Author: cliveoconnell

BRAHMS CELLO

Zoe Knighton and Amir Farid

Move Records MD 3451

You’ll find the cello well-represented in the Brahms catalogue. We have the bountiful Double Concerto Op. 102 as well as multiple chamber works: three definite piano trios, three piano quartets, the F minor Piano Quartet, the clarinet trio and mellifluous quintet, a string trio, three string quartets, the two string quintets and two string sextets. But when considering the instrument as a more exposed voice in Brahms’ output, we’re left with the two cello sonatas: Op. 38 n E minor and Op. 99 in F Major, written 21 years apart. Still, these stand as highpoints of the form, each score a rich repository of power and brilliance, both indispensable elements in every aspirant instrumentalist’s repertoire.

Here is the latest collaboration for Move Records from cellist Zoe Knighton and pianist Amir Farid. It’s the sixth in a sequence that began in 2010 with the complete Felix Mendelssohn product for cello and piano. This was followed a year later by an Argentine collection of odds and sods, with Constantino Gaito’s Cello Sonata of 1918 as its culminating point. Then came the complete Beethoven in 2012, followed by a French collection in 2013 where Debussy’s sonata capped a series of bagatelles and arrangements. A Russian collation came by in 2015, with the Gretchaninov and Prokofiev sonatas taking pride of place. Most recently, in 2021 we heard the ‘complete’ Schumann through the Funf Stucke im Volkston and the Fantasiestucke Op. 73 juxtaposed with arrangements of 15 lieder by the composer’s wife Clara.

Put both Brahms cello sonatas together and you have about 58 minutes’ worth of music on this particular CD. To flesh out the length, these artists have provided three lieder as makeweights. We hear the first two of the Op. 43 set of four – Von ewiger Liebe and Die Mainacht – along with the middle member of the Op 63 Lieder, Meine Liebe ist grun. All are welcome as reminders of the composer’s mastery at plumbing emotional insights, as in the eternal love statement from the maiden in the first of these, where the rhythm moves from a solid 3/4 to the more consoling 6/8 and Brahms’ tonality changes to the major while his melodic line pursues a complementary path to that urged by the worrisome lad who thinks he’s throwing down a commitment gauntlet at the end of the seventh stanza.

No such affirmation in the melancholy depression of the May night wanderer who clearly thinks the search for his lachelndes Bild is fruitless, its only outcome this perfectly posed lied which surges to a compelling ardour in Knighton’s hands at the flattened supertonic downward arpeggio in the seventh-last bar: a superlative example of poetic self-pity.

Separating both is the happy outpouring about love’s freshness and the elation of its emergence in what I assume is a young man’s voice although, in these piping times of transgenderization, nothing can be taken at face value. Knighton and Farid approach this passionate lyric through a vivid realization of its Lebhaft direction, the pianist’s hands full of syncopated middle voices across the lied’s stretch, leavening the cello’s regularly-shaped vocal line.

You’ll find so many indelible pages in Brahms’ output that have maintained their power to move, years after your first experience: the Violin Concerto’s finale opening, the gloom-piercing Ihr habt nur Traurigkeit from A German Requiem, that amiable Menuetto from the D Major Serenade,, the subterranean hugger-mugger of the finale to the Symphony No. 3, an open-handed humanity from the opening bars of the G Major Violin Sonata, the enthralling breadth of the Piano Trio in B Major’s first 44 bars – you could go on for some time.

Among these passages of unforgettable responsiveness strikes is the first movement entire of the E minor Cello Sonata. Knighton and Farid’s reading works as something like a scouring revelation to those of us who play it as a tussle for supremacy; for example, the forceful contest between bars 54 and 65, or the lurching inexorability between bars 111 and 125. In this account, the duel remains rational and disciplined, thanks to Farid’s delivery of a moderate dynamic output. You find plenty of willing power in this disc’s interpretation but the intention of the players’ output is to emphasize the muffled drive of the composer’s construct, peppered with some eloquent detailed work, such as the slight hiatus heralding a change of key at bar 50, and Knighton’s haunting, veiled line at the repeat of the exposition’s opening.

An important factor in the appeal of this movement comes with the performers’ responsiveness to each other, especially in their mirrored phrasing, best exemplified across the development section’s pages which are a model of mutual pliability. Mind you, these musicians stick to a schedule, even at the relaxation of this movement’s coda when we change to E Major for a consoling lullaby and the pace is less stringently marked. Of course, that emotional ease after pages of controlled stress is one of the joys with which Brahms delights us, if nowhere more touchingly so than here.

When it comes to the Allegretto quasi Menuetto, the performers present the movement with an easy grace, their phrasing well-balanced and congruent, Farid happy to set the running from bar 47 to bar 59 where the piano has all the action over an unexceptional bass-reinforcing cello part. Here again, you can find details that pique your attention, as in the Boskovsky-like hesitation concluding bar 70 (that recurs at the end of the pleasantly fluid Trio’s second part).

Unlike most other assaults on the final Allegro, Knighton and Farid have a rather laid-back approach where the fugal lines are given plenty of air, the ambience less fierce than you’d expect. Still, this makes sense when you consider the clarity of the writing and the uncomplicated nature of the entries while the fugue is still in operation. Knighton makes an effective splaying of those solitary cello bass notes in the polemic of bars 25 to 29, But the most noticeable factor in this version is the lucidity of mass from both players, especially in those pages that are often handled as a sweaty welter, which includes pretty much everything from bar 147, through the Piu presto, up to the concluding clincher. This interpretation dances in well-heeled shoes rather than the all-too-common galoshes.

