Category: CD

THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER

Judith Lambden

Move Records MCD 667

Rather than loading up reviewers with the full 5-disc set of this exercise, Move Records have sent us the first disc only in the series, which takes in the first twelve preludes and fugues of Book 1 in Bach’s monument to adjustable temperament. I don’t know whether this is a case of economy (the rest of the CDs are available on request) or compassion; after all, it’s a substantial task to listen through the whole 48, even if such an effort is good for the soul and serves to pay due respect to the performer.

I’ve heard one previous all-Bach recording on Move from Judith Lambden. It dates from 2021 and comprised the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Italian Concerto and four of the seven keyboard toccatas: a welcome variety in content and form. But this Well-Tempered Clavier performance is a much more concentrated experience, even if the various pairs involved are – to some extent – common currency among pianists/harpsichords today.

Most of us have experienced these pieces in fragmentary form – as components in examination material or as instances of form in musicological investigations. Some musicians will have investigated the two volumes out of curiosity (possibly, a delighted form) at Bach’s endless facility for invention of the highest order. I’d suggest that quite a few keyboard players enjoy certain specific preludes and often their partner fugues more than others; in my lengthy exposure to them, I can count some favourite pairings on the fingers of one digitally semi-amputated hand.

But that’s as a player and substantiates the tedium of studying a piece under compulsion. In the realm of entertainment, the fugues have an emphatic cerebral attraction, primarily in seeing the work that the composer put into manipulating his initial material. Many of the preludes hold little interest, which may be due to over-familiarity, but that’s an unfair complaint and completely irrelevant to Lambden’s achievement which, we are informed by the Move publicity machine, is the fruit of nine years’ preparation and recording.

And it’s not the case that Bach’s compendia are solely useful for educational purposes. I’ve some memories, necessarily faint because they date back to October 2008, of the Canadian Bach specialist Angela Hewitt playing Book I in Melba Hall for Margaret Farren-Price’s Impresaria organization. Mind you, my main recollection is of the gleeful spitefulness from some audience members who detected a fault in one of the later fugues but, if that’s your level of insight after what was a dazzling demonstration of intellectual concentration, it would have been best to keep mouths shut. Sadly, they didn’t.

It’s not as though Lambden is lacking significant predecessors in recording the 48. Glenn Gould, Edwin Fischer, Wanda Landowska, Andras Schiff, Sviatoslav Richter, Rosalyn Tureck, Ton Koopman, Daniel Barenboim and Roger Woodward are only a handful of names in that long list of exponents who chose to put down their versions of these volumes for general delectation. I suppose that Lambden too feels that she has something individual to add to our experiences of this massive construct.

No surprises (are any possible?) with the C Major Prelude; Lambden avoids the ticking-clock approach for a more elastic mode with two points of slight rallentando and a realization of the piece’s climactic at bars 28-9. With the fugue, we are made aware of the subject entries in all four voices by the pianist’s practice of slowing the pace so that the first four notes are crystal clear. Still, while the performer takes care to point up some entries more than others, your sense of coherence is not challenged and it’s novel to hear a reading that pays as much attention to the tenor as to the soprano.

In the C minor Prelude, the toccata approach is muddied by some irregularities where Lambden doesn’t stick to the regular pattern but indulges in occasional blurring or note-clipping. As well, she has some sustained carry-over in the three single-strand bars 25 to 27 which are usually carried out with a love-’em-and-leave-’em touch; and the following Presto doesn’t live up to its name. In the following fugue, my only question is with some crotchets that aren’t sustained – hit well enough but left by the wayside, e.g. the alto crotchets in bars 10 and 11. But Lambden’s approach here, especially near the opening, is full of a welcome lightness that sometimes nears staccato.

I didn’t find the C sharp Major Prelude over-convincing because it came over as awkward with too many moments where fluidity of utterance disappeared, e.g. the left hand work from bar 47 to bar 53 and the subsequent recovery of tempo when the hands’ material is reversed. Again, this fluctuation in speed turned to an asset in the long fugue during which Lambden handled with warmth the middle section with its multiple double-sharps while pointing up some pivotal modulations with some slight pauses-for-emphasis.

No significant problems with the C sharp minor pair. Lambden made a feature of pausing slightly on the initial half-way point of the opening bars but started to distribute her emphases more equitably in the prelude’s second page, again finding a steady fluency in the soprano line whose dominance enjoys only one real challenge and that comes in the concluding five bars. I don’t think you can do much with the five-voice fugue except ensure that the simple subject gets prominence whenever it rears its head. Here again, the entries are handled with flexibility and only rarely do you sense the piece’s polyphonic weight (e.g., bars 99 to 100) as Lambden outlines the intermeshing strands with deliberation but little Romantic heft (apart from that tempting bass C sharp in bar 73).

Some clumsiness marred the delivery of the D Major Prelude with quite a few noticeably clipped notes in what is an evenness study for the right hand and which here started out as if to meet that requirement. As well, Bach’s concluding flurries for both hands – bars 29 to 32 – are treated as spasmodic bursts with interspersed pauses for regrouping, rather than the pell-mell rush that I think they represent as a lead in to the bar 33 cadenza-like flourish. I’ve not heard the fugue treated like this before where the subject’s semiquaver components are treated like demi-semiquavers, a practice that turns this already jumpy construct into a series of unexpected jerks. Does it work? Sort of, but you miss the magisterial progress counterbalancing the theme’s initial flourish/motif.

Lambden makes a better fist (or two) of the D minor Prelude, maintaining her tempo despite some uneven right-hand delivery points on the second page, then making the odd choice to sound the original’s sustained soprano D in the last bar’s first chord. Still, she does the same at the end of the fugue which progresses well enough apart from a pair of laboured alto/tenor trills. You are, by this stage, continuing to welcome the pianist’s intention to keep the polyphony clear but this lucidity can result in momentary digital strain as Lambden avoids employing one of the modern instrument’s greatest gifts: the sustaining pedal.

You encounter a deft example of this artist’s limpid approach in the E flat Major where both prelude and fugue enjoy room to breathe but with few indications that the performer is under stress, least of all in that long prelude with its sudden move to a kind of alla breve before taking up the initial motion fifteen bars later. No surprises of any moment crop up in the E flat minor Prelude – a sterling instance of Bach introducing us, through a slow-moving pavane in 3/2 time, to a key that we’ll encounter rarely on our various paths through Western musical practice. Then the D sharp minor fugue gives us a taste of the inversions, augmentations, cancrizans – the whole panoply – that eventually hit us centuries later with Webern. This makes a fair temperamental pairing in Lambden’s reading which is well-defined with a sense of exploring the strands that coalesce across this contrapuntal marvel.

A gentle amble through the E Major Prelude further exemplifies this artist’s undemonstrative mode of interpretation before an unexpectedly strict reading of the companion fugue which follows its inexorable path, leavened by some unexpected false relations. You get the mildest of emotional contrasts between the opening 22 bars of the E minor Prelude and that subsequent shift to a presto which, in this case, doesn’t send the blood racing. But you couldn’t ask for a more transparent texture than that offered in the fugue which sounds like a particularly spartan invention, accounted for here with a digital idiosyncrasy and dynamic balance.

A further instance of clumsiness comes with the F Major Prelude, another two-part invention which should sail past with even flutters but on this occasion is laboured, the trills in both hands clearly a trial to integrate into the piece’s movement, while the alternation of material between the lines is not deftly integrated. Fortunately, the kindly three-voice fugue that follows enjoys more fluent handling, even if much of the ornamentation distracts as it interferes – albeit slightly – with the work’s rhythmic consistency.

I’m sure there must be a reason why Lambden keeps on repeating the usually-sustained bass C across bars 17 to 21 of the F minor Prelude but that is a minor issue when you face yet again the problem of hard-fought ornamentation. By this stage you’re tempted to say that, if a mordent interferes with the music’s performative logic, leave it out; leave them all out! The second page of this piece proves to be much more enjoyable; in my Henle edition, there are no ornaments. It’s whipping a dead horse to note that the only real flaws in the F minor Fugue come when Lambden slows down to negotiate a trill, notably one introduced into bar 55 – just when the work was proceeding steadily.

You can’t doubt the performer’s sincerity in this exercise and the intense labour that has gone into the recording. But it makes for an often uncomfortable listening experience, chiefly because the disc shows effort of delivery on nearly half its tracks. In the end, for me, this Well-Tempered experience is unsettling and uneven.

THE OTHER SIDE OF TONY GOULD

Jasmine Lai, Fabian Russell, Firebird Trio, Rosa Scaffidi, Tony Gould

Move Records MD 5478

Move Records are floating this disc as giving us an alternative view of Tony Gould. It’s true that most of the celebrated Australian musician’s output for this company has fallen into the jazz and popular categories but Gould as a composer of serious music is not exactly an unknown quantity, partly due to his one-time position as Dean and associate professor at the School of Music, Victorian College of the Arts. Still, this compendium has some interesting tracks, as well as some light ephemera.

Two of the pieces are performed by 19-year-old pianist Jasmine Lai: Empathy of 2013, and A Little Music for Jasmine of 2022 or thereabouts. Another intimate piece is Dreams of My Girl, also from 2013, and which was commissioned and performed by the Firebird Trio probably in that year; certainly from back in the days when Roger Jonsson was the ensemble’s violinist; cellist Josephine Vains and pianist Benjamin Martin appear, veteran and current Firebirds, The largest in scale of Gould’s works is a Homage to Mahler, premiered in 2014 by the Monash Academy Strings under Fabian Russell, who on this CD conducts a body called Symphonic Strings.

