Category: CD

BROKEN WORDS

Susie Hodder-Williams, Chris Caldwell, Harry Rylance

Move Records MCD 677

Australian composer Frank Millward spruiks his wares on this Move Records CD but we hear only three of them. Title work Broken Words, like its companion pieces, is a duo – in this instance, for flute (Susie Hodder-Wilson) and piano (Harry Rylance); in fact, the composer calls his score a sonata. It’s a product of 2023 and has three movements: Broken Words, and (conjunctionitis), Pronouncing the Noun Baroque. Next we have _Ruptions which asks for saxophone (Chris Caldwell) and piano (Rylance). Here, the three movements for this 2024 creation are even more cryptic: E, Ab, Inter (it helps if you insert a silent ‘ruption’ after each title). To end, #6 Bag of Tells, written for flute and baritone saxophone, was also produced in 2024.

That seems plain enough, but it isn’t. Broken Words has Hodder-Wilson play three instruments, one per movement in the order concert flute, alto flute, piccolo. The final track/work, in which six small poems precede each of the movements (read by Hodder-Wilson), was originally written for flute and bassoon. As for _Ruptions, Caldwell also alternates in his instruments: baritone saxophone, then bass clarinet, finally alto saxophone. This work was originally written for bassoon and piano. The whole CD exercise lasts for a touch over 44 minutes, the works decreasing in length as the disc proceeds – 18′ 20″, 14′ 43″, 11′ 02″.

It’s probably telling nothing to anybody who knows Millward’s work but he appears to have a preoccupation with verbal communication as it relates to music. That’s hard to take in as a simple matter of performance mechanics where you can more obviously treat words by setting them. Not in this CD’s case where the composer attempts something difficult and completely subjective; he writes in the accompanying leaflet about music speaking to the subconscious and, because each of us has one, the message received is always different.

In his flute sonata, Millward proposes that its outer movements show the executants coming to grips with ‘fragmentation’ – which they do, as the first of them reaches a clear resolution of instrumental commentary that operates in a kind of benign disjunction for part of the players’ journey. That sort of dislocation, two voices speaking at odds, doesn’t come through as a constant, though; more often, the flute and piano conduct a dialogue evenly with few moments of brazen contradiction, if you like. But not much. In the third Baroque movement, the interleaving and welding of lines shows up more closely in what I think is meant to be whimsy across pages reminiscent of Pulcinella; if Baroque, very late.

What conflict there is in this section appears to be harmonic, although there’s not much of that going on. As for the middle conjunctional movement, this strikes me as admirably inter-dependent, the pages’ casing a solid construct with alto flute and piano intercutting as finely as in the Poulenc sonata, and with just as much linear sympathy. Far from any sign of rupture, this lengthy meandering impresses for its coherence, even if it smacks of 1940s Paris before the revolutionaries came into their own.

When it comes to the one-time bassoon sonata, you have to wait some time before we reach the first movement’s E_ruption, which comes in the last bars and dissipates quickly into some smouldering piano lava. The movement is elliptical, both baritone sax and piano crossing each other’s pathways with determination, but then, as in the preceding flute sonata, forming a sort of coherence of utterance that makes the momentary mild explosion more striking than you’d expect. For reasons I can’t quite explain, it seemed to me that the players were displaying some tenativeness in these pages, as though waiting to be surprised by what the other was up to and so poised, in a politely reserved fashion, for what came next.

My fault, probably, but I was expecting something a bit more disjunct in Ab_ruptions, a suggestion of violence as one part separated from another (possibly) larger mass. What we hear is a sprightly (eventually) duet for bass clarinet and piano with a carefully planned inter-connectedness, one line making allowances and space for the other, the whole following a regular path set up in the piano’s left-hand during the opening 6/4 bars of regular quavers, like a mutating imitation of a cantus firmus. In its outward presentation, the movement is stolid, steadfastly refusing to break away, or up, into lesser or greater shards.