When we come to the Sonata No. 2, the atmosphere changes completely. Its first pages are notable for a tremolando urgency in the piano underpinning a vibrant, buoyant outpouring from the cello, the complex excellently handled by Knighton and Farid as Brahms moves from exuberance to less active, more measured elation, then back again to furious action from both participants. Later, you can relish the narrative directness of the development with its sequence of compressed treatments, culminating in the reversal of roles between bars 92 and 118 where the cello is all a-flutter while the piano articulates quiet, full-bodied chords, this passage remembered in passing before the emphatic conclusion.

An attractive sentiment typifies the Adagio affettuoso and a gentle and pliant approach makes for a reading that involves you, even if it doesn’t overwhelm with emotional weight. Neither player goes for the jugular, except possibly at the emphatic start to bar 64 where Knighton’s pizzicato is unexpectedly percussive; both maintain a consistency of pace and pointed emphasis in crescendo–decrescendo tides, Knighton employing a healthy vibrato while observing the decencies, rather than spilling over into ripe blather.

Once again, you could find much to admire in the following Allegro passionato, particularly Farid’s sensible handling of some very thick writing, not least those hemiolas that start in bars 17-24 and recur (in both instruments) across the movement. Later, what a welcome delight to break out of a particularly emphatic batch of them at bar 109! Then, alongside the galumphing rhythmic high-jinks, you reach a lyrical pearl in the Trio from bar 180 to bar 191, even more welcome in its glowing repeat. Again, you have to thank these performers for the aural rewards they give us in the clear delivery of texture in these pages that are often treated with more bucolic gruffness than is necessary.

We arrive at the final Allegro molto and strike a friendly enough landscape, if not a particularly long-winded one. The only feature of its plain main melody that strikes interest is the flattened leading note in bar 3; the rest of the melodic terrain makes for plain sailing. One of the few later points of interest comes with Farid’s deft account of the right hand in bar 28 where the triplets against regular quavers are enunciated with admirable ease. But then Farid is a model of care in his work, as witnessed across these two sonatas with no detail glossed over and a high degree of consideration for Knighton.

So welcome to this new CD which provides us with a fine demonstration of a partnership in full fruition, the partners’ energies and talents exercised on a brace of cello/piano masterpieces. It makes a welcome addition to the libraries of Brahms enthusiasts and a true pleasure to the ears of those who delight in experiencing chamber music at its most appealing.

KEYS TO HEAVEN

Australian Chamber Choir

Move Records MCD 659

A reconstruction is the main point of interest in this new CD from the Australian Chamber Choir of Melbourne (similar to the Australian Chamber Orchestra of Sydney). Elizabeth Anderson, long-time ACC member and wife of the body’s artistic director/conductor, came across a fragment or six written by Agata della Pieta, one of that fortunate group educated at the Ospedale in Venice with which charitable institution Vivaldi’s name remains inextricably linked. Anderson discovered some parts for Agata’s setting of Ecce nunc (or Psalm 134) in Venice’s Benedetto Marcello Library and built up a working version for public presentation.

As well as this novelty, the choir has produced another reading of Palestrina’s Missa Aeterna Christi munera to sit alongside its previous recording of 2014/15. Among a scattering of bibs and bobs, Allegri’s Miserere enjoys an airing; I think I first heard the ensemble sing this polychoral warhorse in 2010. More Allegri comes with Christus resurgens ex mortuis for 8 voices. And there’s a neatly wound version of Palestrina’s papal office-affirming Tu es Petrus for six voices, director Douglas Lawrence making sure we hear the Secunda pars which is omitted in many recordings and scores.

The CD itself is a compendium with the Christus resurgens and Palestrina mass coming from a live performance in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, Middle Park, Melbourne given during November 2019. The latter composer’s motet also emerges live from a week before in St. Andrew’s Church, Brighton, Melbourne. The all-too-well-known Miserere setting seems to be a collation of two performances: one at the Middle Park church on August 23, 2023, the other three days later at Mandeville Hall in Toorak, Melbourne.

As for the Agata psalm-setting, the greater part of this recording took place in the Scots’ Church, Melbourne on May 4 2022, eleven days after the work’s world premiere in Terang, Victoria. One solitary track from the ‘new’ score – the contralto aria In noctibus – was taped at the Collins Street venue almost two years later on April 12, 2024. Which makes this last the most recent track on a disc which has enjoyed a five-year gestation.

Anderson’s realization divides the psalm into four sections. The first sentence is covered by two movements: a soprano solo with choral interference, then a plain soprano solo. Unfortunately, the booklet accompanying this disc allots to the aria a line of text that is actually included in the soprano-plus-chorus opener, which led to an inordinate amount of repeating the tracks to trace what was going on. The specially-recorded contralto solo takes care of the second sentence, and the third and final one is given to the chorus. Fleshing out this brevity, we hear a doxology in two parts, the initial Triune extolment given to two solo sopranos, the following unlimited-time guarantee fulfilled by a single soprano and chorus – just as at the work’s opening which provides its material.

Lawrence employs modest forces to bring this score to life, including a string quintet and Rhys Boak on organ. His choral forces are also modest with six sopranos and four each of altos, tenors and basses. Still, the work itself is hardly Baroque-Heavy, as you can predict from its opening ritornello: a mobile, gentle chain of semiquavers, delivered carefully if marginally out-of-tune at the end of bar 3: a predictable problem when playing non-vibrato in stile antico. Amelia Jones‘ soprano makes a clean business of the opening solo and the choral body continues the placid ambience established at the opening.