Over half of the CD’s length comprises the four-hand version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring from 1913. Here Gould collaborates with Rosa Scaffidi, but I think this is a re-issue of a recording that the two pianists made for Move Records twenty years ago. If so, it has worn well, which is probably due to the machinations of the company’s founder, studio manager and recording engineer Martin Wright who has shown time after time how intonationally pure and timbre-rich each musician can sound under his ultra-informed care. Still, I can’t find any sign of this performance in the current Move catalogue, so perhaps a reminder of a considerable past achievement is in order.

The shorter of the two piano solos, A Little Music for Jasmine, is a mixture of rambling lyric and jazz-inflected chords. The melody line is all right-hand and the music progresses in ‘normal’ fashion; a good dollop of calm sentiment amid the quiet meandering which Lai delivers with fine control. At the start, while Gould’s intro wove its gentle patterns, I expected something along the lines of Grainger’s arrangement of Love Walked In to emerge, but the flow that followed had its own voice and balance.

Empathy has more substance to its material, although it follows a similar rambling path with the right hand dominant again. Here, Gould employs more rubato and his chords present more of a challenge in terms of their sequencing and content, which moves easily between the consonant and mildly dissonant. Once again, the phrase shapes remind you of Gershwin, if not as symmetrical or as calculated for a singer’s range. Lai maintains the piece’s even temperament, coasting gently over its mf ebbs and flows.

In fact, Dreams of My Girl turns out to be a kind of rondo on the old tune sung by Perry Como, Girl of My Dreams, written by Sunny Clapp in 1927. The trio take their turns in outlining the sentimental waltz while Gould provides two episodes of a more exploratory nature than you’d expect, although he does offer several twists and turns on the song’s original harmonic underpinning. A deft arrangement with some piquant moments, but I don’t think this is taking us very far into the alternate reality of Gould’s ‘classical side’, except for the matter of the piano trio performers who are very adept at entering the piece’s relaxed character.

You find much more gravity in the Mahler tribute which is based on the opening theme to the Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 9 finale. Gould offers a reharmonization and a re-thinking of the movement which, of course, sent me back to the original and its slow reckoning with sorrow and resignation. Apart from two significant full orchestra (sort of) points, the Mahler Adagio is a long elegy for strings and Gould reminds you of the wide-spread textures in the symphony’s spread. His modulations strike you as less comfort-inducing but you encounter passages that mirror the firmness and absolute inexorability of Mahler’s relentless grind towards an evanescent resolution.

First time round, I saw where Gould had interpolated the first line of The Last Rose of Summer but clearly wasn’t concentrating enough to see how substantial was his use of Aisling an Oigfhear, although he doesn’t explore the song’s second half (well, the start of it) although most levels of his string body enjoy momentary encounters with the first strophe. Further, he signs off with a reminiscence of the air at his solid essay’s conclusion.

Of the four original Goulds we hear on this disc, this Homage offers the most sustained outline of the Australian composer’s compositional depth. This is not to decry the piano pieces or the trio, but the gravity of its language and the intense focus on elaborating long paragraphs of string fabric make this a fine demonstration of Gould’s gift for taking a strand of material and making it his own while preserving the original’s character.

I think I’ve heard the four-hand version of Stravinsky’s epoch-signalling ballet only once – in the Collins. St. Uniting Church, played by a Russian husband-and-wife team who I believe lived and taught in Melbourne for a while. Of the performance, almost nothing remains in the memory except the faint feeling that both pianists operated from the one piano. This must have been horrifically difficult because, while you can negotiate most of the score at a single instrument, there are passages where the hands interweave to the point of reaching for the same note.

Scaffidi and Gould recorded their performance on two Yamahas at the Move studio and the result is startlingly clear. Without its rich orchestral garb, the work becomes something unexpected; all those biting chords present now as explicable, able to be dissected and lacking their usual timbral gruffness. What you get is an exposition of the composition’s bones, unadorned by flesh or cosmetics. As Gould points out in his leaflet notes, Stravinsky and Debussy played the work through in this four-hand format (but only Part 1) in June 1912. This event lives in my mind because of the generous reaction that the senior composer gave to his on-the-make junior, all the more memorable when you recall the various bitchinesses that Stravinsky came out with in his 1959 Conversations with Robert Craft.

As far as I can see, the four-hand reduction is congruent with the orchestral score, even if you’re always a little insecure, the composer having modified the work so many times throughout his life. Various editors have found thousands of errors or differences between original intentions and printed reality. Adding to this, Stravinsky took advice and suggestions from a good many people. So, while we’re generally confident that the Boosey & Hawkes edition of 1948 comes as close to the original as probable, the piano(s) reduction proposes several unresolved questions.

Gould and Scaffidi seem to follow the original Editions Russes de Musique of 1913, reprinted by Dover in 1989. They have a few scuffles with tempo placement on the first page but settle into congruence by bar 20. Whoever plays the Prima part avoids the ossia elaborations starting at bar 25 which follow the higher woodwind curvets above the general melange; mind you, how anybody would leave the main body for these finicky lines beats me. But the rest of Part 1 is handled cleanly; the Jeu de rapt an excellent instance of duo playing, specially when the Seconda (I think Gould takes this role but can’t guarantee it) hits those resonant bass duplets.

The further in you progress, the more you miss certain idiosyncratic timbres, like the brass braying in the Jeux des cites rivales and the percussion penetrating throughout the Danse de la terre. But the pianists produce their most effective work in the two rhythmically disjunct dances of Part 2: Glorification de l’elue and the massive Danse sacrale which comes close to realizing the unforgettable asymmetry of the orchestra in full spate. The players insert a few pauses between movements which makes me think they might have worked from a different edition – or they might have wanted to offer clear changes of pace/attack.

Whatever questions you raise about the reading’s oddities, the inclusion of this example of Gould exercising his talents on Stravinsky’s early masterwork certainly justifies the CD’s intention of showing another aspect of the pianist/academic’s range of practice. I’ve known Gould for over fifty years and was never aware of his Mahler work or this recording with Scaffidi; both are enriching for long-time acquaintances and newcomers to this remarkably versatile musician’s layers of creativity and performance.

MY HEART

Danae Killian

Move Records MCD 673

To be honest, I’m not on the wave-length of this Move Records CD from Melbourne pianist Danae Killian. Eight separate works provide the performer with plenty of material but seven of these break up the core of this presentation: a three-part construct by Killian called My Prussian Blue Heart. Originally written in 2017, then revised in 2024, this work is scored for pianist, tarot cards and piano – which strikes me as partly tautological in this case as Killian is definitely the piano performer and, I assume, takes on the pianist (speaker?) role, mainly because no other performers are listed on the liner notes/leaflet.

Exactly why the composer singles out that particular colour as a cardiac descriptor has me beat. Apart from its use by artists from the 17th century on, it also has strong medical applications; perhaps that’s a relevant association as the musical work could have some kind of therapeutic value for the composer/performer. Or it may have to do with Killian’s source of inspiration in German/Jewish poet Elsa Lasker-Schuler’s novel Mein Herz of 1912, an effusion of startling self-expression and revelation.

Killian’s first inter-leaver is Schoenberg, represented by his Drei Klavierstucke Op. 11 of 1909. This expressionist monument is followed by Mobius of 2012 by Melbourne writer Howard Dillon. Then, from another Melbourne resident, Christine McCombe‘s Asphyxed from 1991. After the middle movement of Killian’s composition, we hear some more Australiana in film-composer Amelia Barden‘s brief The Seventh Centre from 1992; and we stick with the Victorian region of the continent through senior jazz musician Colin McKellar‘s Birth Music of 2006 or 2008 or 2018, depending on your source.

Next, we make a temporary swerve geographically to Gregers Brinch from Denmark whose four-movement Two Minds suite dates from 2004. Then, just before the 39-second conclusion to My Prussian Blue Heart, back to home-base for Evan J. Lawson who appears through his Sikinnis III of 2015. He is the artistic director of the Forest Collective organization with which Killian is closely associated.

Another body that has proved a haven for several of these contemporary voices is the Melbourne Composers’ League, a body that has been operating for almost 30 years and is in the bread-and-butter business of presenting new music by local composers – although that categorization now stretches to include interstate and international voices, even if the avowed context of its presentations is covered by the term ‘Asian-Pacific’. As far as I can recall, my only experiences with this sector of Melbourne’s musical world has been through recordings, but it had an ardent advocate for many years in my erstwhile colleague-critic on The Age, Dr. Joel Crotty.

The first movement of Killian’s opus is a monologue which focuses on a single character: the pianist. You hear no music, from a piano or otherwise; just a pretty brief display of self-awareness on the narrator’s part. She appears to be suffering from an identity crisis but, to my mind, even if she fuses with the pianist figure, answers are a long way off. The second movement introduces piano sounds produced by striking the strings manually before settling into the orthodox note-production technique. Asa for the text, this has abruptly turned into a dramatic display bordering on sprechstimme but vehemently dramatic at its best, phantasmagoric more often in its imagery.

In fact, this long scena is highly aggressive, the piano’s innards a source of violent percussive attacks that reflect the narrator’s ramblings that present as a kind of image-laden narrative asking a good deal of the listener just to keep track of what’s being delivered. For all that, the admissions and self-observations move all too easily into the banal, both when concerned with mental states as well as physical. On top of this, we are treated to vocalizations of a hectic nature, yells and cries leading nowhere in particular. And the movement ends with a German text that could come from Lasker-Schuler, the whole singing to a final ‘Sterbe ich’ declaration – somewhat unnerving when you consider the previous indications of violent action.

As for the concluding phase of this work, it reverts to unaccompanied monologue, the pianist-subject in a happier place without any singing or piano scrapes – just a narrator reporting her current state of contented emotional stasis. Well, we’ve had a pianist as the focus of the work’s stages, and the middle segment features a piano in all its late 20th century glory. The tarot cards are mentioned but are irrelevant to this CD experience. Killian states that the full work also contains two interludes and a postlude; these interludes are apparently subsumed in the other composers’ music, and I assume the postlude disappears intro the ether.