Easiest of all is Inter_ruptions which begins (and mainly continues) as a modestly energetic tarantella, couched in D Major at the start and subscribing to a 12/8 time signature which seems to vary only slightly as the movement progresses, leavened by a few rhythmically stroppy breaks and a tendency to opt for a 3/4 cross-pulse. Living up to its title, the dance enjoys a few deviations, none of them too extreme to impede the underpinning forward thrust or long enough to unsettle the listener with unfamiliar matter. I might have been more enthusiastic about these pages if the players had pushed themselves more heftily into the score, although, to be fair to them, the material is sparse in nature, not encouraging of flamboyant e_xplosions.

What Millward means by ‘tells’ is a problem, although I think he’s referring to those quirky grimaces or gestures that gamblers make that reveal the nature of the cards they are holding. Going a long way further than this, Millward is considering society’s ability to read and interpret all modes of communication, not just giveaway tics, to the point where we have to cope with material like the ‘fake news’ that the current American Buffoon-in-Charge spouts while accusing others of creating it.

As prefaces to the music of #6 Bag of Tells, we hear short poems – two each of 3, 4 and 5 lines – called Barefoot, Seven, Roamer, Try ‘n’ Tell ’em, I Said, You Said, and Told. None of them is memorable or offers more than simple observations or suggests anything but an ordinary set of scenarios. The music holds more interest although you’d be pressed to find relationships betweeen poem and flute/sax duo. In the first, the reed makes a constant ‘tongue on reed’ sound in its constant quaver bass, which the flute eventually mimics.

The next lives up to its name by starting in 7/8 time, although by the end this has swollen to 9/8. The instruments start out at odds in motif- and phrase-lengths but reach a concordance near the end. By now, you have become used to the two-part invention suggestions as well as Millward’s quirky harmonic vocabulary which operates on a mild level of dissonance that can just as easily slide into a sudden pair of Major 6ths. Roamer has the flute indulging in a few glissando slides, and the motivic imitation appears to be more tightly wound. This piece reaches a strange conclusion with both players weaving around a fixed pitch, achieving parity and moving out of consonance in a sort of haze, suggestive of the title’s proposed dearth of direction.

Try ‘n’ Tell ’em is a canon at the 4th, started by the flute and moving regularly for most of its length until near the end when the regular sequential motion becomes fractured and the two lines end up in a splenetic contest of sorts: a feisty ending to a piece that Millward calls a gigue. Despite its final suggestions of inconclusiveness, I Said, You Said is one of the more amiable of the ‘tells’, subtitled by the composer as a Graceful Courante and operating for much of its length on ‘white’ notes. Still, the piece has suggestions of discord, giving substance to the preliminary poem’s statement: ‘You said what I said/But not the same’.

Told, with the extra heading of Bird like chirping (which the flute finds easier to realize than the baritone sax), is another friendly duet operating on a near-G Major basis, hopping and pirouetting to a satisfyingly formal denouement. But, as with most of these pieces, I can’t see a correlation between the spoken word and the played sounds. This slight score winds up a moderately intriguing disc that strikes me as holding music packed with inferences but lacking solidity – or perhaps I mean stolidity. And that finding betrays this ‘listener’s interpretation’ – the fundamental, age-old problem with which Millward faces us.

EXQUISITE HARMONIES

The Marais Project

Move Records MCD 676

Here is a remarkably chaste outing from Sydney’s period music ensemble, The Marais Project. We hear four performers – gamba and Marais founder Jennifer Eriksson, singer and violin Susie Bishop, gallichon Tommie Andersson, harpsichord Anthony Abouhamad. Gallichon, I hear you cry? It’s a bass lute, I’m told, popular in the 18th century for its continuo potential. As for what we hear, the group begin with an Abel sonata for gamba, of which instrument this pupil of Bach was a master; a Telemann fantasia for harpsichord and another fantasia ‘after Telemann’ from our harpsichordist-turned-composer; more Telemann in a gamba sonata; a Grande French Suite compiled by Eriksson which makes up nine tracks of content from Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, Louis de Caix d’Hervelois, Couperin, Marain Marais and Forqueray. Finally, Andersson has arranged The Acceptance by Biripi-Gamillaroi writer Troy Russell.

Comprising some 19 tracks, this CD is not a long one – about 53′ 30″, which averages out to about 2′ 50″ a section. The most substantial tracks – the Couperin piece for solo harpsichord, a gamba chaconne by Forqueray, the transparent Telmann keyboard fantasia and Abouhamad’s homage to that composer – settle just long enough to make their marks. But some of the other pieces make their points – what there are of them – in a startlingly short time. Not that you can put your trust in length – see Mahler v. Webern.