The following aria for Jones with Jennifer Kirsner‘s obbligato violin, Qui statis in domo Domini, presents an adroit duet contemporaneous with many another more complicated (and more interesting) exercise in this form to be found in Bach’s cantatas and Passions. Reconstructor-contralto Anderson also enjoys Kirsner’s assistance through her aria which shows that the singer’s voice has remained the same over the many years that I’ve been listening to it it; accurate, but awkward in delivery.

The Benedicat te chorus is brief, standing in as a palate-cleanser, just like a chorale in the more substantial German works being written at the same time as Agata was composing this gentle piece. A soprano duet – Jones and Kristina Lang – begins the doxology, distinguished by the excellent complementary timbre of the singers and the occasionally scrappy upper violin contributions in triplets. Then Jones enjoys a solo – shorter than in the opening movement – for the Sicut erat up to et semper, before the choir enters to re-appraise all the concluding lines of this placid wind-up to so many prayers in the Western Christian tradition.

As a whole, the newly-discovered setting gives us an eminently approachable sample of this period’s compositional style, Agata’s instance notable for its benign atmosphere and generally predictable progress. We’re introduced to a creative voice that few of us would encounter across our life-spans, and one that speaks with a sort of quiet confidence. How much is Agata and how much Anderson, we’ll probably never know, but the composite entity makes for attractive listening, excellent material for any chamber choir who wants to engage with a score that is gracious, elegant and reverent – not descriptors that you can apply to much that came out of the magniloquent city of St. Mark.

Palestrina’s motet enjoyed a straightforward interpretation; a bit four-square for my taste, sticking to its pulse with few signs of relaxation (except at the cadences to both parts). But the output remained dynamically balanced across all six lines and the not-too-long melodic arches came across as shapely, except for a length abridgement at the end of the first super terram where sopranos (canti), altos and tenors bounced off the final syllable in order to maintain the rigid tempo. But I suppose when you’re dealing with rocks, the inclination to present an inexorable surface is very tempting.

I’m assuming that there was something of a carry-over of personnel between the mass tapings across the 4/5 year gap; certainly I recognize a few names in this current CD list that were part of the ensemble when I was reviewing the ACC’s Middle Park events. Nothing else I’ve heard has come close to the 1959 recording of this work by the Renaissance Singers in the Church of St. Philip Neri, Arundel: the most riveting, ardent interpretation you could wish for. You’re in for a more balanced demonstration of Renaissance choral music in Lawrence’s hands. Here, tout n’est qu’ordre et beaute, sort of, but you can forget about the luxe and volupte even if calme is all the go.

The ACC’s Kyrie is a model of linear clarity and parity of parts; no change of pace for the Christe but a steady and regular field of play with almost the same disposition of singers as for the Ecce nunc, an extra bass giving substance to that gloriously singable line. More regularity emerged in the Gloria, resulting in a curtailed second syllable in the first Patris just before the Qui tollis chords. However, the ensemble made a fine fist of the piece as a complete construct and – marvel of marvel for us old-time Catholics – you could decipher every word.

A few details intrigued during the progress of the Credo, like the delicate breaks in the Genitum non factum statement up to facta sunt; also a softening of dynamic without the usual deceleration at the Et incarnatus moment; as well, a brightening of attack at the Et in Spiritum Sanctum affirmation; and the realization of those warm key changes at simul adoratur and Et expecto resurrectionem. Despite the rhythmic inevitability (to this geriatric mind, reminiscent of the Creed in Schubert’s G Major D. 167), the luminous pairing of lines that punctuate this movement sounded finely etched and even the two passages of rather ordinary counterpoint impressed for their transparency.

If you were going to exercise rhythmic fluidity, you’d have to engage in it during the Sanctus, where the Hosanna is ideally staged for drama and a suggestion of haste. Not here; Lawrence keeps his singers bound to an unvarying speed. Not even the Benedictus trio shows any deviation from the regular, although the Hosanna return manages to engender a restrained elation. You can actually sympathize with the conductor’s approach to this composition where the chaste sparseness of its content makes a clear parallel with the abstract eloquence of plainchant.

For the Agnus Dei, the pace is slower, more considered as the composer indulges in plenty of textual repetition (as compared with the speedy despatch of the Gloria and Credo). Again, the balance is very fine, each line distinct in the mesh. But the work’s glory is the expansion into five parts for the final pages. This splits the tenors in two and the ACC singers sound appreciably thinner. Still, they are distinguishable in this reading and refrain from braying their top notes but maintain a quiet and controlled output in sync with their colleagues.

There are very few pages in all Western music that offer the consolations of Palestrina’s concluding bars from the dona nobis pacem emergence to the end. When I’ve sung this in previous incarnations, the pace has generally slowed, possibly because of the nature of these final pleas. Very little compares with the subtle consolatory suggestions of those flattened leading notes in the tenor and bass lines as they approach that breathtaking, concluding plagal cadence, here articulated with cautious devotion.

There’s not much to say about the choir’s version of Allegri’s Miserere. Lawrence has rehearsed his men effectively so that the plainchant sections impress for their gravity and sense of space; just as in the best monasteries, there’s all the time in the world. The five-part choir shows itself willing to give power and impetus to their work while the solo quartet – sopranos Elspeth Bawden and Kate McBride, alto Anderson, bass Thomas Drent – operate comfortably in their remote, exposed roles. I don’t know which of these sopranos takes the high Cs but the pitching is exact, the ornamentation pretty lucid.