As for the rest of the CD’s content, Killian’s reading of the Schoenberg piano pieces impresses for its strength of purpose. She is a stickler for observing every dynamic marking and is responsive to the frequent changes of pace across the composer’s free-flowing canvases. Very few details raise question marks, although the laid-back left hand entry at bar 45 of the second Massig seemed a puzzling choice. But the brisk oscillations between placidity and rapid outbursts that make the concluding Bewegt a sterling challenge for any pianist were unusually clear-cut and focused.

Dillon’s score lives up to its title by offering a repetitive cycle of individual notes and mini-chords that weave in and out of themselves in a pattern that seems like a moto perpetuo but allows for rubato moments – and a dead halt about half-way through. After which, Dillon appears to be considering his material in discrete fragments, as though the strip has become obstructed. Indeed, this meditative pattern remains with us for the remaining pages of the work as its world remains in a brooding ambience until the end, as though the performer realizes that the mobius construct leads nowhere.

By contrast, McCombe’s Asphyxed gives us a landscape of (mainly) single notes that creep slowly forward, interrupted at least twice by short, sharp gruppetti of chords and loud exclamation points. For all that, I don’t understand the title’s relevance nor the work’s intentions, even if Killian’s reading shows a willing sensitivity. What The Seventh Centre refers to escapes me also but in it Barden has constructed a soundscape as remote as McCombe’s, if one built on a clearer framework and employing a more obvious harmonic structure while occupying less than half the time-length.

Written around the time of his daughter’s birth, McKellar bases his work on a combination of bell-ringing charts and standard jazz progressions. He also has a penchant for single notes; understandable, given the nature of campanology in practice. Yet, for all the projected relationship between the two sources, Birth Music seems fragmented – possibly because of those single-note passages that are relieved by chords that have enjoyed permutation according to the bell chart being employed. We get idea after idea but it’s hard to find a focus.

Brinch’s first movement has the same title as his work and it cleverly proposes either two personalities or two aspects of the same consciousness. Each gets its individual say before the composer fuses them in concord and discord, although the les flamboyant mind has the last word – or does it? Reflective Intersections is less overt, although it opens with a meandering right-hand line supported by left-hand chords. As the piece moves beyond the half-way mark, the two intermesh and the texture becomes bass-heavy with whatever melody is left subsumed into sometimes gruff, other times brooding textures.

Third in this series, Homage, is something of a funeral march, especially in its later stages despite a florid upper texture. The piece opens with celebratory flourishes but soon settles into more sombre strophes. Of course, much depends on who or what is being paid homage and, being unaware of anything relevant, we are left to appreciate these pages as blanks, abstracts without context. Much of Drought is set at either end of the keyboard, so that initially I thought the low rumbles signified a protesting earth while the tinkles in alt were suggesting distant rain. But then, you wonder if Brinch’s drought is a physical one, or more simply a spiritual/emotional absence. Whichever it is, the writing is powerful and suggestive on its many disparate and (eventually) combined levels.

Last of Killian’s interstices is Lawson’s Sikinnis III, third (obviously) of a series based on a dance form from ancient Greek satyr plays. At the opening, I find this hard to fathom as the work’s progress is extremely slow, the composer celebrating the piano’s sustaining pedal with plenty of room for extended resonances. This composer is also a member of the single-note brigade that populates this CD. But then, the piece’s final pages are heavy with clangorous chords that enjoy a long fade to silence. It’s time for the less-aware among us to have a look at the lighter products of Aeschylus and Euripides to find some sort of footing for Lawson’s vision.

And that’s it. Killian has presented this collation in live concert for nearly a decade now and I suspect the exercise is more impressive in actual performance. I found individual works here very impressive but the whole strikes me as a collage of unfused parts – which you might say is what a collage is. Well, no: the craft comes in the fusion, as old Kurt used to say (and, if he didn’t. he should have). With My Heart, especially the disc’s focal work, I can’t detect more than a none-too-convincing melange.

HOMEGROWN

Rebecca Cassidy and Alex Raineri

Move Records MCD 664

That’s just what they are: art songs by nine Australian composers, one of whom gets a double dip (Lisa Cheney) and another also represented by a piano solo, performed with enthusiastic rhapsody by Alex Raineri. His associate, soprano Rebecca Cassidy, moves through a pretty wide spectrum, even if the greater number of these writers share a brand of lyrical vocabulary that doesn’t move much beyond Debussy at its most sophisticated and Vaughan Williams at its simplest. Alright, let’s say Cyril Scott or John Ireland or possibly Duparc – well-trodden paths, whatever the derivation.

The earliest piece on this Move Records CD is a John Fletcher setting by Peggy Glanville-Hicks that dates from 1931. Next is Miriam Hyde’s 1933 Dream Land to a Christina Rossetti poem, with her piano solo – Brownhill Creek in Spring, dating from 1942. Then comes Dulcie Holland whose Hope in Spring from 1953 is here receiving its first recorded performance. For some reason, there’s a near-forty year break before we come to Betty Beath who, in 1991, wrote her River songs cycle, from which we hear River – Mother, River – Child. A year later, Mary Mageau produced Son of Mine to a poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, which is also enjoying its first recording here. Finishing the 20th century is Linda Kouvaras with Distant lullaby from her 1999 cycle Art and Life.

The first Cheney song comes from 2006, a simple Lullaby in its first recording, as are the rest of this CD’s contents. Melody Eotvos features here with one of her Wakeford Songs of 2014; By Train. Penultimately, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon appears with a 2022 commission written for Raineri’s Brisbane Festival: Crepe Myrtle Sky. The finish comes through Cheney’s second contribution, the most substantial on the disc: Gratitude and Grief, written last year and a substantial contribution to the form, even if the vocabulary applied is conservative.

Does that matter? Should we regard the similarities between Glanville-Hicks’ quick lyric and Cheney’s maternal eulogy as evidence of an inner consistency of language and employment of the form? Not as close as nearly100 years apart, I would think. You might find explanations for Glanville-Hicks, Hyde and Holland but the other six writers are working well after a massive explosion of technical and emotional language became available to Australian writers for several decades before, for example, Beath’s product of 1991. Such a discarding of advances in language speak to an undercurrent in the CD’s title where the writers use a compositional vocabulary that was tried and true, well established before most of them were born and which they are obviously happy to re-employ in these latter days of a current reductio ad absurdum in serious composition (see Eurovision or the ABC’s rage for relentless instances).

Cassidy and Raineri give a genteel reading of Glanville-Hicks’ setting of Fletcher’s two-stanza lyric which taxes nobody because of its clarity – one might say, its simplicity. The composer begins in G Major and stays in that key throughout with not a single extra accidental employed. The little prelude provides the initial material for the singer and the postlude reflects the piece’s beginning. Glanville-Hicks wrote it before leaving for England and it shows an 18-year-old making the most of what she has come across by way of instruction in 1930s Australia.

Showing a more adventurous attitude to tonality, Miriam Hyde’s treatment of Rossetti’s four stanzas shows an awareness of chromatic passing notes on its lush Brahmsian A Major path and the composer treats the vocal line as a continuous sheet rather than four repetitions while Raineri arpeggiates and moons soulfully with semitonal droops across the canvas. But I can’t help thinking of Amy Woodforde-Finden’s Pale Hands I Loved of 30 years earlier because of a similar hot-house emotional restraint and a similar vocal curvature, although Hyde’s choice of text makes for a refreshing dash of introspective brilliance.

As for Hyde’s piano piece, this also luxuriates in its A Major neo-Impressionism with some Debussy Arabesque-style arpeggios to begin over a left-hand melody that employs a flattened leading note, leading to a development/elongation of the set material, before a less active section – less full of Jardins sous la pluie or Jeux d’eau – moving more slowly, before a return to water imagery and a quiet coda. The images here are European; probably understandable because the photos I’ve come across of Brownhill Creek are of a lush landscape, even more so than the Esmond George watercolour that inspired it. Raineri has had this music in his repertoire for a few years now and holds its quivering sensibility in the palms of both hands.

With Holland’s love song (to her own text), we have a further reach back into the past, to an almost Victorian mode of communication. Also couched in A Major, its three verses operating in an A-B-A ternary mode, this is a fluent example of limited rhapsody, its emotional language operating inside strict bounds, the excitement limited to a concluding sustained vocal A, the whole typical of this popular writer’s craft in action. Cassidy and Raineri make an elegantly-paired combination in facing its few challenges.

Now we make the forty-year leap to the 1990s and Beath’s setting of a Jena Woodhouse poem which also could be using A Major as its base but is written in neutral tonalities with a kind of prevailing ambiguity, possibly arising from the composer’s time in Bali and Java. Still, there are passages where Europe still holds sway, e.g. bars 15 to 18, and bars 24 to 26; in fact, anywhere that the texture changes from the open-sounding 6/8 quavers set up at the opening. But it manages to avoid the predictable character of this CD’s earlier samples through its angularity and rhythmically varied vocal and piano lines.

Setting this country’s best-known Aboriginal poet is a daunting task, even for an American expatriate. Mageau achieves a good deal in her Noonuccal setting, keeping up a steady A octave bass drone-support for most of the three stanzas, with some grinding dissonances in the pivotal chords underpinning the central quatrain. Despite the poet’s attempts to lift the spirits of reconcilers in her final lines, Mageau maintains the accompaniment’s grimness under the composer’s arioso-type vocal line. The whole exercise reminds me of Schubert’s Leiermann, probably because of that persistent bass and its added notes like Schubert’s use of the appoggiatura.