For most of this CD’s length, you can hear Abouhamad and Eriksson at work. Bishop appears only, I believe, on the last track which is dedicated to Russell’s much-arranged piece The Acceptance that involves all four performers, Bishop singing the composer’s poem as well as providing an occasional upper line. I believe we hear Andersson’s gallichon here only, although I’d like to be able to question some of the gamba/harpsichord duos where the bass line is very resonant and you could expect a touch of lute doubling; but no – it’s gamba+harpsichord only in the Baroque material.

The disc opens with the Abel Sonata in C Major Op. 9 No. 2. I’ve got a score open in front of me – the second printing for the composer from 1771 – and can’t find any similarities between what I’m hearing and the print. For one thing, this old Bremner edition of Opus 9 comprises six trio sonatas, of which No. 2 is in C Major but has only two movements as opposed to the three (Vivace, Adagio, Minuetto) on this recording. Not that it matters overmuch as the outline offered by gamba and harpsichord is clarity itself as Abel pays homage to his own instrument and its passing. Eriksson’s timbral quality is plain to the point of blandness, without a hint of vibrato and not much dynamic differentiation; all the interpretation’s colour comes from Abouhamad and his (comparatively) striking keyboard part.

No repeats are offered in this sonata which might be just as well as the content is simple enough to be imbibed on one hearing. You could say the same about the harpsichordist’s account of a Telemann fantasia, No. 5 in F Major from the 1732-3 set of three dozen. The march-like two-line tramping of the 42-bar-long Vivace is interrupted by 11 bars of D minor Largo before we enjoy a complete Vivace repeat. Nothing taxing here either, although Abouhamad spices up his repeat with some rapid-fire ornaments.

Eriksson returns for more Telemann: the A minor Sonata TWV 41:a6 which appeared in the Essercizii musici collection of 1739-40. The repeats in the opening Largo are observed, the gamba administering her own little variants the second time(s) around. In the following Allegro, the composer lives up to his reputation for modulatory predictability in moments like that between bars 39 and 43 which sound uninspired despite the sprightly instrumental interplay. In fact, the few moments of interest arrive in the appearance of triplets in both instruments, even if some of those from the harpsichord’s left hand (as in bar 21) are muffled.

The C Major Soave enjoys some eloquent phrase-shaping from Eriksson across its 30 bars of clean-limbed melody. Back to home-key for another stomping Allegro finale which maintains its pulse, although the build-up to the first-half’s highpoint – a gamba A in bar 20 – sounded more like effort than triumph. While the performers repeated this movement’s first half, they left the second part at one run-through, possibly out of consideration for the segments’ relative lengths. This is not a gripping work but you can find more substance than you expect the longer you look.

Abouhamad’s Fantasia after Telemann (Allegro-Affetuoso-Allegro) takes up where the preceding sonata leaves off: also in A minor and revivifying patterns that we’ve come across in the preceding five tracks. The work has an insistence about it, a sense of purposeful direction that isn’t travelling very far, which chimes in with what I’ve played and heard of the composer’s keyboard works. Abouhamad has a penchant in the outer Allegro movements (they’re the same, I think) for coming to an abrupt halt, giving us a break from his seamless chattering motion. As well, he introduces a few moments where the modulations are slightly off-kilter; not obstreperously so, but just enough to pique your interest in a landscape of the predictable. For all that, the work is an improvisation: on-the-spot music-making and a testament to the performer-composer’s powers of invention.

Then comes the composite suite, beginning with Sainte-Colombe’s Les pleurs, written sometime in the later 17th century. It’s heard here in a gamba/harpsichord version which tends to make things easier for the string player; in fact, I think the piece might have been better served as a solo gamba offering, bringing us somehow closer to the original for two viols. Anyway, the work meanders fitfully through its 17 bars of sturdy melancholy before yielding place to Louis de Caix d’Hervelois’ three-movement Suite in G minor/Major.