But the number of participants involved is only 18, which cuts down to 14 for the five-part body when you deduct the four soloists. More impressive is the solid output of the 21-strong group that presents the Christ resurgens motet. There’s plenty of power at the extremities with 7 sopranos and 6 basses surrounding quartets of altos and tenors. The sound is sumptuous throughout, with a nice difference in character between the two choirs at antiphonal passages, the full-bodied stretches a splendid affirmation, particularly during the powerful Alleluias that conclude the three Epistle to the Romans extracts which make up the elements of this polyphonic gem.

BEING

Daniel Pini

Move Records MCD 622

Cellist Daniel Pini comes from a well-known Australian string family. His father Carl founded the Australian Chamber Orchestra, handing over artistic leadership to Richard Tognetti about 200 years ago, and he led the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the first half of the 1990s. I also remember a string quartet performance (part of an all-Beethoven cycle?) he led which was held in the Athenaeum Theatre many years ago. As well, Daniel Pini’s mother, Jane Hazelwood, still plays with the violas in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and some of his siblings are also musicians.

This is Pini’s debut CD album and he is promulgating local composers and their solo cello works with a will. Brett Dean provides the longest work in Eleven Oblique Strategies, written in 2014 for that year’s Emanuel Feuermann Competition held in Berlin. Carl Vine‘s 1994 Inner World for amplified cello and pre-recorded tape (the best kind) is next in size, followed by Liza Lim‘s Invisibility written in 2009 for French composer/cellist Severine Ballon. Red Earth, White Clay was written for Nicholas McManus by Victoria Pham in 2018, the product of an archaeological expedition to Sri Lanka during that year. As for the briefest piece, that comes from Deborah Cheetham Fraillon in her Permit Me of 2020, commissioned by the Canberra Symphony Orchestra and first performed by principal cello Patrick Suthers.

Dean’s work takes its impetus from a collection of aphorisms published in 1975 by Brian Eno of ambient music fame and visual artist Peter Schmidt. These mots were intended to provide either inspiration or stimulus, depending on the respondent’s state of play (or non-play), Dean’s first piece, Listen to the quiet voice, offers specific cells – quite a number of them – and hardly finishes elaborating some of them before he moves into the next piece without a pause: A line has two sides. This employs a vaulting interval that could derive from the first piece’s opening gambit, but the strategy concludes with a catchy, skipping motive familiar from the centre of the initial piece.

Don’t stress one thing more than another acts as a moto perpetuo in which the performer simply churns out notes in a repetitious pattern that obeys the instruction of not emphasizing anything. Until its ending when the action changes in dynamic to strong assertiveness before moving to a study in concentration with Look at a small object, look at its centre which revolves around an insistently repeated note with arabesques spiralling out from it. This piece is notable for the fulcrum study moving out-of-kilter into descending quarter-tones; possibly, an excess of concentration is implied.

When we arrive at What are the sections sections of?, Dean outlines some more cells that appear to juxtapose rather than intersect – a glissando mimicking the work’s opening gesture, a skittering dance fragment, finally a single yearning note that seems to be played consecutively on two different strings. Possibly, the answer to this segment’s question is that the sections are just sections – discrete, not sub-sections. Or perhaps the proposal goes in one ear and rattles in empty space, as so much does with me these days. In Don’t be frightened to show your talents, the composer revisits Strategy Three with a fast-moving chain of notes that gradually move from the cello’s bass to its centre before entering a new field where virtuosic double-stops interrupt the flow and the forward motion moves up the instrument’s register in a splendid mimesis of 19th century concerto writing.

This continues throughout Disciplined self-indulgence which consists almost entirely of double-,triple- and quadruple-stops with an accent on the last of these as the level of intensity – already sharp – rises to an extreme level. Suddenly, we are faced with a striking descending figure in single notes that prefaces Bridges – build – burn. We begin with a powerful rhetoric that returns to the slashing quadruple stops of the previous section, before the fabric slowly collapses in a descending sequence of tremolo shakes, moving down the cello’s range until an inevitable silence.

Ghost echoes is the longest of these short pieces and, as you’d guess from its title, the most ephemeral as we occupy a soundscape where nothing rises above the piano level; in fact, much of its length sounds to be played in pianissimo territory: a music of suggestions, inferences only with a few clear remembrances of aphorisms past. For the Buddhist Disconnect from desire, the composer asks for his player to administer a series of double-stops non vibrato, surely projecting the absence of emotion as a state of what I can only describe as mobile stasis; the music changes notes and register but the effect is a dissociative one.

To end, we are In a very large room very quietly where the atmosphere is just a tad less soft than in Ghost echoes and the sound palette is rich in harmonics and shadows, with a final hint of the leap at the opening to the whole work. Which makes a splendid, challenge-filled contribution to the solo cello repertoire, putting an interpreter through plenty of hurdles and sustaining a sure continuity as Dean juggles his brief bursts of activity with fine craft. I’m still a bit doubtful about Pini’s realization of some high-pitched, soft sections which seemed to waver in their security. But the work convinced for the player’s realization of its inbuilt dramatic shifts in attack and colour.

How big is Vine’s Inner World? It’s a multi-partite entity, for sure, which begins promisingly enough with a series of arresting gestures: a minor 10th vault upwards, sets of demi-semiquavers and hemi-demi-semiquavers, rapid flourishes after sustained notes, further and more elaborately finished variants on that initial springboard – then a tape is added, based on sounds generated by the piece’s original performer and dedicatee, David Pereira. Once this new voice enters, the piece embarks on an often predictable path with two fast segments urged on by a regular motor rhythm surrounding a lyrical, rich nocturne.