Both poet and composer change the tone for the work’s central lines which detail some of the crimes committed against Aboriginal people, causing Mageau to break into a confronting discordant piano part that heightens the outrage being communicated, the harmony having moved to C minor, if you take the soaring vocal line into consideration. It makes for grim hearing, but then, the poet was intent on holding her mirror up to white failures – which I think come across strongly in this musical realization.

Distant lullaby is the concluding song in Kouvaras’ six-part cycle and is emphatically tonal from start to finish; I believe it starts and ends in C Major with some moves into the flattened submediant – two of them – that would recall Schubert if the general texture and message of the piece weren’t plain. Art and Life traces a woman’s infatuation with an artist, the baby they have, a growing disaffection, her militancy in the face of abuse, her action (murder?) in facing down the violence against her, and this lullaby sung from her incarceration.

Kouvaras is an academic at Melbourne University but her composition practice comes from a different source than the sophisticated technical bravura prevalent in her workspace. You might find it effective in achieving its end, showing a pretty widespread emotion – love of a child – in a simple consolatory expression but, for me, it’s naïve. Yes, I know that’s the nature of a lullaby but this simplicity sounds inconsistent with our times – too much Richard Strauss, not enough Janacek.

Furthering the trend towards simpler times of yore, Lisa Cheney’s Lullaby stays in a 3/4 metre throughout, I think. Certainly, the key is B flat minor and there are few deviations from it. There’s a lilt and folk-song gentleness about this piece which eventually reduces Raineri’s function (in the third stanza?) to little more than a few supporting notes or chords. Probably the only surprise comes in the presence of a flattened supertonic at the end of a stanza or two; for the rest, the New Simplicity strikes again.

Suddenly, we come to a composition that sounds totally contemporary in Eotvos’ striking lyric which details World War One nurse Muriel Wakeford’s arrival in Cairo prior to heading for Gallipoli (which she survived). By Train is part of a five-song cycle on texts extracted from Wakeford’s diary but the other songs are difficult to come by. Anyway, this composer has a complex vocabulary and puts both her interpreters to the test, particularly Raineri with flurries of notes meant to represent the train itself. Still, the vocal line is in parts jagged, with difficult leaps and it’s rhythmically demanding as the piece operates in a free-flowing ambience. Nevertheless, despite the high chromaticism at work, I sensed an undercurrent of G minor beneath the abrupt forays and excursions from both musicians.

We hit show-tune territory with the Cheetham Fraillon creation. The song’s text – as with Holland, Hyde and one of the Cheneys – was written by the composer and can’t be found online. Neither can you find access to any part of the music, although that doesn’t matter so much because the proportions and content are easy to fathom, often to the point of being predictable. The song appears to begin in an ambiguous C Major (most of the Bs are natural) but ends in a definite F Major. It only strays from these possibilities twice, the second deviation more solid, but you are confronted by a pleasant vocal line that could have found a place in a Sondheim musical.

And so to Gratitude and Grief which is a mixture of scena and meditation with motherhood as its subject. This song is the only one to enjoy any sort of exegesis in the CD’s accompanying leaflet and it’s a backgrounding from the composer on her embrace of the existence of her two young daughters. The text comes from New Zealand poet Jessica Urlichs and, although it does nothing for me because of an innate sexism and misogyny typical in men of my age, the words find a gifted setter in Cheney and evoke a lucid response from these musicians.

The piece rises and falls like a long arc, climaxing in the words ‘I’m still learning to breathe under this waterfall of gratitude and grief’ which are sung with conviction by Cassidy while Raineri evokes an emotional cascade in a fierce wash of notes. On either side is a calm that eventually resolves into a limpid vision of the new-born as infinite but knowable, which is about as consoling a realization as any parent can come to and which mercifully doesn’t tip over into self-congratulation.

Here also, there are traces of the show-tune sentiment in the melodic phrases and that peculiarly American mode of confessional declamation that has its origins in Rodgers and Hammerstein heroines. But Cheney isn’t alone in this penchant for the soulful and accessible, offering the most sustained instance in this CD of a contentment with trusted tropes.

I assure you that the order in which I’ve commented on the4se songs is not that of the CD’s tracks, which jumps all over the shop temporally. For some of us, the album is light-on, coming in under 45 minutes; balance that with exposure to two fine talents who invest their talents and sympathy into each composer that they benefit here with their art.

BACH TO CHINA WITH YU

Julian Yu

Move Records MD 3474

Much of this latest volume of works by Julian Yu involves clarinet, violin and cello. In fact, Robert Schubert‘s clarinet features in each of the four varied elements on the CD, as it has on two previous Move Records publications that present the composer’s chamber music involving that instrument. Also appearing here are pianist Akemi Schubert, violinist Yi Wang, and two well-known cellists in Virginia Kable and Josephine Vains.

Now, to content. The album starts and ends with Bach, whose music enfolds Yu’s arrangements of 24 Chinese Folksongs (some of which also contain Bach snippets) and two tracks of Dances from the XII Muqam, a collection of traditional Uyghur melodies. As anticipated, the longest of these four compositions is the assemblage of folksongs, but Yu fans will have heard these some years ago – 2019, to be exact – when pianist Ke Lin recorded the composer’s 50 Chinese Folk Songs. As far as I can see, Yu has revisited 22 of his original 50 and transcribed them for Schubert, Yi and Vains; the two odd-persons-out are Su Wu Tends the Sheep and Wild Lily.

As I said, there’s some Bach included in the folksongs as Yu elects to employ some of this composer’s bass-lines (and those from other composers) as supporting material for his collated melodies. Some of these interpolations are easy to find; others escaped identification by this willing listener.

Beginning with a solid slab of Western music, Yu has arranged the Chaconne in D minor from the Violin Partita BWV 1004, written sometime between 1717 and 1720. He’s not alone in this exercise and admits to drawing on transcriptions by Mendelssohn (who wrote a piano accompaniment for the piece), Schumann (who did the same), Busoni and Raff (who both did simple piano transcriptions, although the latter also made a version for full Romantic orchestra), and Brahms (a splendid version for piano left-hand). In this performance, we hear Schubert, and the string partnership of Yi and Kable for the only time on this CD.

As for the ending, we hear the organ Passacaglia in C minor for organ BWV 582 from sometime between 1706 and 1713. Yu gives us the famous bass line on the cello but has dilated the first note of each bar to a dotted minim, so the time-signature changes from 3/4 to 4/4. On top, the composer introduces scraps from arias and instrumental interludes heard at the Peking Opera; some are original, some Yu-composed. In all, we hear about twelve variations – down on Bach’s twenty – and the results prove to be disarmingly deft.

But you could say that about the whole set of 28 tracks. The arrangements are clever in conceit and clear in texture, if only rarely arresting. As you’d anticipate, the most challenging work comes first with the Chaconne. Yu begins in orthodox fashion with clarinet and cello outlining the eight bars of basic material before the piano enters discreetly with some melodic and harmonic reinforcement. All three are in operation with few signs of disturbance until we reach bar 25 where Schubert takes the melody line and elaborates it into a semiquaver pattern while clarinet and piano take on the chordal punctuation.

From here on, the central melody is shared between all three players while the re-composer begins to add flourishes, distinctly new lines, all the while indulging in some neatly dovetailing klangfarbenmelodie. We come to a slower oasis at bar 77 when the clarinet takes over from the semiquaver-addressing piano, giving us a calmer ambience which lasts up to the arpeggio direction of bar 89 which the piano takes on board and follows with a general attention to the written notes, apart from a few deviations, the whole fraught sequence winding up with a powerful bass line of striding quavers from cello and piano which is not in the score but makes a remarkably Brahmsian lead-in to the D Major reprieve at bar 133.

This is taken at a slow pavane speed and Yu recycles the opening variation of this segment as a subordinate component while gradually building up intensity with the piano adding more arpeggiated ferment, until the reversion to the minor key, at which point the piano disappears and clarinet and cello play the first two variations from this point by themselves, a few triple-stops from the original falling by the wayside. The piano gets an attack of the triplets well before they should turn up in bar 241 but by this stage we’ve been treated to so much linear displacement that the prepositioning hardly raises any eyebrows.

And so to the final peroration which is given with more late Romantic magniloquence in the best Busoni tradition. Also in something of an arranger’s tradition, Yu fleshes out that final noble single D with a full chord. So do Schumann, Mendelssohn, Raff and Busoni (who indulges himself with a tierce). The solitary exception is Brahms, who consents himself with three massive octave Ds – a man who knew when to leave well enough alone.

I heard the folksong Su Wu Tends the Sheep with more interest than most because it concerns a real person: a 2nd-to-1st BC diplomat who was detained on a mission for 19 years and put to menial work while under what amounted to imprisonment. The melody is here given mainly to the violin, the clarinet a late entry to the mix. But the message is clearly one of longing (for the homeland?) even in the middle of pastoral solitude – or so I feel about what is a warm, even sentimental lyric.

The other novelty in this collection is Wild Lily from the Shanxi province. A simple melody in four phrases, Yu sets it simply enough for violin with clarinet discordant underpinning, then again where the clarinet bears the melody while the cello accompanies in an atonal language – nothing too savage in either half, only single notes but deliberately at odds with the tune’s simplicity.

As for the other 22 elements in this collection, I refer you to my review of Ke Lin’s Move Records performances of the 50 Chinese Folksongs back in 2019. I believe I commented on all of the others treated here and have nothing new to add apart from predictable remarks about the new settings’ timbres. The same problems still apply: the arrangements are brief (eight of them are under a minute long, including Wild Lily) and, after a while, they fuse, so that it’s hard to distinguish between something as well-known as Jasmine (thanks to Puccini’s Turandot) and Willows Are New.

