Author: cliveoconnell

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS?

Claire Patti, Louise Godwin, Tony Gould

Move Records MD 3469

There’s something disarming about this album which is a collection of songs/folk-songs – several of them well-known – performed as trios, duets and solos by Claire Patti (harpist and singer), Louise Godwin (cellist but not employed as much as she could have been), and Tony Gould (pianist and the heaviest participant in this amiable exercise). I say ‘well-known’, but that might only apply to that generation that boasts Gould and me (he is my senior by a few years). The Skye Boat Song, My love is like a red red rose, Londonderry Air, The Last Rose of Summer, Black is the colour of my true love’s hair and Molly Malone were standard articles of faith in my youth and all enjoy a re-working here.

As well, you will come across a few that ring bells in the memory, if not very clamorous ones: Carrickfergus, Strawberry Lane and Ae fond kiss. Gould and Co. have included an Irish lyric that I’ve never come across – Tha M’aigne fo ghuraim (This gloom upon my soul) – and an English traditional song that none of those great 19th-into-20th century collectors seems to have bothered with: Sweet Lemany. Not to mention a Scottish tune that sounds more promising than its reality in She’s sweetest when she’s naked. Then there’s Idas farval (Ida’s farewell), written by Swedish musician Ale Carr, and Jag vet en dejlig rosa (I know a rose so lovely) which is a traditional tune, also from Sweden; I suspect that both of these spring from Godwin’s interest in that Scandinavian country’s music. From left field comes A little bit of Warlock, which sets some pages from the Capriol Suite, namely the Pieds-en-l’air movement.

The ensemble beginsn with Sweet Lemany, which may have origins in Cornwall, Ireland, or Suffolk; it has certain traits that argue for an Irish genesis. But the setting is original,, first in in that Godwin maintains a one-note pedal throughout, pizzicato and keeping to a mobile rhythmic pattern. Patti sings with a light, refreshing timbre while Gould informs the piece with subtle inflections and brief comments/echoes. For all that, Patti sings four of the five verses available in most editions.

Gould takes the solo spot for William Ross’ Skye Boat Song and, apart from a winsome introduction, sticks to the well-known tune right up to the final bars where the straight melody is subsumed in a brief variant. Most interest here comes from following the executant’s chord sequences which follow an unexceptionable path throughout a mildly meandering interpretation. Gould gives brief prelude to My love is like a red red rose before Patti sings the first two stanzas. Godwin offers a cello statement, before the singer returns with the final two stanzas and an unexpectedly open concluding bar. Gould occasionally offers a high trill to complement Patti’s pure line. And the only complaint I have about the vocal line is the singer’s odd habit of taking a breath after the first few syllables of the third line in most of the stanzas.

Carr’s sweet if repetitive lyric is a sort of waltz with three-bar sentences/phrases, in this case giving the melody first to the cello, then the harp, before the cello takes back the running. The piece’s form is simple ternary and we certainly are familiar with the melody’s shape before the end. More irregularity comes in the Swedish traditional song from the 16th century with its five-line stanzas, here handled as a kind of elderly cabaret number by Patti and Gould, whose support is a supple delight beneath Patti’s somewhat sultry account of what textually should be a love song but musically sounds like a plaint.

The Warlock movement, here a piano solo, gets off to a false start and Gould can be heard saying that he’ll start again. For the most part he is content to follow the (original?) Arbeau melody line and reinforce the British arranger’s harmonization with some slightly adventurous detours along the path. A variant appears shortly before the end but the executant eventually settles back into the format and plays the final two Much slower bars with more delicacy than the original contains. Patti sings two stanzas of the three that make up the ‘standard’ version of Carrickfergus and invests the song with an infectious clarity of timbre, especially at the opening to the fifth line in each division with Gould oscillating between the unobtrusive and mimicking the singer when she moves into a high tessitura.

A harp/cello duet treats James Oswald’s She’s sweetest when she’s naked, which has been described as an Irish minuet (whatever that is). The only peculiarity comes with a change of accent to slight syncopation, first seen in bars 3 and 5 of the first strophe. Patti plays the tune through twice, then Godwin takes the lead for another run-through. Some laid-back ambling from Gould prefaces the Danny Boy reading for solo piano, with just a trace of Something’s Gotta Give before we hit the melody itself. The pianist does not cease from exploration and offers some detours to the original line, as well as a couple of sudden modulations to restatements in a refreshed harmonic setting. For all that, the Air remains perceptible across this investigation, the CD’s longest track.

Staying in Ireland, Gould gives an alluring prelude to The Last Rose of Summer before Patti starts singing Moore’s lines. Godwin has a turn at outlining the original Aisling an Oigfhear melody before the singer returns with the second stanza, then omitting the third, with Gould providing a postlude that puts the first phrase in an unexpected harmonic context. As with all the vocal items on offer, this is quiet and unobtrusive, some worlds away from the habitual thrusting treatment demonstrated by generations of Irish tenors bursting into the role of Flotow’s Lyonel.

Across the sea to Scotland’s Black is the colour of my true love’s hair which Gould opens through some sepulchral bass notes before giving the melody unadorned and unaccompanied before moving into a fantasia that harks back to its source material before resolving into another re-statement of the melody and a reappearance of the opening’s repeated tattoo. This version is comparable in colour to some of the more conscientious American folksingers who have recorded versions of this work, making a slightly unsettling celebration of what is a love-song in a minor key (mode!?) context.

Back across the sea to the island, Godwin plays Tha M’aigne fo ghuraim as a solo, punctuated by sudden turns and grace notes; at well under two minutes, the CD’ shortest track but probably its most obvious and characteristic in terms of its country of origin. Another piano solo, Gould gives us a preamble before playing Strawberry Lane through straight once, then almost doing the same thing again before following his pleasure at the end of the second stanza. Of course, he returns to the melody en plein air near the end but concludes with a reminiscence of his earlier elaboration and an unsatisfying tierce to finish.

Another Burns lyric, if a despondent one, in Ae fond kiss brings Patti’s calm delivery into play once again. She sings all the stanzas except No. 2 in the set of six. Gould offers a mid-flow interlude which, I suppose stands in for the missing lines but the song’s delivery suggests a rather odd 3/4 rhythm as opposed to the more bouncy original 6/8. But the executants’ restraint is put to happy employment throughout. Molly Malone brings up the rear and is another piano solo where Gould plays the stanzas’ sextet several times, giving less space to the three chorus lines. It’s plain sailing through this very familiar melody, the pianist content to follow the air’s contour.

Not everything on this diverting disc works ideally. Some of Gould’s chords sound like abrupt breaks in an otherwise placid flow, some notes don’t sound, and Godwin’s cello seems uncomfortable on one track. Still, you’ll find plenty of material here to entertain and over which you can reminisce – which is clearly (for me, at least) the whole point of the exercise.

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.