The opening sounds like free-fall where the approach is rhapsodic, with the live cello following a lyrical path while the tape provides background colour. This makes for a ‘modern’ sound if not too adventurous, even by the standards of 1994, But then a sequence of tape sparkles and a kind of duet between taped and live cello take over; the sparkles transform to a cimbalom punctuation and the duet/canon continues with more intensity, although the taped component leaves the imitative set-up quickly and opts for harmonic distancing.

The slow middle-or-thereabouts segment gives space to the live cello outlining a slow neo-diatonic melody with an active but hazy background from the other sound source. Some almost menacing taped glissandi and percussive knocks with an overload underpinning pulse bring us to the happy final section where notated and electronic glissandi lead to a happily concordant coda. complete with common-chord quadruple stops from Pini and an abstention from discord that would warm the heart of any reactionary who has endured those previous indications of experimentation.

A good deal of the tape content employs familiar electronic tropes, like the falling bird calls that eventually end the piece, blocks imitative of organ chords, percussive bands that propel the work’s progress with as much subtlety as a rock drummer. I’m not experienced enough in the field to tell if all this material came from Pereira’s instrument or whether some of it was manufactured by studio equipment, but the resulting entity impresses as a suite springing from the work’s first flourishes; rather like Dean’s Strategies.

Lim operates on an aesthetic level far beyond my ability to imbibe fully, but her scores offer an overwhelming breadth of sounds and timbres, each refined and directed to allow for little deviation. She presents a world of subterranean shifts in dynamic and textural shivers across the canvas of Invisibility which calls for two bows: one orthodox, the other with the hair plaited around the stick. To be honest, I don’t understand how the latter produces continuous sounds, but it works – in this recording and in other YouTube performances.

Still, the sonic output stretches the instrument’s array of sound production, even when the player shifts to an orthodox bow when the score accelerates its level of ferocity and initial bite. Towards the work’s conclusion, the player is called upon to use both bows simultaneously, the plaited one eventually ranging up and down the fingerboard in an eerie conjunction of the earthbound and the otherworldly. And that, to me, forms the attractiveness of the experience: a double-barrelled world where nothing can be anticipated and your ears are stretched by the whole engagement.

Easier to imbibe, Victoria Pham’s Red Earth, White Clay appears to exist in discrete sections that might have thematic links but presents on the surface as moving into distinct atmospheres through changes in pulse (where there is one) and the presence of key motifs. The composer’s intention is to revisit the sights and sounds of a dig in which she participated at the northern tip of Sri Lanka. During the central pages of the piece, we have aural references to village/tribal dancing through a repeated bass note punctuated by a melody and some brisk chords. The outer sections that mirror each other (with a bit of Bach suites-like broad-beamed arpeggios suddenly emerging) might pertain to the dig site itself and the impossible-to-convey title of the score.

Pham’s vocabulary, despite glissandi and other gestures towards the contemporary (including some striking harmonics), is conservative, the work beginning with emphatic suggestions of G and D minor; even the post-dance-chugging segment presents a melodic flow that is packed with Romantic nuances. In harmonic sympathy, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon employs an even more limited language in her Permit Me which opens with an A minor cell and stays with that tonality for much of its little-over-three-minutes’ length. The composer projects a mournful ambience, suggesting a lament or at least regret, peppered up slightly in the centre by an abrupt burst of action.

Still, I don’t know for what the composer is asking permission; every time I see those words, I’m reminded, in my culturally blinkered fashion, of the heroine’s address to Bunthorne in the Act 1 finale to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. But you’d have to suspect that Cheetham Fraillon’s intentions are more severe, given the brooding quality of this near-elegy.

The CD is not a long one – about 49 minutes’ worth. Nevertheless, it’s a wide-ranging compendium of solo cello compositions written over a 26-year stretch, demonstrating the broad gap between the innate complexity and sophistication of senior writers when opposed to the reversions embraced by younger voices to that old-time creation. Pini’s performances, as far as I can tell without scores, are temperamentally faithful although a few details in the more complex works come over as wavering, uncertain, and I suspect that he takes the occasional rhythmic liberty. But he’s to be congratulated on putting his talents at the service of local creative minds, some of them highly demanding.

THRENODY

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Records MD 3475

Here is a re-issue by Move of a recording that was printed almost 30 years ago by the Astra Chamber Music Society. Re-mastered by the indispensable Martin Wright, this CD underlines with pretty heavy scoring the debt that Australian music owes to Harvey, whose dedication to the local product (both the significant and the not-so-remarkable) has remained unswerving across his long, seemingly tireless career. What you hear in this collection is evidence of his professionalism and insights, handling works by six composers (and a couple of his own) with skill and sympathy.

Harvey begins with his own stunning Toccata DNA pf 1993 and later gives us his lesser-known Addict from the following year. Between these two, he plays Carl Vine‘s Five Bagatelles of 1994, Stuart Campbell‘s Quaquaversal from the same year, Eight Preludes by John McCaughey coming from 1991-3, Andrew Byrne‘s Within Stanzas of 1993, Eight Bagatelles by Keith Humble written in 1992, and James Anderson‘s 1994 Reveria im Neuen Stil. He splits the Vine pieces by conserving the last – Threnody – for his final track. All these pieces occupy a compressed compositional time-span, testament to the performer’s intense curatorship as well as demonstrating a sudden temporal rush to the Australian compositional head/brain from composers both well-known and obscure.