This comes from the composer’s 1708 Premier livre of Pieces de viole which he supplied with a continuo part. Rather than a series of suites, the book looks like a varied collection of ‘character’ pieces and dances with the odd Prelude thrown in for punctuation. Eriksson and Abouhamad start with L’Agreable, which is in G minor and, if intended to depict a person, gives us a rather ponderous one, inclined to gruffness at cadences. Then comes the following piece in the volume, La Fanatique, which is a kind of rondo with a recurring G minor melody coming up between segments that move to a mild derangement in 35 bars of bustling semiquavers before the main theme’s final resurgence; a kind of psychotic build-up although obviously sanity triumphs after the crisis . . . sort of like everyone’s hopes about the fate of One Nation.

Caix d’Hervelois’ last offering comes two items futher along in the volume: an Allemande in G Major, the musicians repeating both halves and Eriksson weaving in plenty of notes inegales, as she did for L’Agreable, which practice adds to the janty bounce of this optimistic 18-bar dance and emphasized the determined aggressiveness of the gamba contrasted with the scintillating brilliance of the keyboard.

A substantial harpsichord work appears in Couperin’s Les Silvains, No. 8 in the composer’s 1713 first volume of Pieces de clavecin. Mind you, it’s a rondeau and a lot of repetition obtains across its 68 bars. Both hands play in the bass clef throughout, possibly to emphasize the composer’s (or Versailles’) view of the forests and their inhabitants as existing on a lower plane than that social level showing itself off in the galerie des Glaces. Abouhamad manages to maintain the piece’s flow while observing all the ornamentation (and it’s thick) that appears in my edition (Pierre Gouin’s) of the piece. At the same time, he outlines the work with a keen eye for its breathing spaces, infusing it with a welcome expansiveness of insight.

Marais’ G Major Suite from his 1725 Cinquieme livre of Pieces de viole consists of 19 pieces; we are offered three of them. Saillie du jardin refers to a projection of some kind – natural or architectural – in a garden; you have to have a more vivid imagination than mine to trace any mental contours illustrating this botanical feature. Sadly, it’s given short shrift as the players don’t repeat its second half, and some of Eriksson’s top notes in double-stops haven’t travelled well. Le Troilleur is another rondeau; the word’s definition escapes me – some call it ‘the milker’, in which case the worker is taking his time or he has some very patient cows to deal with; others refer to a cafe witticism, which seems unlikely, given the slow-moving pace of instrumental dialogue. In any case, Erisson and Abouhamad indulge in the first repeat and eschew all the others.

To end this Marais jaunt, we hear a piece from near the suite’s end: Le petit badinage. This shows some liveliness in Eriksson’s mode of delivery compensating for her instrument’s problems with light musical raillery through a welcome variation in dynamic shaping. Finally, the pair work through Forqueray’s La Buisson of 1747, which you can take to refer to a person (unknown) because of its gender. Eriksson scrambles through some rapid high gruppetti in one of the later variations and does the inegale delivery at some points. But this is a no-nonsense reading of a work that throws the gamba’s potential for virtuosity into high relief.

Russell’s quiet lyric, The Acceptance of 2025, stays in a modal E minor for its limited length and, as far as I can tell, its original organization for soprano, violin and gamba has simply gained Andersson’s quaver-plucking gallichon as an undercurrent. Bishop plays a few bars’ duet with Eriksson at the start, then sings the work’s two verses, and the song ends without postlude. I’m sure it’s a sincere gesture although it’s hard to find any relevance between this work and the Baroque/Classical content preceding it; an odd note with which to end an odd if otherwise historically focused mixed bag of a CD.

THE LIFE IN BETWEEN

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Records MD 3483

Here comes another solo collection on the Move Records label from Michael Kieran Harvey, that endlessly fertile pianist-composer now resident in Hobart and still (happy 65th birthday for last month) one of the dominant forces in this country’s musical environment – playing with the same mastery while writing works that are thoroughly exciting to hear. On . . . the life in between . . . , he gives pride of place (and his CD’s title) to the last work by Martin Friedel: a 2022 compendium of ten short pieces (the longest lasts 4’01”, the shortest 1’21”) with little room for virtuosic flourishes and emotional outbursts, despite its being written for Harvey – our most technically brilliant and temperamentally flamboyant pianist.

