Greatest Hits selection but the entire oeuvre that he has written (so far) for solo piano.    He shows us his beginnings with a late (and sometimes middle) 19th century bent, using the conventions of that time (in fact, there’s rather a lot of these pieces, as they take over half-an hour of the CD’s 72 minutes’ length); then comes the abrupt shift to a world of technique-shaking demands familiar to us survivors of the challenges promulgated by Bussotti, Berio and Kagel (not to mention the apparent insanities committed to manuscript by Pousseur and Ferneyhough); finally, it’s an arrival at the ‘new lyricism’ where ev’ry compositional mountain and hill is made low.   All of this makes for a refreshing, wholesome hejira, one that is probably not completed.   Along his path, Henry has been gifted with a sympathetic and conscientious interpreter who exerts her considerable interpretative craft across each of these 21 tracks.

RHYTHMS OF GREEN & GOLD

John Martin

Move Records MCD 622

I’ve been ambivalent about jazz and all its offshoots for many years. After the initial rush to the head during young adulthood when Monk, Mingus, Davis and Coleman set impossibly high levels of accomplishment and virtuosity, an inevitable reaction set in, similar to the disillusionment that comes to us all through an excess of Wagner or Mahler – when you realize the importance of emotional brakes, if nothing else. Just as with low culture’s implementation of serious music – who can forget the drum-kit added to Mozart’s No. 40, or the smoothing out of dissonance in Copland’s Fanfare? – just so do you have to acknowledge the bowdlerization of jazz’s limitless potential in melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre. Many of my contemporaries would remember still the adoption of jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s as entertainment for the pretentious young habitues of Melbourne’s clubs, the brief flash that marked the advent of Brubeck and the MJQ (mainly in recordings, although I heard the former play at Rushcutter’s Bay sometime in 1960), not to mention a few out-of-left-field experiences like the 1965 appearance of Thelonious Monk in the Melbourne Town Hall, playing to an audience of about a hundred of us. But today? The well-worn furrows have been ploughed to base rock and you look fruitlessly for anything original outside the realms of fusion – which is to say, compromise.

This disc offers 19 tracks of solo piano, compositions old and new by Australian composers (hence the CD’s title reference to our national colours – which aren’t any such thing, of course, as this country is still marching in a vexillatory two-step with its colonial master) some of whom offer refined takes on jazz rhythms, if not much else. About half of the writers are well-known, like Elena Kats-Chernin, Ann Carr-Boyd, Stuart Greenbaum, Ross Edwards and the performer himself. A few names rouse tremors in a waning memory bank, viz. Rod Heard and Matthew Dennett, while others have escaped my attention – Amanda Handel, Tom Anderson and May Howlett. The most senior writer represented is Howlett while Dennett is the youngest of them. As for temporal substantiality, Kats-Chernin takes the prize with her Nonchalance that almost lasts 7 minutes; at the other end of the scale sits Greenbaum’s Taurus, coming in at 1’30”. Quite a few of the remaining 17 tracks are brief, seven coming in at under 3 minutes.

Sydney composer Handel is represented by three compositions: Dreamboat Blues, Bootleg Blues and Blue Laze, the last-named being the most substantial. Martin’s reading of Dreamboat is laid-back, to the point where its underlying pulse is relaxed at two obvious spots; the structure is simple, 7th chords abound and no ripples are raised. A jaunty syncopated bass line prefaces the Bootleg drama which features a more adventurous harmonic palette, even if the format is little more sophisticated than its predecessor; again, Martin allows himself a rhythmic flexibility – although that might be written in. Blue Laze is a pleasant post-Gershwin laze which too often sounds like an exercise in peregrinatory chords, its deliberately lolloping bass a genial support for upper meanderings that are amiable if aimless. All these pieces are of an unobtrusive genre of jazz with nothing depressing or ‘dirty’ about them; another way of saying that they’re lacking any decided personality.