Still, there’s not much new to say about this re-issue of a significant body of work that’s been around for so long (that’s assuming that the Astra CD has been available over the years). The portentous opening to Harvey’s toccata with its slow-moving segments brings to mind the variety of Buxtehude before a launch into ostinato-heavy rapidity and that unstoppable headlong flight that seems to me inimitable, this composer-pianist’s own voice speaking with absolute conviction and generating the sort of excitement that you will find only at odd moments in this disc’s later tracks.

With Vine’s Five Bagatelles, we encounter another master-pianist/composer at work in a brilliantly balanced sequence, opening with a rather benign Darkly that presents some material that looks complex on paper but sounds transparent; for example at its splayed chord agglomerations between bars 22 and 25. This is succeeded by the raid-fire syncopations and time-signature oscillations of Leggiero e legato which enjoys a crisp, sparkling run-through.

The control of meshed colour returns in Gentle which opens and closes with more of those splayed chords surrounding the statement of a quiet melody that could have strayed in from an unpublished set of Debussy preludes; shadowy and suggestive in its outer reaches, placid at the core. The untitled fourth bagatelle proposes a raunchy jazz-inflected stroll, like Gershwin’s American brought forward 66 years, but the jauntiness interrupted by more sustained chords offering a brief hiatus, before a nifty note-cluster conclusion expertly accomplished by Harvey.

As many would know, Vine wrote his Threnody for the Australian National AIDS Trust fund-raising dinner, the other four pieces added later with the total work premiered by Harvey at the end of 1994, Its subtitle – for all the innocent victims – is reflected in its character which follows a simple stepping motion that suggests a hymn with an added high mixture stop at a 5th in alt. The result suggests resignation, calm acceptance of an inevitability, and the essential blamelessness of all those trapped in this once-fatal infection. It makes for a sobering conclusion to the CD, a respite from the complexities and abrasiveness of much that precedes it.

Coming round to Campbell’s Quaquaversal, we face a virtuosic complex opening with some massive chords reminiscent of a cathedrale engloutie for our times before a fugal interplay that alters to a ort of ostinato bass supporting a wealth of coruscating darts and flashes. Then the composer’s promise of fluency rather than development sort of takes over with several contrasting episodes (with a mid-level repeated chord featuring in the work’s centre, surrounded by a wealthy of Harveyesque bursts of brilliance). But then, the work was written for the pianist by this one-time member of La Trobe University’s Faculty of Music and it features some pages of dazzling pointillism as it approaches its toccata-like conclusion.

I’m sure a wealth of theoretical depth underpins this work which bursts with verve but you have to assume that the basic impetus comes from the title’s middle six letters. Whatever the case, this is a splendid vehicle for the pianist’s panoply of skills. From another one-time labourer in the La Trobe vineyard, McCaughey’s collection moves us into a more refined landscape; four of his preludes lasting less than a minute, the other four averaging 80 seconds in length. The opening Fluent lives up to its name with some restrained ambles at reserved speed up and down the keyboard. You hesitate to typify the vocabulary but I’d probably light on a compulsive atonality. Presto segreto is not a whirlwind rush but a series of lurches from one pivot to the next, eventually working into its own secret by slowing to a concluding crawl.

With No. 3, Animated, hastening, McCaughey takes us into just that: an atmosphere of abrupt bursts of action punctuated by pivotal mini-pauses, as though the protagonist is faced with a series of dead-ends that set him/her/them doubling back for an alternative outlet. Quick presents as a monophonic sprint, for the most part – possessed by a neurotic elfin urgency. Next, the odd aspect to A sense of slow background tempo is that you’re aware of a rhythmic reticence, as though the work’s progress is being conducted on two levels or in twin layers, even if the overall impression is of a sturdy post-Webernianism.

Mind you, Semplice carries on where its predecessor left off, typified by a forward mobility in which the motives or thematic cells meld into a well-woven fabric; more a handkerchief than a carpet. An overt contrast arrives with Leggiero, recitativo where the principal end is fitfulness, rapid squiggles providing the solid events in this brevity that you could call either whimsical or neurasthenic, depending on your currently predominant sense of aesthetic charity. McCaughey’s concluding Serene seems to be more a journey towards the proposed state rather than a depiction of its prevalence as the piece moves with a confident angularity that occasionally amounts to aggression before a brief resolution.

Byrne recently became a co-director with McCaughey of the Astra organization and he also nurtured his own academic roots in the La Trobe Faculty of Music. After an initial hearing, I thought I discerned four separate sections to this composer’s Within Stanzas; take a few more and you realize that there are a lot more of them. It’s just that they bleed into each other with remarkable fluency so that a sound-production gesture or a timbral-interplay sequence becomes part of a new context or landscape. Mind you, Byrne is lavish with his material which overwhelms your desire for instant auditory analysis, notably in the opening pages’ rhythmic and dynamic conundrums that dazzle with their effective unpredictability. Here again is anther composition tailored to Harvey’s brilliance and premiered by him at an Astra concert, but it is noteworthy that Byrne has withdrawn this score from sale or public performance. He has apparently moved on, and so should we.

Closer to a minute shorter than McCaughey’s preludes, Humble’s brevities show the pianist-composer in assured mode, the score rich in awareness of the instrument’s breadth of colours and most impressive in its rapid-fire virtuosity. You find an illustration of this in the opening Fast which exposes an assured forward thrust while ranging over the piano’s compass before a contradictory slow conclusion. The following Slow is still an instance of forward motion, couched in a compositional style that brings to mind the 19th century more than the composer’s dodecaphonic home ground, with a rich, sustained major chord to cap proceedings.