Harvey plays nothing of his own, exerting his talents on behalf of five other composers. The oldest piece presented here is Johanna Selleck‘s Homage to Liszt from 2013 when it was premiered by the writer’s colleague at the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium, Ian Holtham. Almost contemporaneous is Andrian Pertout‘s L’architecture du cosmos from 2013-2014, first performed a year later in Paris by its commissioner: Chilean musician and activist, Maria-Paz Santibanez. This construct from the Melbourne-based writer/academic strikes me as the most rigorously organized work on the disc.

With the challenging title of Eine kleine Nachtmusik (after Dorothea Tanning), Colin Spiers produced four movements in 2021 that owe nothing to any Mozartian predecessors and everything (including their titles) to the 1943 painting by the then-Surrealist American artist and – to put it in sexist terms – Max Ernst’s fourth (and last) wife. This enjoyed its first performance, I believe, from Alexander Gadjiev in Hobart a year after he’d won the Sydney Piano Competition for 2021. Bruce Crossman‘s Not Fading Resonance presents as a 2023 exercise in friendship for its dedicatee (pianist Harvey, on his 60th birthday) and sustained sounds from the keyboard, held notes and chords emerging out of rapid flurries of activity in a large-scale rondo form.

The most recent composition. Vaughan McAlley‘s Toccata, was composed last year for Harvey and is the most tradition-echoing work on this CD. It demonstrates McAlley’s long background in choral singing (the Ensemble Gombert, Ormond College and Scots’ Church Choirs) and his mastery of ye olde-fashioned techniques of counterpoint and harmonic sequence. To thine own self be true, false wise-old-man Polonius said, and his dictum is carried out faithfully by this writer who lashes his Renaissance/Baroque colours to the mast without any self-deprecation.

Selleck’s Liszt tribute is packed with references to the Hungarian composer’s B minor Piano Sonata, completed in 1853. She opens with an upward leap on a larger scale than the original’s bar 8 move to Allegro energico and it isn’t long before she introduces a version of the single-note tattoo that emerges in bar 14. Harvey’s powers at overwhelming the listener through relentless virtuosity are allowed free rein at certain points and Selleck shows less interest in the languorous themes of Liszt’s large-scale construct, concentrating her (and Harvey’s) energies on that upward leap and the descending G minor scale articulated in the Sonata’s second bar.

Where Liszt’s score ends in B Major placid shadows, Selleck concludes her rhapsody on an upward flourish that serves as an affirmation rather than a reminiscence and is a valid reinforcement of this Homage‘s intent – a reminder of Liszt’s reputation across the centuries as a keyboard master of brilliance rather than a soulful poet, although he could be that all too easily; witness the Consolations, if you must. Harvey enters fully into this 19th century tapestry with contemporary threads, making the most of its Romantic undercarriage with persuasive zest.

Pertout’s score is substantial and differs from two other compositions by being all of a piece and the longest in simple length. It’s intended to be a homage to Stockhausen, for which purpose he employs the German composer’s Klavierstuck IX which is, like Pertout’s opus, partly based on the Fibonacci series; three familiar pieces by Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit, Jeux d’eau, and Une barque sur l’ocean; and three obscure compositions produced in the middle-to-late years of his life by Ukrainian-born/American composer Leo Ornstein – A Morning in the Woods, A Long Remembered Sorrow, and Metaphor No. 3.

These Ornstein works have no resemblance to the works that the writer produced in his young, ultra-avant garde days, but are more tonal, impressionist (well, the first two are), and prone to repeating patterns, as well as indulging a passion for setting four against three in terms of rhythm. You don’t come across anything as outlandish as the opening bars to Klavierstuck IX with its relentless chord repetitions, and the construct turns from 20th century elliptical to a kind of grave musical recueillement quickly; even the high-tessitura pointillism in these early-to-middle pages sounds more soft-edged than anything out of Darmstadt.

The rapid single-note tattoo with which the work opens recurs often, as do quick clusters and trills but at first in the context of sustained chords – some urgent, some placid. The work’s centre shows a restlessness that mirrors the opening pages and the repetition and fragmentation bring Ornstein to mind as Pertout’s language imitates the semi-improvisatory harmonic movement (or lack of it) that obtains in the first two of the above-mentioned pieces. Certainly, you come across some Scarbo-indebted explosive jerks and a long stretch of filigree work that occupies the limelight towards the piece’s luminous conclusion might suggest Ravel’s fountains.