Tom Anderson has published a collection of rags – won prizes for them, no less. His A Walk Down Ragtime Lane is a fair representative of the genre with various clear-cut segments jammed alongside each other in the best Joplin tradition. Again, Martin puts in the odd hesitation, almost as though he’s finding a bit of trouble handling what sounds like a pretty easy-fitting modulation. As with a good deal of her work, Elena Kats-Chernin’s Nonchalance exists in several forms but the piano version here is something like a slow toccata or a piano study; there are a few jazz traces, mainly in some syncopated spots like bars 13 to 19 but the piece is probably included because of its original genesis as referring to suave characters in old black-and-white movies (George Raft? Or George Sanders?) but its continual middle ground of Alberti-bass type quavers in sets of four is more reminiscent of Hanon than Hampton. It was probably more effective in its original shape for cello and piano. At about a third the length of its companion, Kats-Chernin’s Reflections derives from an earlier suite written for a piece of theatre. Again, there is a binding sequence of Alberti quavers but the piece is appealing for its melodic sentiment: the sort of thing a very competent tea-lounge pianist would present with the merest suggestion of harmonic liberation.

Canberra-based musician Matthew Dennett proposes a nicely meandering melodic upper line in Round Midday but his piece is cursed with a repetitive bass line comprising steady block chords that seem to work against the free-and-easy meanderings in Martin’s agile right hand. I take it as a tribute/offshoot of Monk’s Around Midnight classic and there are plenty of homage points; like the American’s original, it might have worked better (probably does, in fact) with a mixed ensemble dealing with its bare bones.

Three Australian waltzes by Ross Edwards come from 1988 and you won’t find in them any sign of Maninyas-type ecstasy; rather, you can detect Chopin and Brahms, even a touch of Satie in the third. The Sassafras Gully Waltz is dedicated to musician/educator Nicholas Routley; Sandy Stone’s Waltz inevitably goes to Barry Humphries; and the Annandale Waltz was written for the composer’s wife Helen. All three are undeniably in 3/4 time and any twist of jazz goes a-begging. Yet the mood, tempo and enunciative changes across the trilogy exemplify the personalities of the dedicatees: determined and bouncy, old-fashioned and sentimental; quirky and ruminative. As you’d expect, Martin has little difficulty in delineating these short, medium-range-difficulty works with a care that invests them with merit, maintaining a fine balance of charm and caricature.

Another New South Wales writer, Rod Heard is represented by four works, the largest grouping on the CD. First comes Take 7, a tribute to Paul Desmond (of course) but not as seductive as the Brubeck classic; we can keep track of five (see Tchaikovsky) but any larger odd number (until 9, to state the bleeding obvious) is beyond most of us (despite Bartok). Heard keeps pretty close to his home key and avoids rhythmic games by maintaining his original allocation of accents; taken as a whole, this optimistic gambol reminds me of Grainger who also showed a penchant for the tonic in a good deal of his piano music. Summer Arrives presents as a sort of two-part invention at either of its ends with more substantial episodes intervening; the odd thing is that its rhythmic element seems to be the least interesting part of its structure.

A more obviously jazz-inflected piece arrives with Barbera Blues, which refers to a variety of Italian grape; mind you, it might just as well have been called Montepulciano and achieved the same result. It’s a 12-bar blues in essence with a middle section in the major that leads to a nicely contrived high-point, but the framing pages display a quiet sinuousness that shows a familiarity with and ease at handling chord progressions endemic in jazz practice. Finally, Rags to Riches boasts a clever title and is a straight rag in the Joplin vein with plenty of discrete sections and some repetitions to give us the reassurance of familiarity. It seems to me that Martin takes this too quickly and employs too many pauses to mark transitions between segments; as well, some of the writing is awkward across its essays in momentary counterpoint and the interpreter’s uneasy execution of them.

Probably the most Romantic music on the CD comes from Martin himself in his The Everglades at Dawn, which has nothing to do with Florida but refers to a National Trust property in Leura through which the pianist/composer takes us on a walk. You can appreciate Martin’s piece as a placid amble at first, although it leads to something more intense later on but the initial impression – at least for the first third of the score – is of an English pastoral, something like Cyril Scott but with less purposeful modulations. As far as green-and-gold rhythm is concerned, the composer is more concerned with a kind of fluent rumbling than any metrical nips and tucks, the interest mainly lying in a slightly elliptical melody line.

