Category: CD

Here we go again

cliveoconnell

A BEETHOVEN ODYSSEY

James Brawn

MSR Classics MS 1465

Brawn 1

Not that there’s any cause for complaint in facing another cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas.  Such an exercise has occupied the talents of many artists, some of whom have brought new life to hoary standards from the well-worn catalogue; we would be much the poorer without the recordings from Arrau, Brendel and Pollini.   British-born and sometime-Australian resident James Brawn has entered the lists with this CD, which has been swiftly followed by three others; currently, he is exactly half-way through the cycle of 32 and, like any sensible artist, is not taking them on sequentially.

In this first essay, Brawn performs the first and last of the Op. 2 job-lot dedicated to Haydn, followed by the blistering Op. 57 in F minor, the Appassionata.   Each reading is finely calibrated in meeting the composer’s multiplex of technical demands, and the performer reaches a persuasive accommodation with the individual sonatas’ intellectual and emotional rigour.

Beginning at the beginning, Brawn impresses straightaway in the Op. 2 F minor Sonata No. 1, not least with his accounting for Beethoven’s sforzandi.   These are treated humanely, as abrupt interjections, not belts around the listener’s ear-hole.   So the texture remains clear throughout, especially in the first Allegro where Brawn avoids the usual trap of blurring passages of maximum activity, chiefly by observing a sensible dynamic spectrum and maintaining a brisk pace in which the trills are handled as integral icing.

The ensuing Adagio enjoys careful treatment with small touches of rubato that still preserve the movement’s fluency.   The only possible fault I could find in the Menuetto was one sforzando too many, while the finale was taken very fast, as required, with a sustained reliability of delivery in the segment’s chains of left-hand arpeggios.   A passage of particular interest comes between bars 161 and 172; excitingly urgent in its emphasis on the bass melody the first time around, then even more so with the reinforced right-hand doubling on the repeat.   Speaking of which, Brawn observes that of the movement’s second-half  – easy to accomplish in the studio, of course, but you rarely hear it in live performances, especially from younger interpreters.

For the Sonata No. 3 in C Major, the semiquaver passage-work comes across in emphatic and digitally decisive shape, yet the first movement’s exposition is distinguished by a generous fluency, only faltering at bars 156-8, the sole question mark in a set of pages that rattle past with fitting assurance and contentment.   For the Adagio, Brawn  is intent on observing melodic continuity rather than following the usual pattern and detaching notes in the onward flow, as from bar 43 inwards; unexpected, but it works for me.

A generously applied staccato dominates the Scherzo wherever slurs are not indicated, but the Trio is the opposite – a melange of pedal-sustained right-hand arpeggios.   In the spritzig Allegro finale, the lightly articulated attack is refreshing, as intended.   Here the only awkwardness comes in the busy pendant to the main theme from bars 8-16, and at its recurrence later on at 116-205 – but then I can’t recall another interpreter apart from Brendel who can give these segments some persuasive kind of organic continuity.

Ten years lie between these two works and the Op. 57 which is one of the four most popular of the composer’s output in this form.   Brawn’s reading has an admirable spaciousness right from the opening which is handled as a true Allegro rather than a shock-and-horror show of inconsistent metres.   In finding and communicating a structural cogency in these challenging pages, Brawn is distinguishing himself from the ruck; not afraid to give full weight to the composer’s explosive, almost manically insistent blocks of full chords alternating between the hands, and then giving an urgency to the counter-weighted piano leavening while avoiding any hint of neurasthenic twitching.   His account of the Piu allegro is exemplary, carried off with passion and lucidity, most notable in a bracing passage from bars 249-256 – as powerful and biting as you could want.

The pianist treats the central Andante‘s theme with deliberation, allowing himself the space to linger at a few points, although the following variations come across as regular without metronomic rigidity.  The last Allegro concludes the drama with plenty of character, its almost-continual restlessness carried off as all-of-a-piece, dynamically sensible and unflustered.   Brawn powers through the coda, hitting his left-hand accents manfully in the sonic mash of bars 325-340 and bringing the whole to a rousing conclusion.