But L’architecture speaks in Pertout’s own voice, in the end and, thanks to Harvey’s free-wheeling hands, it’s an unexpectedly amiable one. As for Colin Spiers’ suite based on aspects of Tanning’s painting. the opening Hallway brings Une barque sur l’ocean to mind with its relentless 11:8 bass line at the outset under a chain of right-hand fourths that suggests foreboding and uncertainty. Eventually, the repeated pattern transfers to the right-hand which lightens the atmosphere, if not completely removing the sense of menace, but the final reversion to bass rumbling restores the piece’s unsettling atmosphere.

Next, Duality possibly refers to the two female human figures in the painting but might mean something completely different to the composer. It begins with some brisk high chords, some of them arpeggiated, that frame the piece’s pages. In between comes much hard-driving action which at times recalls those Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm that conclude Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, at others the Shrovetide Fair mobile stasis; a set of pages to keep you guessing. Sunflower refers to the unnervingly large centrepiece of the painting, here represented by some slow-moving bass chords, followed by cadenza-type scintillations, both coming close to dialogue but having to contend with other matter before an ending which brings back that 11 demi-and-semiquaver gruppetti sequence from the work’s first pages: a kind of macabre poem in irrational menace, thanks to Harvey’s relentless delivery.

Last is Doorway. There are four of these in Tanning’s painting, the furthest away slightly ajar. This opens in a kind of oppposition to Hallway with a regular 10 demi-semiquaver pattern in the right hand against which the left hand offers a melody of sorts. Before long, both hands are in the rapid tintinnabulation game and the melody becomes more stalwart before fragmenting and the 10-note pattern rises to the top of the keyboard while the left-hand returns to its original melody, now obscuring it with trills; which could be another version of that in-my-end-is-my-beginning scenario or it could mean we can escape into light through that half-opened door.

Friedel’s ten-part collection opens with a series of solid and slow bass-heavy chords whose dissonance is muted by their low register until an accelerando about three-fifths of the way through, leading to a final chord that is sustained for an awfully long time. Next, a determined melody in a single isolated line is punctuated by a soft treble chord and a grinding bass cluster. This is followed by a belle-et-bete dialogue, a treble melody of some angularity answered by a gruff bass response, one after the other, until both reconcile with soft chords at either end of the spectrum.

The fourth segment operates with the same contrast between high (reasonably) and low but the chords launch into each other, so that the energy is not between the two layers but an integration of both. Like its predecssors, this also ends with a long sustained texture. Not so with the following gruelling essay which operates for most of its length at either end of the keyboard, the hands operating simultaneously and sustaining the prevailing grim emotional landscape through a firmly administered atonality.

The contrast between upper and lower voices is more satisfactorily drawn in the next set of pages where both follow their own paths, one note at a time with a few exceptions, mainly in the left hand for some short chords/intervals. It’s something like a hitherto-undiscovered Webern study: angular, uncompromising, honest. What follows is a complement, being labelled ‘vi. b’ and maintaining the same disjointed motion but sounding as though it’s following a single thread; once again, with some stand-out chords or intervals but the main thrust that of a one-line melody (aren’t they all? Better expressed as a chain of notes) spread across the keyboard’s full range.

Track 8 (piece vii) shows more volatility. An irregular pattern of notes is outlined in both hands, then acquires a harmonic framework that seems to be in fourths or fifths (augmented and diminished – no consonances here, as far as I can tell) which aggregate on top of each other until a general pause (long), with pianissimo chords to finish. The second-last work operates on three levels: in the middle, another single-note melody. with a downward-heading semi-arpeggio in the bass and isolated fifths (perfect, I think) in alt, all operating at different points in time, apart from a few doublings between the middle and top levels of action.

Last of all comes a variation on a chord. I think it’s G Major/minor and the piece begins with an unexpectedly strident challenge in its octave statement and percussive bottom-of-the-keyboard response. As the segment moves forward, its core acquires some notes, some of them fundamental to the chord, others peripheral; but the drama gradually yields to quiescence and the final page of this Track 10 ends with the same elongated resonance as obtained in Track 1. Now what any of this has to do with the quote from which Friedel’s composition takes its title, I’ve no idea. ‘Regard as one, this life, the next life, and the life in between.’ Thus spake the Tibetan sage Milarepa close to eleven centuries ago and I suppose we’re all pretty happy to go along with that advice but how the composer’s aphorisms bear on this – well, you work at it, grasshopper. But the score intrigues in its spartan directness and its innate consistency.