A slight syncopation distinguishes the placid elegy Taurus by Stuart Greenbaum, written as a remembrance of Australian composer James Wade who died suddenly in 2017 at the age of 38. The piece is both emotionally charged and restrained, a ternary-shaped deploration that makes its statement without elaborations, and then stops. Martin treats it with calm consideration, realising just the right amount of Greenbaum’s simplicity of utterance. A sort of companion piece comes in Looking to the Future which Greenbaum originally wrote for a play dealing with the Newcastle Workers Club disaster of 1989. It is slightly more optimistic than Taurus with an aggressive counterweight that follows the opening quiet cellular statement; however, a similar melancholy pervades both short pieces, each coming in well under 2 minutes long.

Western Australian-born May Howlett has contributed The Baroqua Rag: a combination term that covers J. S. Bach and Berocca. The first is easy to detect as Howlett uses the opening subject of the C minor Fugue in Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, stated en clair towards the end. How she gets the effervescent tablet into the mix remains a mystery; I can’t remember the jingle that mentioned how you get back your b-b-bounce but I sense it might be in there, somewhere along the way during this rather awkward piece with an over-repetitious bass; well, over-anchored might be a better way of putting it. Last of all comes Ann Carr-Boyd – not quite as much a veteran as Howlett but of the same generation. Her The Solitary rag comes from 2020 and is a kind of comment on the arrival and isolation of COVID with minor key (A?) bookends around a melancholy major-key middle, which presumably recalls the good times when we could socialize without penalties, personal or state-imposed.

But it’s an odd piece with which to end. Martin seems to be doodling around with it, taking his time over the end of sentences and blurring the piece’s outlines – but then that may be the way Carr-Boyd wants it outlined, so as to emphasize its nostalgia, a longing for the way we were. Such an epilogue does remind us of the current state of public safety (here comes the revolution), the uneasy condition of our world, and so is a worthy musical image of the green and gold national cosmos (!) that we have to negotiate. An interesting CD, then, if not a particularly challenging collection of Australian produce.

WALSINGHAM

Rosemary Hodgson

Move Records MCD 637

An excellent example of focus, Rosemary Hodgson’s latest CD centres on the English ballad Walsingham which refers to the medieval pilgrimage site in Norfolk, maimed and dissolved by Henry VIII during those years when he pursued a new marriage. To set the tone (literally), we hear the tune and some variations as it appears in the final lute book by Matthew Holmes. Then, Hodgson offers us uses of the same tune by some Elizabethan/Jacobean composers: Francis Cutting, John Johnson, Edward Collard, Anthony Holborne, John Marchant and John Dowland (two treatments from this most famous of Elizabethan lutenists). Several other writers get included in the 21-track album, somewhat dodgy entrants in the Walsingham banquet: William Byrd, Anthony de Countie and Gregorius Hywet.

Hodgson has rarely sounded better to my ears with carefully judged phrasing and a reassuring purity of articulation. Her delineation of the branch that gives flower to much of what follows, the anonymous Matthew Holmes’ setting, comes across with a wistfulness that speaks of the possibly regretful – doleful – background to the melody: a plaint for the priory’s destruction (yet another distressing blot on the origins of the British 16th century heresy). Mind you, the little that I can see of the original score follows the nodal chords supporting the tune but I suspect that, of the two Walsingham versions that Holmes copied, this is one I haven’t come across. Still, the whole field of Renaissance performance has become many-textured, to the extent that it’s rare that you encounter a solo piece that is played exactly as one particular manuscript requires.

For no particular reason, Hodgson then offers Byrd’s The Voice which is cited as coming from that extraordinary resource, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book but under the title of The Ghost. This lute version follows the almain’s chord progression, I think, and the melody is sort of recognizably germane. Regardless, the performance is quietly buoyant with some attractive open 5th drones and only the slightest hint of an enunciative problem with the melody early in this miniature’s exposition. De Countie’s Pavyn could come from early in Elizabeth I’s regime when the man himself was a lutenist at court. The piece itself is a meditative gem with the faintest of flourishes at its conclusion; whether it was written by this musician is moot as nothing definitive attests to his writing anything, let alone this dance that bears his Christian name.

My reading of tablature is elementary at best but I think that the version of Walsingham we hear by Francis Cutting is the first of his two versions, although the differences between the two are slight. It is handled with an appealing flexibility which observes the bar-line accents so that, for all its folk-like simplicity of melody, the ornaments are set in proper place and time with only a small amount of leeway. The other Cutting track, Sir Walter Raleigh’s Galliard, is appropriately direct in its opening swagger but the piece’s character changes at bar 33 when the texture seems more compact, less flamboyant even if this is a version with some paring; Hodgson’s attack reflects this sudden shift down (up?) a peg with fine precision.