Fusing his Chinese melodies with the West, Yu uses a Handel bass to underpin the Mongolian melody Gada Mailin, then a Bach quotation from the B minor Mass in Picking Flowers. A more original device comes in Little Cabbage from the Hebei province where the cello picks out the vegetable’s name notes for underpinning; this probably works well because of the resultant motif’s pentatonic nature. More difficult to discern was the quotation from Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 during Lan Huahua, although Yu made it easier for us by opening A Rainy Day with the first eight bars to this symphony’s Passacaglia.

It’s back to the B minor Mass for the Sichuan tune Jagged Mountain, clarinet and cello presenting it in turn even if it tended to throw the melody into the background. An outburst of familiarity came with the Shaanxi air A Pair of Ducks and a Pair of Geese which enjoyed the bass-line on which Pachelbel constructed his mellifluous Canon in D, beloved of wedding-organizers. Also easy to pick up was the use of the left-hand to the Goldberg Variations‘ opening statement during Taihang Mountains.

But we encountered more difficulties with Willows Are New, during which Yu employed some famous Bach motifs that went straight past this bat into a no-doubt-contemptuous keeper’s gloves. But I recognized at least one of the Brahms Symphony No. 1 bursts that supported the medley of three Shanxi and Shaanxi folksongs and that was the chorale spray that climaxes the finale at bar 407. However, the impact of the German master’s rich chromaticism made the track surprisingly Western/European, a factor that also struck me in the last of the collection, Thunder a Thousand Miles Away, which seemed to be a mix of three-part invention and (limited) fantasia.

But so what? Yu’s compositional career has been informed by his homeland and further education here; the least you’d expect is a happy relationship between the two ‘schools’, as we find on this disc. Still, he strikes the same problem as most other writers when dealing with the material for his Three Dances from the Uyghur people of Xinjiang: the tunes are finite and the changes you can ring on them present challenges beyond simple repetition in new timbres. The first dance is extensive, showing a good deal of inventiveness in edging the basic material in several directions, made all the more difficult by the number of repeated notes involved, especially in the piece’s middle pages.

More surprising was the character of the melody which seemed to share characteristics with the folk music from various countries as collected by Bartok and Kodaly than with the 24 folksongs sitting alongside it on this CD. Yu grouped his second and third dances together; well, sort of: the tempo increases for the third which concludes in an almost Rossinian galop. Oddly enough, only in these dances did you come across faint cracks in the trio’s ensemble work, mainly due to slight hesitations about entries and the delivery of some pretty simple syncopations.

For organists, Bach’s big Passacaglia and Fugue are impregnable musical fortresses. You can’t really take exception to Yu’s employment of its bass progression for his own composition, but he is operating with a melodic and harmonic pair of palettes that are very limited when compared to the original. That said, you can take pleasure in Yu’s interweaving upper voices, particularly if you can keep out of your mind the monumental welter that straddles your consciousness from bar 144 to the end of the great organ construct. And, as the poet says, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp and this CD is witness to Yu’s high level of ambition.

TRUE ROMANTICS

Philip Arkinstall and Kristian Chong

Move Records MCD 668

Well, you can’t argue with this CD’s descriptor. Clara Schumann and Brahms were solidly Romantic, their early lives focused around the lady’s husband, who was one of the great 19th century creators of that school alongside Chopin, Mendelssohn and Berlioz. In these latter days, Amazonian efforts have gone into foregrounding female composers, from Hildegard through Barbara Strozzi to Amy Beach and a multitude of contemporary Australians ( especially on ABC Classic radio). Schumann has enjoyed a revival of interest for decades longer than most of these writers, yet her appearance on programs must still be called – in all charity – uncommon.

The performers of one work by Schumann and two sonatas by Brahms on this disc for Move Records are Philip Arkinstall, associate principal clarinet with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for the last 16 years, and Kristian Chong who is an associate lecturer in piano at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music to anchor his active life as a performer.

On this CD, these performers give us Schumann’s Three Romances of 1853, originally written for violin and piano, here enjoying a transcription by Roger Young, Arkinstall’s colleague in the MSO where he has been a violinist for 26 years. The Brahms Clarinet Sonata in F minor and his Clarinet Sonata in E flat comprise the composer’s Op. 120 and date from 1894; these are the last chamber compositions he produced before his death and they make a magniloquent pair of gifts to an until-then almost non-existent repertoire, apart from a small quiver-full of concertos.

Clara Schumann’s Romances recall her husband’s compositional aesthetic in pretty much every aspect, apparent from the first Andante molto with its ambiguity of rhythm that doesn’t become quite clear until about bar 11, not to mention its floating harmonic underpinning, an adventurous chromaticism seen in the central segment from bar 24 to bar 32, and a steadiness of emotional output that you find in the male writer at his most impressive (the lieder, the chamber works with piano).

Moving to the second romance, complete with a German direction (Mit zartem Vortrage) that might have come from the composer’s nationalistic husband, we find a more orthodox harmonic complex, its ternary form running G minor, G Major, G minor with a quietly assertive main melody that recalls some of the more sparsely textured Songs Without Words. Arkinstall observes an appropriate dynamic restraint throughout this miniature’s length while Chong shows once again a discretion that falls short of self-effacement, always contributing to the partnership as you can hear in the musicians’ sensible and sensitive account of the final twelve bars, the clarinettist even giving us the violin’s final quadruple stop.

Again with the third romance, Robert Schumann’s linguistic choice enjoys pride of place with the direction Leidenschaftlich schnell, the musicians’ collaboration as ardent as you could want, given the benign, self-assured content in another ternary shape with the composer happy to maintain her B flat Major territory in the outer segments. From the start, Arkinstall’s main lyric is supported by fluid triplets from Chong that change only for regular semiquavers in the initial 21 bars where the main material recurs. The pianist once more exercises an assertive discretion throughout, both players investing the work with a tidal ebb and flow in dynamics while the metre stays constant, Arkinstall making gentle work of the three-note pizzicato chords between bars 50 and 57.

After these novelties come two familiarities in the Brahms sonatas. The No. 1 in F minor is more familiar to most of us than its partner in E flat Major; why this is, I have no idea except that performers might find the first more satisfying to play or present, or it might be that audiences are more receptive to its flamboyant style of address. Whatever the reason, Arkinstall and Chong open it up to a remarkably clean airing, right from the opening Allegro appassionato which gives us an object lesson in nuanced shading from the clarinettist and an admirable, mud-free outline of the keyboard part where every bass note registers and Chong’s surges into action ring out clearly, especially when the going gets piano concerto-mode tough (as at the end of the development, bars 116 to 132).

Profitably for us all, the interpretation is invested with dynamic tension, but the piano conclusion starting at bar 225 gives an excellent instance of shared responsiveness where the instruments dovetail with care to make the composer’s last reminiscence of his opening phrase somehow inevitable and poignant. Which makes a fine transition to the restrained and compact Andante that takes us on a simple ternary journey with a slightly surprising chain of modulations before re-settling onto its A flat Major homestead. No surprises here from either performer as they handle this brief segment with a deft mobile lassitude.

Coming out of the A flat Major warmth of the slow movement, we strike it lucky again in the ‘scherzo‘ movement (well, A flat with lots of E flat Major getting in the way). This is an appealing landler that varies its rhythmic predictability in the trio where the piano has an almost continuously syncopated right hand melody line (apart from 12 bars in the second part). You can find some moments of quiet humour like the clarinet’s laconic quiet interpolations when the piano has the main tune in bars 9 to 16, and the woodwind’s suggestions of yodelling in bars 35 to 38. To their distinct credit, these performers find and maintain the movement’s inner bounce and bucolic grace.

Finally, we enter the realms of the Academic Festival Overture with Chong’s expounding of the central theme to this F Major rondo with that combination of strength and lightness that typifies this reading. Despite its arresting opening, the theme moves into staccato chattering in its second and third quarters, but the distinction of this performance is the pleasure you experience on each recurrence. Not to forget the St. Anthony Chorale reminiscences when we move into buoyant crotchet triplets at bar 42 and later at bar 142. Once again, these musicians show a combined delicacy of insight into the score’s energetic bravura and its simple, happy brio.

I suppose what counts against the E flat Sonata from the beginning is the sentimental nature of the opening friendly Allegro‘s first subject. Further, Brahms is not slow in presenting us with several splendid melodies – or fragments of them – while ringing some vivid dynamic changes, like the sudden burst of language from the Piano Concerto No. 2 across bars 15 to 18; this continues in sporadic eruptions like bar 39, bars 60 to 64, and later in the recapitulation. But then, the clarinet writing is so mellifluous and persuasive in its wide arcs that the wonder is these players combine with such great empathy to give us a masterful composite, graced with yet another bout of splendid warmth in the concluding twelve Tranquillo bars.

It’s about now that you appreciate the compression at work in these two works; much of the first and all of the second operate without repeats so that you are in a constant state of discovering fresh country. Even second hearings of what seems like the same matter can be deceptive by means of altered accompaniment or original transpositions and modulations. This may go some way to explaining the sense that this sonata’s second movement is brief although it follows the classic scherzo pattern. Further, Brahms breaks into his four-bar phrase patterns with some arresting interruptions.

The piano writing here suggests parts of the rhapsodies, but the intertwining of both sound sources is admirably supple, both in the ‘dying fall’ passages like bars 48 to 64 and the two noble shared chorales of the central Sostenuto trio. I’ve heard other readings where the atmosphere is darker and angst-driven, but I think Arkinstall and Chong have the right of it with their cool outlining of the controlled agitation that underpins these pages.

And then you come to the last movement which starts Andante on a set of variations that stands with the best of the composer’s more emotionally untrammelled, benign creations. Starting with an ordinary skipping tune, a lyric with a lilt, Brahms brings about a set of cadences that culminate in a satisfying plagal in bar 14. From the opening statement, we move into off-the-beat commentary from the piano, triplets alternating between the players, a demi-semiquaver duel, a variant in which the piano is continuously syncopated while the clarinet outlines a version of the theme sotto voce for the most part, then an E flat minor elegant furiant before an inconclusive Piu tranquillo, the quick allegro returning for a final burst of high spirits with some chortle-rich piano writing from bar 134 almost to the end with cross-rhythms galore against a cooperative if comparatively strait-laced clarinet.