Crossman’s work is an exercise in generating resonances, most effectively through pressing down notes silently so that they sound after a percussive explosion around them. But the composer is pursuing all sorts of resonances by juxtaposing registers and simply allowing the sustaining pedal to do its work and carry various layers across each other. By its nature, Not Fading Resonance is spasmodic, packed with abrupt note-play and over the top in its dynamic directions: for example, a septuple piano in bar 2 and a nonet sforzando in bar 3 which give an ocular fascination to the score-reader but present an impossibility for any performer. Still, Harvey observes this piece’s fits and tremors with his usual aplomb in controlling a sterling example of sonorous theatre.

Last is McAlley’s tribute to French masters like Widor and Boellmann, although its opening is distinctly Bach-like with the right-hand playing a two-line gigue while the bass sets up what could have been a chorale melody, if only it hadn’t held some pretty wide interval leaps. A little further on and that base melody operates on two levels with our running gigue triplet pattern in the middle. Eventually, the striding bass is leavened by middle register chords while the right hand is occupied with McAlley’s unending dance, and the work ends with an eloquently extended tierce. Written with organists in mind, it sounds thunderously satisfying in this reading, Harvey as happy in handling its semi-traditional harmonic language as he is with the several vocabularies of the other writers whose music graces this benign and rewardingly catholic CD.

DREAMS

David Joseph

Move Records MD 3479

If you try to find traces of Australian composer David Joseph‘s current activity, you’re pretty much pursuing a lost cause. As far as I can tell, he’s not writing or publishing anything but is living his life as a lawyer in Nunn St., Benalla, and what music is coming out in his name is already-achieved material. Such is the case with this current CD from Move Records. It comprises four works, all of them choreographic exercises although I believe that only one of them has actually been danced.

Further to this retrospective feature, all of the scores come from a limited period in Joseph’s compositional life. The oldest comes first: The Dream, written in 1986 for the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra and here performed at a live concert by that body (now defunct?) conducted by a long-time conductor for all seasons, John Hopkins who passed from us in 2013. Next is The Haunting, which was commissioned in 1992 by Paul Sacher for his Collegium Musicum Zurich, putting Joseph among a very distinguished company in having such a relationship to the Swiss billionaire. And just in time, too: this body was disbanded, after more than a half-century of activity, in that same year. This track is performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under the Anglo-Australian musician Roger Smalley (who also left us, in August 2015) and was recorded live at the Malthouse Theatre.

The Memory was commissioned in 1994 by one-time Song Company director Roland Peelman for the Newcastle-based Hunter Orchestra which I believe has disappeared from that region. This track also comes from a live performance given, I assume, in 1995. Finally, we hear Two Ballet Scenes that Joseph wrote for the Queensland Ballet in 1994, taking their source from Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande play. First comes By the Fountain, a scene where the lovers converse for the first time and Melisande loses her marriage ring when it drops into a well (not a fountain in the play or in Debussy’s opera). Then we hear the Act 3 scene where Melisande is combing her hair and, in one unforgettable orchestral gesture from the Debussy score, lets it drop from the window.

These two excerpts are performed by a body called the Broadstock Orchestra which I cannot trace at all. It might be connected to Brenton Broadstock, the former Melbourne University academic and composer; it might be an ad hoc body named in his honour. At all events, these live performances have no named conductor, no venue information and, for that matter, could have come from either 1995 or 1996 – the CD leaflet is unsure. Which makes me think we’re fortunate to have these tapes re-mastered before any further details lapse from living memory.

As for the music itself, most of it is complex, if not severely so to the point of impenetrability. But that’s to be expected in works that deal with the subconscious and its perception (or lack of it). The Dream opens with some phantasmagoric skittering wind passages that settle down to a long unison melody for strings and low woodwind, then high strings stand alone in fluent chordal progressions. But the atmosphere turns menacing and unsettled. Slow chords, wavering string duplets, isolated percussion notes all alternate to suggest instability, if not an outright threat.