Easily the longest of these bagatelles is No. 3, For Tony P., very slow, molto rubato. This could be an elegy or just a quiet eulogy; it’s the most placid and stress-less of the collection, opening woth a minor 3rd cell and expanding on this in the best Berg style with a prominent byway to a set of major 3rds articulated at dead-slow before a diabolus in musica finishing interrogation. Move it opens with a confrontational syncopated sequence, full of fast-flying bravura before a fade-to-black close to its 30 seconds length. With Agitato, we’re in Harvey Land through a chain of rapid-fire oscillations across both ends of the keyboard in a fierce display of an unsettled musical state. The No. 6, EKE Bounce easily (and naturally) continues along the frenzy-in-short-bursts path with some brilliant percussive attacks from Harvey before the familiar wind-down final bars.

Slow impresses me as a valse sentimentale manquée, even if the pulse can work against it. But you sense a kind of regret, a nostalgia in this second-longest of the bagatelles, after the (in its context) substantial No. 3. To end, Humble gives us a burleske that is much shorter than the track listing. This is good-humoured and another opportunity to wonder at Harvey’s assured command of what amounts to a study in exuberance. This work brings to a close (as far as I can tell) the CD’s association with La Trobe University where Humble was the first Professor of Music from 1974 to 1984, that faculty eventually shutting down in 1999 to general dismay.

Anderson remains a shadowy figure in Melbourne’s musical world but his Reveria was written for Harvey which speaks to his presence on the city’s contemporary music scene in the early 1900s, at least. This reverie is pitched to the top half of the keyboard with a few low pedal notes to remind you how high is the piece’s operating field. Anderson’s projected state of detachment is packed with vivid flashes featuring frequent flurries of cascading gruppetti punctuated by solid blocks of notes and centre-register diversions. The composer’s emphasis on upper-level flashes does become wearying but Harvey’s account forefronts any inbuilt timbral and emotional variety.

The pianist’s Addict involves a collaboration with sound engineer Michael Hewes who brings computer processing into the mix, complementing Harvey’s playing. Here is the most advanced composition on the CD, chiefly because of its parallels and distortions of the live performance, if only in patches to begin with, but eventually the partnership becomes more challenging. Harvey begins with a rapidly repeated note like a tremolo and he finishes in the same way, but the work evolves soon enough into a rapid-fire moto perpetuo that flummoxes with its tiers of activity.

Hewses employs several electronic/computer techniques, none more prominent than that mirroring effect where Harvey’s sound is duplicated by what sounds like a West Indies steel drum; this has the effect of both reinforcing your impression of Harvey’s trademark agility and also distracts from its purity – which might be a comment on the title character’s state of mind. Whatever the case, the collaboration makes for a wild ride, the emotional state on view very hyped-up and certainly not comatose; this is an addict in search of relief and, even by the end, the sufferer is undergoing nightmares in recollection.

As noted above, Vine’s Threnody brings the CD to a close, an oasis after frenzy in more than one sense. Still, the recording is well worth obtaining (or re-obtaining) as a witness to Harvey’s unfailing musicianship as well as a document of this country’s (well, Melbourne’s, mainly) aggressively active music scene and the wealth of talent at work in it across these few years.

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CROSSING PATHS

Ensemble Liaison and Tony Gould Trio

Move Records MD 3473

First, a few confessions – or better, admissions. I’ve known Tony Gould for about 50 years through our student days when working at a Master’s Preliminary year under Keith Humble at Melbourne University Conservatorium. Tony survived that ridiculously cavalier class and went on to greater things; I left the room and came back years later to take up the same degree with a real teacher. Further, I’ve known the Liaisons for a fair while: pianist Timothy Young since he took on the role of resident pianist at the Australian National Academy of Music in South Melbourne; the other Ensemble members – Svetlana Bogosavljevic and David Griffiths – since pretty close to the formation of this excellent group in 2007.

This CD is not so much a collaborative project but a set of juxtapositions. It begins with the Liaisons playing the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria in a straight arrangement – well, as straight as that sentimental hybrid can get. Then Gould and his colleagues – saxophone Angela Davis, bass Ben Robertson – give their version of the same piece. The Andantino middle movement from Faure’s Trio in D minor follows; again, turn and turn about. A change arrives with Satie’s Three Gymnopedies which the Ensemble plays complete, Young working the original No. 2 by himself with the outer pieces involving his partners. Gould and Co. offer their interpretation of No. 1 only.

Continuing the religious motif, we hear an ‘original’ version of Piazzolla’s Ave Maria before the jazz variant offers an essay in conciseness. We return to Faure with readings of the composer’s popular Apres un reve. Finally, we are treated to a transcription and a brisk interpretation of Schumann’s Traumerei. Then the CD seems to peter out in a version by the Liaisons of Schubert’s Ave Maria (what is it with this prayer?), followed by a piano solo from Gould of Gershwin’s Love Walked In.

All of this makes for what is called ‘easy’ listening, a sequence of tracks that raises no temperatures and plumbs no angst-ridden emotional depths. The Liaison group show their polish in a series of controlled tracks and this calm ambience is reflected in the contributions from Gould and his colleagues. Bach/Gounod’s golden oldie starts with the familiar piano ripples while Bogosavljevic outlines the French composer’s lavish melody with gentle authority and a carefully judged use of vibrato; second verse around, Griffith enters with an almost-not-there adjunct set of sustained notes that weave a most restrained counterpoint that informs but doesn’t intrude.