All this comes off very well indeed without any signs of faltering in attack or pace. But that could be said about the whole disc; throughout the three scores, Arkinstall and Chong demonstrate how a chamber music partnership should function, with every phrase mirrored or duplicated, with the dynamic ebb and flow organized carefully with each other, and with every slight rallentando – no, even the big ones – carefully graduated so that entries are pointedly precise. It all speaks for the high worth of this exemplary, polished disc.

SCARLATTI KEYBOARD SONATAS – INGENUITY AND DELIGHT

James Brawn in Recital Volume 3

MSR Classics MS 1829

Following the nine discs in his survey of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, British-born musician James Brawn is keeping himself occupied with a new entry for his ‘In Recital’ series on the MSR Classics label. The first in the set, recorded in 2012, featured some Bach, Liszt, Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition the main work. Three years later came the second in the series, a double album with a fuller scope through Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, and Gershwin.

This year, the third of the series has appeared and the focus is pretty concentrated on Domenico Scarlatti. Brawn takes us through 21 of the 555 in the (so far?) accepted canon, two of them revenants from his 2015 marathon: K. 159 in C Major (La Caccia) and K. 380 in E Major (Le Cortege). Many of us would have made our first acquaintance with this composer through the 25 Sonate per clavicembalo edited by Alessandro Longo in a Ricordi publication that I came across in the late 1950s. Brawn plays nine of the sonatas in that volume, including the two referred to above from his ‘In Recital Volume 2’ double-album.

Tagged on at the end, he presents a small-scale sonata by Domenico’s father Alessandro – the shortest track on the disc at 1’33” – and a more substantial sonata in G minor by Pater Scarlatti’s friend, Johann Adolph Hasse. A bit of a problem is the uncertain provenance of the Alessandro Scarlatti D minor Sonata, labelled Arioso. The piece is two lines in its substance, as are many of Domenico’s works: a simple tune above a walking bass. Brawn repeats the first half but not the second, although not much is gained by hearing any of this bagatelle twice.

The Hasse work is often listed as an attribution to the composer, possibly because the composer’s other sonatas are generally not stand-alone movements like this Largo. Still, it has a more mobile bass line than the elder Scarlatti’s piece and actually gravitates towards a wealth of right-hand thirds. Brawn plays repeats of both halves and gives us a gentle, measured account of a pre-Domenico piece that a reasonably competent pianist could probably negotiate successfully at sight.

As for the CD’s major consideration, Brawn opens with No. 1 in the Kirkpatrick numbering system, a D minor here subtitled Toccata. Well, it moves briskly and you come across some of those passages where both hands touch the same note in quick succession (bars 7, 8,11, 15,17, 26 and 27) but it’s more a toccata in the sense of rapidity of manipulation – and Brawn is excellently even-handed throughout – rather than the usual Baroque idea of a series of quick flurries and contrasting sections.

Another D minor follows, K. 9 and it’s one from the Longo 25 Sonate collection, here named Pastorale, which must refer to the musette moments at the end of both halves. This is a transparent view of the work with Brawn treating it as a bit of an amble but adding a sudden pianistic interest to the second half by semi-arpeggiating the left-hand chords across bars 27 to 32 and allowing himself room to breathe after some semiquaver runs; not that any of these raise the interpretation’s placid temperature.

We’re still in the minor (B) with K. 27, which is a fine exercise in hand-over technique, where the left hand plays top note in a chord. This is reliably achieved by Brawn who efficiently skewers these isolated notes, at the same time giving some crotchet weight to notes beginning semiquaver chains of four in passages following the main gauche uppermost bars. The style is outwardly calm, with an undercurrent of mobile gravity.

Once again, we revert to D minor for K. 32, yclept Aria. This one-page sonata has a first half of 8 bars, a second section of 16 and it barely modulates: all the Cs in it but four (in a passing flirtation with F Major) are sharpened. The work proceeds with gravity, a slow minuet, but imbued with grace and without melodrama. Sticking with the same tonality, Brawn next presents K. 34, Larghetto. This is a more progressive minuet, with a first half of twelve bars which modulates to A minor, the conclusion to both halves notable for a flattened supertonic which, in this harmonic context, is a slight shock to the predicting system.

At Track 6, we hit A Major, K.96, subtitled La Caccia and another Longo album favourite. As even small-scale Scarlatti enthusiasts know, this sonata has a variety of tests: repeated notes expressly marked Mutandi i deti, 18 instances of rapid left-hand over, double octave passages in both hands, a splash of Tremolo di sopra, and some pauses that offer no respite. I felt a slight dip in bars 26, 28, 30 and 32 where Brawn appears to offer a small hesitation before the demi-semiquaver duplets in each bar; it’s as if he’s determined to observe the letter of the law and give the upward flourishes extra space to resonate. Also, he sustains the tenor A through bars 103 to 108 the first time round but doesn’t bother in the repeat, following the pattern written at the same place in the second half where the Ds are struck at the beginning of each bar. The work is buoyant enough, if dynamically restrained.

Would you believe, we return to D minor for K. 141? It sports the title Toccata with some relevance because it’s in part a study in rapidly repeated right-hand notes that features in the Longo collection although there’s no indication in my edition that you have to change your fingers while repeating those groups of six notes (Longo prescribes an alteration of 3-2-1, which I suspect Brawn follows). It also features some of those brusque left-hand chords which involve both 4th and 5th above the bass note, a strident rasgueado suggestion that Puyana delivered with incredible punch. And this piece is also distinguished by its requirement for both hands to cross in both halves. This pianist appears to miss nothing, even if the repeated notes sometimes seem on the verge of disappearing.

The A minor K. 149 is new to me and a delight for its inventiveness as Scarlatti leaves his first idea alone in the second half and deals with a figure that presents as an adjunct in the first segment. The references back to prior material demonstrate the felicity and flexibility of the composer’s thought but the sonata radiates that extraordinary combination of power and elegance that distinguished the best of these pieces.

Another favourite from Longo’s album is the K. 159, which also has here the sobriquet La Caccia and is a much easier piece to handle than K. 96 in D Major. Brawn follows some performers in omitting one of bars 14, 15 and 16 in the sonata’s first part, then one of bars 53, 54 or 55 later on, although I can’t find an edition where this liberty is edited in. He also imitates those who repeat the first half’s top note tonic triad elements that are written in all editions I can find, doing the same across bars 18 to 20 in the second half at bars 57 to 59 which I can’t find anywhere even if it is an obvious act of balance. For all that, this is an engaging negotiation of one of the composer’s most attractive keyboard canters.

Speaking of Puyana, one of the sonatas that he transformed into a percussive nightmare for the rest of us is the A minor K. 175 with its plethora of dissonant left hand chords. Brawn splays these at the opening, once again suggesting a flamenco guitar attack but his reading is controlled and light in dynamic; this lets you relish the offered contrast between determined arpeggio material at the start and an unexpectedly gentle bounce at the rapid left-hand cross that comes out of nowhere at bar 85 to provide some contrasting bouts of light-hearted euphony.

The following A Major K. 208 is labelled Cantabile (in my edition, Adagio e cantabile) and is another unknown, moving from slow crotchets, through syncopation, to semiquaver runs in its first sentence, all over a steadily insistent crotchet bass in 4/4 time. It does have a singing quality although on paper the upper line looks jerky; another welcome discovery. A further A Major, K 209, is partnered with this gentle lyric; a complete opposite in atmosphere as it’s a chattering non-stop (initially) linear dialogue, mainly in two voices but succumbing to the necessity for chords to embroider a pretty breathless impetus. Here is some delicious playing, especially in the last 17 bars of each half where the rattling along settles into a pleasurable comfort zone while staying in one uninterrupted major tonality.

I found the Sonata in E minor K. 291 mechanical, in spite of Brawn’s vigorous interpretation which dealt with some ordinary material by bathing it in dynamic contrasts. An insistence on its opening pattern of four quavers followed by six crotchets, allied to a predictable modulation sequence reminded me of Browning’s mocking, ‘Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!’ where the note-spinning leads nowhere in the end. You might say something similar about the next, K. 322 in A Major except that the primary subject melds into further material with particular ease in a work that is essentially a simple two-line construct (and the lower a functional grave procession of subsidiary minims), graced with a stretch of nine uplifting final bars in each half that seem to come through on its own recognizances. Brawn handles this work with a muted determination that still finds the benignity across those codas to each section.

Bouree is how this pianist typifies K. 377 in B minor and it does have lashings of that driving bass mobility you can find in some of Bach’s works using that form. Once again, this is a two-line (almost completely) sonata but blessed with a bass line having a mind of its own with the occasionally-exercised ability to take over the running. The pace is steady, not inclined to give way to any inept dancers and an ideal sample of Brawn’s clarity of articulation, thanks to the absence of any deadening sustaining pedal.

Having reached K. 380 in E Major, we come across one of Scarlatti’s most famous sonatas and a favourite of every aspiring pianist. Brawn gives it an aggressive edge at the start, the ornaments in bars 2, 4, 6 and 8 a tad more martellato than usual. In fact, many another player comes to this work as to a fairly slow minuet, milking those horns of Elfland that begin in bars 19 to 21 for as many Romantic atmospherics as possible. This musician gives a suggestion of echoes but never faintly blowing, and he ploughs through the ‘working’ bars 50-56 at full steam without pulling any punches – an approach he in fact proposes in the first statement of the piece. It’s called Le Cortege on this CD: taken literally, it’d have to be being performed at one of your no-nonsense military funerals.