Some patterns enjoy repetition; others come out of nowhere and disappear: repeated trumpets, a falling filled-in third for woodwind, wisps for strings followed by an Augures printaniers-style chugging, trumpets in the ascendant for a happy Turangalila-reminiscent moment, and much use of 2nds, livened up by some inaccurate brass chording. A central passage of frenetic activity is followed by shards of intersecting motion before a general pause and we move to a more placid stretch of sustained notes and trills. Then a kind of reversion to the opening takes place with broad strokes from the upper strings and a plethora of trills, notably from the brass.

The piece has its moments of nightmare juxtaposed with emotional plain-sailing, although the latter usually devolves into frenetic action very quickly. Even the final sound-planes and broad melodic strophes lead to an unsteady resting point of three chords that are slightly splayed in this performance. As a whole canvas, the work succeeds in depicting a sonority-rich landscape where an awful lot happens, while the dream it depicts presents as both disturbing and disturbed.

As expected, The Haunting bears a strong resemblance to The Dream but is a work with stronger definition in terms of rhythm and interwoven timbres. The block chords that dominate the opening pages completely, later the furious rushing scales from Joseph’s woodwind en masse, and a vehement bass underpinning all produce an accumulating tension that follows the earlier work’s narrative pattern – which, it seems to me, is based on spasmodic activity, prescient pauses and an instrumental stridency where blocks collide without yielding space, like the string body’s whirling pattern being cut across by trumpet-led brass chord-expectorations, over a sustained timpani roll.

Inevitably, you are impressed by the suitability of this score as a film accompaniment, probably for a graphic slasher movie. Joseph doesn’t put any limits on his aggression which continues for some time with downward rapid scales from strings and woodwind cut through by strident brass in repetitive two/three-chord punctuation, while every so often the smoky colour of a vibraphone cuts through. You get a sort of let-up at two-thirds of the way through, although what really happens is that the metre slows and the notes get longer. But dissonance is king in this series of short oases as Joseph moves into a planar model where you have time to appreciate the instrumental structure of his sustained, intensely strident chords, especially the chain of 27 that precede his final, soft farewell to this unnerving process – one that is expertly accomplished by Smalley and the MSO.

The composer views the third work in this triptych, The Memory, as the most abstract of them but it strikes me as being rooted in something closer to the everyday than its companions. It’s still hard to make links or connections between its constitutional elements although I think the task would be easier in studying this score, if you had the ability and inclination. For one thing, it proceeds in a series of aphorisms, brief outbursts separated by silences that make the content apprehensible. In fact, it’s only at about the three-quarter point that you come across a sustained utterance.

The other characteristic is its pace which, because of the general pauses, impresses because it gives the mind time to absorb. As well, Joseph suggests the everyday intentionally, even if you have to enter into a kind of modern-day Impressionist ambience; you can hear birds, traffic, crowds, although I think he’s stretching it by proposing clouds as a musico-pictorial effect – but then I never believed in the efficacy of Debussy’s nocturne. So, it’s odd: the composer pushing the immaterial character of this work that is suggestive – admittedly, only in part, and perhaps, only to me – of our real lives.

The two Pelleas et Melisande pieces serve as flavoursome vignettes to finish, the first flute-dominated at its opening while the Window scene is led by the strings into an irregular song-like lyric which eventually sounds out clearly, emerging as lucidly as it’s going to get toward the piece’s end. The performance from the Broadstock body is eloquent and clear-cut, the ensemble coping with some hefty post-flute solo writing in the fountain/well scene where the content moves from picturesque to a substantial commentary on humans attempting to interact in the Belgian dramatist’s labyrinthine emotional field.

Joseph’s voice has been one of the more interesting to hear in the Australian musical world over the last thirty years and this collection of works for reduced orchestral forces sets his individuality in high relief, particularly when the CD’s major orchestral offerings are set alongside the vapid effusions we have become accustomed to hearing (and tolerating) from writers with no knowledge of or background in the historical practices of their art. He might be mystifying in his intentions, startling in his ferocity of utterance, and inviting his listeners on a confrontational path, but Joseph maintains his focus and holds your attention across the span of these well-resurrected scores.

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.