John Johnson’s son, Robert, is a familiar name from the English early Renaissance. The father’s work appears more rarely; a real case of wrongful neglect if A Pavin by Mr. Johnson is representative of his output. Both this dance and his Walsingham setting (where the melody gains a few feet – or so it seems) show an appealing control of emotional output, devoid of abrupt splurges but all of a piece, the pavane a model of quiet deliberation. I’m not really convinced about the inclusion of the Netherlands writer Gregorius Huwet in this collection; the grounds are that he almost certainly met Dowland during the latter’s visit to Germany in 1594, and his Galliarde Monsieur Gregorij is thematically akin to Walsingham and may have influenced the English composer’s own galliard on the tune (or vice versa). Preceding this effort comes Huwet’s Fantasia Gregorij. Is this the one that Dowland organized into his Varietie of Lute Lessons? It doesn’t agree with the score I have, as well as being less fitful in the sense of having fewer elaborate decorative devices. You can find traces of Walsingham in Huwet’s dance which is more assertive than any of the English translations of the tune we have heard so far. Hodgson gives the piece an appropriate firmness of delivery, heightened by a certain stridency in the top line.

The trio of Collard works begins with an unspecified pavan; one of the CD’s more substantial tracks, it maintains the optimistic tone set by its immediate Huwet predecessors with some surprises that aren’t adventurous but more quirky. Even in its minor mode, this set of pages reveals a light emotional band-width sustained across its canvas. Next, The Maye Galliard begins with involving energy and revisits the energy along its path, despite two phases where the rhythmic certainty falters; Hodgson gets all the notes out but it would have been more satisfying if the pace had remained consistent. As for the Walsingham variations by Collard, these come across clearly enough; the player does display a tendency to decelerate at the end of a segment, particularly if semiquaver runs appear.

Anthony Holborne’s exposure here comprises three pieces, two of them a little over a minute long. As it fell on a Holly Eve (the second-shortest track here) is a neat, slightly catchy tune with two bars of sentence-ending ornamentation that doesn’t quite convince. The Walsingham comprises a sporadically rich-chorded version of the original melody with the second half repeated; Hodgson handles it with almost exaggerated care. As for the Jest solo, this also begins bravely, as with the previously-heard galliards. But its semiquaver runs are a mixed bag, some fluid while others labour.

What follows is the second-longest of the Walsingham treatments – that by John Marchant – with an exhaustive 12 variations, the last two a rich coruscation of semiquavers. While the interpretation has an intriguing consistency, Hodgson’s sparkling top-layer falters occasionally – not into uncertainty but a seeming dogged insistence on putting things in a row. Even more satisfying is Marchant’s Fantasia which holds a rich vein of quiet grandeur, the piece moving forward at a stately pace that in its chord progressions smacks of inevitability.

Finally, Hodgson comes to Dowland through his Galliard on Walsingham: 24 bars that neatly divide into three discrete sections, all of which are here repeated. This short piece is not alone in embellishing the tune, although some moments are striking like the high tessitura at bar 11, and the soprano avoidance of the first beat in six of the last nine bars. Hodgson negotiates this trifle efficiently, even if some of the chords sounded under-populated. The G minor Pavan, longest track on the CD, is a splendid example of the instrument’s expressive capabilities, especially plangent echoes between soprano and lower voices. For my money, this is the finest performance Hodgson gives us – from the first Lachrimae motif to the superbly optimistic final bar. As in the Walsingham galliard, so for Sir John Souch his Galiard: another 24 bars in three segments, all repeated. Again, a forward-thrusting reading with a few breaths along the way – no Julian Bream rugger-bugger bustling in this style of address.

Rounding off the CD is Dowland’s unadorned (!) Walsingham which presents as the longest treatment of the melody on this recording. It’s a remarkable conclusion because it comes close to a meditation in which the original’s melodic contours are not so much scrubbed as superseded in a splendid fancy where the composer wanders free from apparent restrictions. Hodgson performs this gem with disciplined rubato at cadential points, keeping to the forefront Dowland’s supple bursts of invention. It makes a suitable finish to this quiet celebration of a simple melody through the eyes of England’s rich school of lutenists.