A fair few of us would know K. 430 in D Major from Tommasini’s ballet of 1917 for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: seven Scarlatti sonatas arranged under the title of The Good-Humoured Ladies. It sounds less of a flurry on the piano, in keeping with the direction on my score: Non presto ma a tempo di ballo. This reading is active enough but measured, in line with the frequent moments of rhythmic and harmonic insistence (bars 19-26, 30-38, 72-80, 84-92) and an inbuilt, frequent ‘kick’ as in the right hand’s first three notes.

Brawn goes a touch more affective for the Sonata in F minor K. 466 which has an actively participating left hand. The construct has traces of a two-part invention format, although the right hand introduces new triplet matter that is not handed to the bass until the opening of the sonata’s second part. But this musician sees the opportunity for added sensitivity and inserts small pauses before hitting the first note/chord of several bars. So it becomes a small-scale, soulful vignette with its own brand of melancholy and a reminder that this composer wasn’t ever just a dry figure, playing Toccatas, stately at the harpsichord.

Le Cortege is again the name appended to K 491 in D Major; it’s now plain that this cortege is probably referring to a stately progress in court from one room to another; rather like the movement of Prince Andrew from Royal Lodge to his new two-up/two-down residence in Luton. This also is a well-known work, notable for its triple call to arms in the opening bar and two abrupt changes of key – in the first half from a dominant-suggesting A Major to a momentary C Major setting; in the second, after the same A Major halt, an abrupt switch to F Major. Of particular note are Brawn’s parallel semiquaver thirds at the end to each half of the work – admirably even and crisp underneath the legato.

Second-last in this celebration of the great keyboard master-composer is the Pastorale in C Major, K. 513, which appears in the much-afore-mentioned 25 Sonate edited by Longo.. Brawn plays through the opening saraband deftly enough, negotiating handily the change in speed that comes with the bass G octave drones, and we enter an aristocrat’s view of the bucolics at their dance. He doesn’t repeat this set of pages but launches into the concluding 3/8 Presto with enthusiasm and does repeat that section with only a slight ponderousness across bars 47 to 49 for inexplicable reasons.

Finishing in style, Brawn plays the quicksilver E Major K. 531 which is another element in the Longo collection. He calls it Tarantella. Well, it is and it isn’t; the metre’s right but the material is too well-bred to set the piazza (or plaza) on a roar. It is given an admirable lightness, noticeable particularly in a well-positioned dynamic level for the left hand which has a significant role on the first page in sustaining the vaulting nature of this sonata’s arpeggio-rich main theme. The headlong progress is halted by several fermate but the communication of Scarlatti’s well-being and felicity sends us off, after this final expert demonstration, more than content with Brawn’s informed expertise.

TOGETHER APART

Brent Keogh

Move Records MCD 643

I suppose that the most significant point of interest on this CD is the presence of the composer playing oud. Brent Keogh has been a student of Joseph Tawadros, who brought that Middle Eastern lute to our attention through his collaboration with the Grigoryan brothers and his several excursions alongside the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Keogh appears in all but the first four tracks of this recording, working in various ensembles with his guests. Still, it’s slim pickings as the disc comes in at a tad over 40 minutes’ playing time. Which makes this a sequence of eleven short pieces – four of them less than 3 minutes long, another four less than 4 minutes in length, one less than five minutes with one a little over that length, the longest piece lasting for 6’20”.

A further disconcerting factor is the minor research needed in trying to date the works performed. No information comes on the disc leaflet, and there’s nothing showing on the composer’s Australian Music Centre entry. When visiting Keogh’s own website, we learn that two major works here, the Hagia Sophia Suite (Emily Granger harp and Andrew Blanch guitar) and the Turimetta Suite (Katie Anderson flute, Elden Loomes cello, Maharshi Raval tabla, Keogh oud) were written in 2021. So was a brief piece for oud, viola (Elizabeth Woolnough) and tabla called Stormfront. I can’t find a composition date for The Red Candle oud solo; Rosie’s Dance for oud, cello, flute and tabla was co-written with Anderson some time before July 20, 2019 (you can see it performed on a YouTube video, although with a double bass substituting for cello). Alunir, the final track for oud and cello dates from 2020 (also found as a YouTube video but with Keogh playing oud and guitar!).

Much of this disc’s content consists of melodies that are simple and folk-inflected; you’re not hearing anything that is challenging here. Keogh sets his bar level pretty clearly in the opening Prelude to his suite on the great church-turned-mosque-turned-museum-turned mosque again. This section is for Granger’s harp alone and begins with a short motif that is minimally expanded before we hit a melody that could be Turkish, or anything. It also undergoes restatement and sits in a fixed tonality, a minor scale rather than a mode which is reinforced by the repetition of a bass note/anchor. One moment of harmonic deviation: that’s all. The atmosphere is firm, slow-stepping, ruminative rather than meditative.

The composer seems focused on giving us a hieratic setting, this musical vorspiel being in the nature of a call to prayer, I suppose. Blanch joins Granger for the following three movements, the first of which is a fast dance in which guitar and harp play a rather intricate melody line in unison to excellent effect. This is repeated in the movement’s last third/quarter while the central panel is taken over by an amplification/treatment of the harp’s opening motif. Does it bring the building to mind? Sort of, in an elegiac way and giving a good deal more picturesque an image than I remember finding in the interior some eight years ago.

In the next phase of this suite, the movement is slower, more measured and less rhythmically irregular. The guitar opens and the harp intrudes by reinforcing individual notes, but then enters fully into the partnership. You can find three melodies that are repeated with slight ornamentation and some differing antistrophes. As with the first movement, the bass note stays constant throughout (it’s the same across the three of them, I think). Unlike its predecessors, the third piece begins with a promising angularity in both instruments, but soon reverts to the minor scale/mode language that has prevailed so far. Keogh refers to major key sections radiating some relief in this not-too-sombre atmosphere: I counted one-and-a-half such breaks, and they didn’t stick around for long. The linear interplay is momentarily interesting but these pages struck me as meandering, somewhat laboured in the antiphonal moments, happier when the initial experimentation was done with.

In his three-movement opus celebrating Turimetta Beach, the composer offers musical reminiscences of three birds that he and his family encountered on their outings during the COVID epidemic’s early years. In the CD leaflet, these are identified as hawk, eagle and heron; on the Move Records website relating to this disc, they are kite, eagle and heron. As one who doesn’t know a hawk from a kite, but is determined to finish off a career spent in distinguishing a hawk from a handsaw, I found the first movement of this suite as simple as any bird. Keogh uses the flute for an initial phrase over a cello drone, even allowing the wind instrument a ‘bent’ note or six in its lyrical outpourings; the oud provides a simple Alberti bass imitation. We come to a halt and what Keogh calls the ‘alap’ is finished. He pairs flute and oud in unison on a catchy melody, eventually giving Loomes’ cello a go at it before suddenly moving everyone on to a more striking rhythmically varied thought and following that to the end of this amiable, breezy lyric refreshed by Raval’s gentle tabla patters

Keogh proposes that the second lot of matter in this movement suggests a chase; maybe, but it’s an orderly, single-minded pursuit that projects more of play than purpose. He uses a static melodic and harmonic vocabulary in which the modulations are as obvious as those in any popular music of these days. Things change when we deal with the eagle. Here, the rhythmic delineation is far more sharp as Keogh sets up a pattern of alternating time-signatures that would do his former master Tawadros proud. He allies the oud and cello in unison combination and puts the flute up as a respondent. The whole atmosphere has sort of moved from Turkey (and Australia) to India with some sustained sitar-like explosions of action in the cello, not made any less suggestive by the tabla support which promises Shankar or Ali Akbar Khan without delivering anything of those masters’ complexity.

The motion is rapid, almost headlong but the output stays disciplined, even through the last pages’ shifts in pairings. Once again, this suggestion of dynamism in flight gives the performers room for individual deftness, although the whole thing is too well-mannered to give us life in the wild, let alone on a Northern Sydney unpatrolled beach. When we get to the heron, we’re in minuet land with Anderson’s flute in control of the melody line and the oud remaining in a supporting role throughout. I found here that even the rather strait-laced creative energy in operation so far had become even less interesting as the instruments followed predictable patterns in nearly every compositional parameter.

Keogh’s disc leads into four isolated pieces via Stormfront which offers an initial theme in disjunct bars of 7/8 and 4/4 with oud and viola in unison while Raval offers slight cross-rhythms that really amount to doubling. The action is fast and repetitive, Keogh’s opening bars coming back again and again, but I find insufficient bite in the complex to give you a sense of approaching weather disruptions, although the composer might have hit on a way to outline musically what passes for a barometric drop in Sydney – not much ado about very little.

Four muffled chords begin The Red Candle, which moves to a melody that is restated several times with some interruptions from the opening chords, the whole conducted over a recurring pedal note which is either present or – in the best linguistic fashion – ‘understood’. The rhythmic pattern stays the same although the melodic direction alters about half-way through the piece, but we soon return to the opening chords (intervals, rather) and the initial melody. Finally, the melody and ostinato disappear and we’re left with another double restatement of the fulcrum chords. I’m not sure that this oud solo lives up to the composer’s intentions of the piece being symbolic of partly-revealed mysteries and a consolation that surpasses the pains of our existence. It’s simply a gently flowing cantilena which, for much of its length, maintains a single melodic strain set to a minor scale.

There’s a Gaelic side-trip in Rosie’s Dance: a mild jig in alternating 6/8 and 3/4 time – three of the former, one of the latter – which presents in ternary form, as do quite a few of Keogh’s products so far. Flute and oud play the melody line together for most of the time, the cello providing a gentle pulse-reinforcement while the tabla also stays with the prevailing rhythm for most of the short piece’s duration. Nobody gets up to any adventurousness, but that’s not this composer’s path. We are quietly entertained by a slight frippery, and that’s about all.