This is sensible Beethoven, giving these sonatas a well-rounded airing and facing the interpretative problems with gusto and honesty.  Brawn’s command and sympathy are present on every page and I look forward to experiencing the rest of his efforts in this wide-ranging musical exploration.

Laying it all out

cliveoconnell

SATELLITE MAPPING

Amir Farid

Move Records MD 3402

Satellite Mapping

Released this year, here are the complete works for piano solo by Melbourne composer Stuart Greenbaum, a luminary of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Music and a writer whose name is continually before the public.  In his 50th year, Greenbaum’s retrospective is being observed by pianist Amir Farid, one of the Benaud Trio musicians and a highly esteemed contributor to this city’s cultural life.   While this retrospective takes up a double CD, much of the music it contains is brief in length, and every so often slight in character.   Yet, because of the composer’s absorption of a wealth of influences from the serious and popular fields, his work has a consistent attractiveness, not afraid to show an inner emotional world that appeals across the potential spectrum of listeners, from those aware of musical developments over the past half-century to others who eschew background for straight-talking  –  not that these groups necessarily exclude each other.

The album follows the development of Greenbaum’s craft in temporal order, starting with the 1991 Portrait and Blues Hymn, recorded some time ago by Michael Kieran Harvey.   Farid’s handling of this miniature displays some basic elements in the composer’s style: a penchant for pauses, a grounding repetition of phrases with varying harmonic-block underpinning (or not), progressions straight from a jazz player’s vocabulary, an easily digestible formal lay-out.   It’s a birthday-celebration piece but its title eludes any definite interpretation.

One of the recording’s major works, Ice Man, follows.  Among the more impressive and sustained products in Greenbaum’s output, this three-movement set of meditations refers to  extracts from Andrew Scott’s Lost in the Himalayas memoir, which details the Australian doctor’s celebrated 43-day ordeal in 1991.   The first (and shortest)  part – Lost | The Moon | Don’t leave me here – presents an atmospherically quiescent sound scape that suggests a detached despair, erupting into a short blast of vehemence before returning to the prevailing placidity.   Picture of an anorexic | Dignity | The dream continues the prevailing pointillist writing style, projecting sound pictures of a landscape where nothing happens in the physical surroundings; only the sufferer’s mind has active flashes that fade to silence or lead to obsession, denoted by repeated chords, a series of arpeggiated or broken sequences that grow slightly by accretion.   But, over all, the  music speaks of isolation, even when Scott’s dream of addressing his family brings about a passage of relative magniloquence.   But in the end the activity dies away to a single repeated note, like a drop wearing away stone.

For the last movement, They must have seen me | Faint voices | Affinity,  the atmosphere changes from meditative to flurries of action, although Greenbaum returns to the passive mode when the excitement of a possible sighting by helicopter dissipates.  Not that the composer is following a script, but it is difficult not to project your own narrative for piano writing that is, at its core, pictorial/impressionist.   Common chords over an oscillating D octave pedal propose a return to humankind and the movement ends with a kind of reconciliation, Scott’s affinity being with the rock that sheltered him and his acceptance of the Himalayas’ beauty, despite their innate menace.  Farid outlines this work’s slow-paced poetry with a high sympathy, giving each gesture plenty of space and maintaining a steady pace through to its consolatory final bars.

Innocence (in Stillness) was written for a birth and may be familiar to some pianists from the AMEB Grade 2 syllabus; a melody punctuated by some simple bass notes and chords, it’s over before you know it.   Looking to the Future, composed as a theme for a play concerning the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, states a bluesy theme several times, then stops on a middle-instrument question – a real bagatelle.   From 1996 comes one of the composer’s more well-known pieces, But I Want the Harmonica which, in some ways, bears traces of the preceding two scraps.   Again, the work follows a clear path, its motivic  repetition sufficiently varied to sustain interest as a descending sequence of two-note gruppetti enjoys multiple accompanying variants with a heavy jazz colour at its high point.   This work exemplifies Greenbaum’s individual vein of melancholy not taking itself too seriously as he recalls with open-hearted benignity a childhood school experience that meant much to him.