After a leisurely introduction, Davis generates a quiet meandering line over Gould’s re-invention of Bach’s arpeggio figure with Robertson following the Griffiths’ role of quiet subservience. The modulations are completely different and you’d be going to trace many parallels between the original tune and the sax’s quiet, breathy investigations. But the trio keeps in touch with the original material, a direct quote peeping through at various points.

For the Faure Piano Trio movement, Griffiths’ clarinet takes the original’s violin line with ultra-smooth results, nowhere better than those two points in this gentle movement where the non-keyboard lines operate on a single melody, most movingly in the last stretches from a bar after Number 8 in the Durand score of 1923 – the year of the work’s premiere. Oddly enough, the composer originally planned for a clarinet to take the violin’s usual place and (at least in this Andantino) there’s nothing that the wind instrument can’t achieve technically that makes the transcription a no-no. Faure’s score rises to two modestly passionate highpoints but the harmonic textures show as largely uncomplicated and the performance is suitably restrained in dynamic terms.

Gould and his colleagues’ reading is rather brief – about 2 minutes to the Liaison’s 6 – and the pianist appears to take his brief from bars 8 and 9 of the original, Robertson pattering away at a roving bass while Davis plays a short variant that I can’t source. Still, that’s part of the delight in this exercise where the mutations can take individual forms. Suffice to note that the jazz trio’s emotional stage is less fraught even than that even temper projected by Faure.

As you’d expect, Griffiths and Bogosavlyevic share melody duty in the first Gymnopedie: clarinet first, then cello each time. I’m indifferent to these pages, probably because it’s unclear what the Greek references do for the musical statements, if anything. The performance is clear and properly remote. Young’s solo exposition of the second in the series shows the requisite modesty and dynamic calm that typifies Satie’s prevailing sound-world, albeit with some more interesting chord juxtapositions than its predecessor. To end, clarinet and cello share the melody line turn and turn about while reinforcing the piano’s bass note when they aren’t in the ascendant.

To reiterate, this makes for an amiable enough experience, although I can’t see Satie’s little essaylets adding up to qualifying for inclusion for ‘their timeless beauty’ or ‘melodic and harmonic richness’, as the sparse CD cover text claims of the general content. The Gould Trio’s version of the first of these works is, for the piano, heavily based on the original, albeit with many harmonic changes; but the contours are obvious. Not so much with the sax’s delayed entry which introduces a novel spray of meandering arabesques, even if these settle down near the end of the operation to fall in line with the composition’s later melodic content. And the supple bass reinforcement-cum-elaboration from Robertson makes for a real pleasure as he follows Gould in the four-across-the-bar and duple-in-triple-time interludes in what amounts – in all three pieces – to a slow waltz.

Piazzolla’s setting (is it? I thought this was called Tanti anni prima) is placid enough – a simple ternary structure that begins in C and ends in F. The cello takes the melody at first; when a pronounced key change arrives at about bar 19, enter the clarinet; then both combine in unison/octave for the melody’s return. This last duet is distinguished by Griffiths’ sympathy with Bogosavljevic’s restrained timbre. To be frank, I enjoyed the jazz trio’s reading more than the original, especially when Davis got away from simply outlining the initial melody and introduced some rhythmic wiggles in collusion with Gould to brighten up some pretty bog-standard material.

No objections to the Liaisons’ account of Apres un reve. After the cello’s announcement of the first stanza – word-for-word according to Emmanuele Praticelli’s 2023 transcription of the original song – the clarinet joined in to play the rest of the piece’s melody in unison. All very even and an ideal example of how to match your performing parameters to your partner’s. But we didn’t really need the supplementary line, especially as the work is too well-known as a cello recital component or encore.

When Gould started his variant, you had to wonder what he was about as we heard a few bars of La fille aux cheveux de lin before he started his re-examination which turned out to be twice as long as the original and stuck to this latter’s outline for about half the track’s length, then doubling back for a looser appraisal with Davis’s instrument very breathy and close-miked. Again, the modern version intrigued for its unexpected formality and concentration of the composer’s resources in this most effective chanson.

Whoever did the Traumerei arrangement that the Liaisons played was happy to spread the joy. The marvellous melody with its risings and dying falls was given mainly to the clarinet, the cello vaulting between the various levels of the piano’s subsidiary lines. It looked as though Bogosavljevic was being entrusted with the gentle piece’s last sentence, but no: the clarinet got the last word. Now this was/is a work of timeless beauty and the ensemble’s handling here showed affection and insight.

Once again, Gould showed himself in playful mood, opening his trio’s reading with a reference to the Preambule to Carnaval, before weaving a path back for Davis to start her very individual take on this childhood scene. Just before the end of this extended review, Gould gave another reminiscence of the Op. 9 opening before he and Davis colluded in a reprise of the original’s last phrases almost as written. Yet again, we could relish a deft combination of the old and the relatively new, with some mildly left-field bursts from all three participants.

I missed a few of Schubert’s endless sextuplets from Young; they just failed to sound fully on occasions. Griffiths gave us the vocal line for stanza 1 of the lied, followed by Bogosavljevic in stanza 2, while the clarinet provided some very soft supporting sustained notes. We can all agree on the inestimable merit of this peerless melodic fluency and you could not wish for more benign treatment than that given by the Liaisons.

Gould’s final solo treats Gershwin’s classic liberally, inferring more than stating and an affectionate ramble on its chord sequences with occasional nods to the optimistic melody. Still, it makes for an off-centre rounding-out of this miscellany: a collection of emotionally placid works which kind of satisfies if you’re not looking for a dramatic confrontation in these crossing paths – which, more often than not, contrive to intersect satisfactorily.