If any of these works is puzzling, it’s the last track. ‘Alunir means to land on the moon,’ writes Keogh who contextualises his work by a lengthy Einstein quote about humanity faced with the cosmos: we know something, but it’s nothing compared to the vastness of our incomprehension. Fair enough: we can all subscribe to that statement of affairs. Still, this piece speaks in a rather Earthy voice as it stays, for the most part, in a mode (Lydian, writes the composer) with a regular pulse, most noticeable when the oud and cello double each other. Some interludes emerge but the score ends with elaborations on and disjunctions of the modal melody, suggesting not so much the moon as cafe entertainment anywhere from Ankara to Alexandria.

Keogh is content to couch his thoughts in familiar guises, without any modernist trappings. He’s indebted to the Arabic world for the more exotic aspects of his output on this CD; you can also hear strains of this country’s folk music shining through. On the present showing, he seems content to occupy an unstressed emotional world, each work shaped with care and (for the most part) avoiding awkwardness. This is a placid voice, a gentle music that on this CD proffers an undemanding sequence of short-lived bonbons.

HAYDN REEDER SOLOS DUOS TRIOS

Move Records MCD 666

A retrospective for Haydn Reeder in some ways, this CD contains two trios – one in two parts scored for your classic piano trio; the other a single movement combining flutes, viola and harp – a pair of duos for flute and violin, then violin and cello, followed by a welter of solos, pretty much all for piano with a solitary exception for cello. One of the five keyboard solos comprises a set of six rapid studies, but the disc’s sixteen tracks are generally short: all the piano pieces come in at less than five minutes each, two of the studies not getting to sixty seconds. It’s not the slimmest collection I’ve come across on CD but at a little over 56 minutes, you’d be expecting fair quality.

Some of the performers are well-known, like cellist Rosanne Hunt, violinist Susan Pierotti, flautist Johanna Selleck, and pianist Danae Killian. Some have been local presences for several years, like violin Philip Nixon from Orchestra Victoria and violist Barbara Hornung whom I last heard three years ago on Johanna Selleck’s Becoming CD, also from Move Records. The Six Studies are entrusted to Elton Sun, winner of last year’s Young Lev Vlassenko Competition in Brisbane but information about him is hard to track down.; according to Reeder’s CD leaflet, he was 12 when recording these pieces.

As retrospectives go, this is a fairly wide-ranging one covering 25 years’ activity. The oldest of Reeder’s works we hear is the Tolling Bell Song piano solo of 1998; then skip forward eight years for the Two Pieces for Piano Trio. Sun’s readings of the studies come from 2014, while the Lines in a Landscape trio dates from 2016 and is the longest track here at 7’20”. Waxing and Waning, the violin/flute duet, was written in 2019 while everything else comes from 2021 (Rondo, piano solo), 2022 (Wheels Piece, another piano solo), or 2023 (Surrounding the Cello solo, and The Spinning and Weaving of Destiny for solo piano). Still, the first works by the composer I can trace come from 1970, so we’re hearing mature chamber music – well, middle-to-late period material.

Matters open with the two piano trio pieces. The first, Growth and Transformation, has it all in the title. It begins with piano notes which the strings take over; you’ve got to go somewhere from here. And Reeder does with increasingly more complex aphorisms, punctuated by lacunae, until we reach an instrumental interplay of pizzicato and staccato line-crossing. My only problem is that I’m not quick enough to realize what is being transformed, although the growth is apparent. This small sample of musical biology brings us Philip Nixon’s violin, Rosanne Hunt’s cello and Danae Killian’s piano, giving full voice to Reeder’s angular, atonal counterpoint.

The same artists work through Flowering of the Resonances, which opens with a series of thick chords from Killian in a sort of Donaueschingen vallee des cloches. The string instruments enter with a series of vehement brief attack-motifs and Reeder builds his piece around textures rather than any overt development I could find. Again, much of the progress is by short bursts of colour with plenty of room for tremolando and sforzando bolts from a clear sky. The results offer a series of instrumental colours, all three eventually weaving around each other softly near the end.

Selleck opens Lines in a Landscape on alto flute and ends the work on a concert instrument. The main interest here is her partnership with Hornung’s viola as their instrumental parts urge each other forward, in the early stages playing at least twice in unison. Mestrovic’s harp isn’t secondary in interest, her role coming into solitary prominence at specific points, but you couldn’t call her contribution linear. Reeder speaks of the songlines of our First Nations people and there is probably a case to be made for such an image in this music if only I could remember my Chatwin. As things stand, this trio is of a piece with its two predecessors in its calm abstraction, although the latter score is somehow more discursive, even if its setting is the horizonless Outback.

Naturally, the textural interplay is more easy to read in the Waxing and Waning duo, here performed by Selleck and Pierotti. The composer sets up his material very clearly and you can follow his intervallic and chordal workings without befuddlement, mainly because he varies the players’ attack and output with an eye for dynamic contrast, as well as living up to his title’s promise in outlining increases and decreases of activity through a transparent environment so that you are aware of every flutter and trill, no matter how faint. It’s yet another instance of Reeder’s ability to construct a scenario with simple means but maintaining your attention by not wearing out his welcome: being discreet in the best possible way.

Just as easy to comprehend is the following Wheels within Wheels for violin and cello. Pierotti and Hunt circle around each other but the movement only presents as regular in a sustained passage at the centre of the piece where the lines are simultaneous, if not congruent in their notation or direction. For most of the time, the wheels intersect but break off, the patterns momentarily circular but more suggestive of plot-lines rather than anything mechanical. It’s suggestive of a consciousness you have of parts of a complex becoming visible, then being shut off, or replaced by something similar but somehow askew. The effect is slightly unsettling but also refreshing in its open-endedness.

What follows these ensemble pieces is a chain of six solos, mainly for piano. Killian opens the sequence with the CD’s earliest piece, Tolling Bell Song, which is something of a single-minded construct comprising sustained initial sounds with arpeggio-like companion-notes radiating off from the initial stroke. Reeder offers rhythmic differentiation by alternating 2/4 bars with irregular semiquaver ‘fillers’ in 10/16 measures, for example, although even these have their initial bell-type strikes. Yet again, you’re reminded of Ravel, if in a vocabulary that is fifty years further along the historical track.

Sun’s readings of the studies are quietly competent. None of the six is particularly demonstrative or confrontational, all being interrupted, to a greater or lesser extent, by fermate or pauses in the action. As with the duos, Reeder presents his material at the outset and moves gradually (sometimes imperceptibly) into a sort of development, which could be a simple process of adding notes to a melody strand, as in No. 1, or swerving to an opposing piece of materiel, e.g. No. 4. These bagatelles are distinct in character and, to his credit, Reeder speaks in his own voice throughout, not really bringing to mind any significant precedents. And he has found a sympathetic interpreter in this young pianist who outlines each study with composed authority.

Killian opens Wheels Piece with another of the composer’s single-line patterns of five notes that rises, then falls back on itself before another line joins and we enter a now-familiar field of two-line counterpoint with caesurae. The rhythmic movement becomes more insistent and we return to the environs of the Tolling Bell Song with single resonant notes sustained while secondary arpeggio patterns radiate out from them. Then we return to the rising pattern from the opening which is now both assertive and shadowy before the rotation stops in a finishing upward flourish – the wheels have come off?

With The Weaving and Spinning of Destiny, Killian takes us immediately into Meine Ruh’ ist hin territory with a repeated simultaneous arpeggio-type pattern in both hands which moves into some by-now-familiar Reeder vocabulary with sudden stops and repetitions-with-accretions, the complex leading to abrupt bumps, both fortissimo and pianissimo, spiced by some repeated note ostinati. Some bass chords are splayed out until they are reduced to their single top note which is repeated, fading into an inaudible space. This may be the composer’s outline of a personal destiny, or it could be applied to us all but I find philosophy’s big subjects impossible to get a handle on; I’d be lost in Also sprach Zarathustra if it weren’t for Strauss’s signposts and the only dissertation/dialogue of some elevation that means much to me is Bernstein’s party-piece Serenade.

Rosanne Hunt gives a spirited performance of the solo Surrounding the Cello which contrasts a downward-moving initial motif with a set of aggressive double-stop intervals that can move in either direction. Reeder sets some technical hurdles here including (I think) sul tasto work and a moment or two or sul ponticello, your odd scrape and harmonic (I assume intentional). Nothing too outrageous, though, and all carefully compartmentalized thanks to the composer’s insertion of aural station-stops. It strikes me that it’s not so much a question of surrounding the cello but more seeing what it can do – a sort of a propos the cello.

Finally, Killian returns with Rondo, which I found the most difficult of the pieces to imbibe. It begins with shades – as the composer informs us – of Berg (the Piano Sonata opening?) and Schoenberg (Op. 11?), but moves out into more diffuse areas which pile up on top of each other. About a third of the way in, the tonality seems more ‘white-note’ than anything else in a stentorian declamation before we hear bass chords-plus-melody under high-tessitura decorative chord-sparks. The bass/middle register texture remains present for some time before a sudden burst of double-handed furioso which itself shifts into pointillistic staccato in both hands that brings the piece to an enigmatic, Scarbo-like open end.

You could call Reeder a middle voice in the development of Australian music, I feel, because he is not of the melody-rules-and-the-more-diatonic-the-better sept, nor is he part of the look-at-me-and-my-daring tribe. His language is calm, controlled and belongs to those logical, clear-headed and emotionally controlled ranks that work at composition with an awareness of responsibility to communicate with an informed band of listeners. I’m welcoming this CD as disseminating the work of a gifted contemporary writer who speaks to us with remarkable clarity.