The first CD ends with three pieces that cover ground similar to that already covered.  New Roads, Old Destinations attempts to illustrate an Escher drawing, one of those trade-mark building designs where stairs ascend and descend simultaneously.  Chords follow a downward path round a central ostinato, either inside the harmonic progression that forms the piece’s material, or below it.   The structure plays neatly with the concept of nothing changing except superficially; as in the Escher drawing, the actual lines remain the same, no matter how you perceive them.   First Light’s four-note basic motive offers a sort of reflection of the previous piece, the motion being upward over a central-keyboard ostinato.   And again, the added-note chords, even the modulations, are reminiscent of a soft-edged Shearing-style improvisation that rises to a powerful C sharp Major conclusion – yet  the almost inevitable, unsettling distant high notes that conclude the work offer a coda of quiet negation, or at least a question-mark.   At about half the length of the other two pieces in this concluding triptych, Fragments of Gratification presents an evanescent meditation on one, possibly two, themes which rises to a brief dynamic high-point at about 1:40 but its true air-space tenancy is coloured in soft pastels.   Composed on the last day of the previous millennium, it eschews hoo-rah celebration for a gently rueful anticipation.

Disc 2 begins with Equator Loops, a set of variations radiating our from a central D; this is one of the few points on either of these discs where Greenbaum asks for unabashed virtuosic playing, the concluding loops in particular wide-ranging and aggressive.  Three Optical Allusions presents as a short suite dealing with musical representations of a solar eclipse, a time-lapse photograph and a Mobius strip.  It is hard to avoid impressions during the second of these, a gradually expanded rising phrase over a fixed bass pattern, of hearing something like  organized doodling, while the third offers little more, except louder.

Four Thoughts remain in the same compositional continuum.  The End of Winter oscillates between two short phrases; For Oliver offers a touch more interest in its change-ringing on simple, if rhythmically varied melodic matter; the Escher (again) inspired Spirals moves into some interesting, almost adventurous territory after a somewhat numbing first half; Bagatelle for Aksel kept its mystery – it is based on a children’s song – until near its ending, but it brought to your attention how surprisingly orthodox is Greenbaum’s underpinning tonality.

Written for Elyane Laussade, Matilda Deconstructions takes fragments of Waltzing Matilda and, in the first segment, gives a driving minimalist-mimicking moto perpetuo; the second dissection, less rhythmically rigid, uses a five-note falling ostinato to support yet another set of wilting, decorative passages of play.

Glen Riddle recorded The 4th Saturday in April among a slew of Greenbaum occasional pieces two years ago, and Farid brings an equal gift of placid serenity to this wedding gift for a wedding that Greenbaum could not attend.   Evocation of 2006 sits as a kind of memento mori concerning one of Greenbaum’s students who died young; the Albeniz connection is a vague one, although the ostinato has some congruence with a permeating figure in the Spaniard’s piece.   And the composer’s avoidance of the anticipated in his disposition of the descending five-note scale pattern in the work’s last third is masterly.

Written for the birth of the composer’s daughter, Lavender for Hanna presents some quick variations on the British folk-song Lavender’s Blue; another miniature that is over very quickly.   More substance comes in Allusion, Introspection and Ascension which uses well-established piano masterpieces as springboards.  The first takes part of Chopin’s Barcarolle and superimposes a structure that oscillates between the chromatic versatility of the original and a patch of 1930s-era syncopation that brings the piece to a close in medias res.  Introspection extracts certain chord progressions from the finale to Schubert’s last B flat Major Sonata, but does not do very much with them; it’s as though the original is too self-sufficient to need much treatment – which rather defeats the purpose of the exercise.   The middle one of Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets generates an exciting outburst in the last Ascension piece, even if the referrents are difficult to decipher until Greenbaum offers some literal quotes; Farid here provides a resonant interpretation of a piece that maintains its virtuosic roots.

The CD’s title work begins sparely before slowly passing to a roiling across-the-keyboard melange: an exercise in depicting the overwhelming detail that emerges as you hit the plus indicator on your Google map image.  It’s an ingenious concept – the gradual crescendo in information – yet it completes its work pretty rapidly; rather like the impatience most of us show when using a satellite map.   The CD ends with Fanfare for Elizabeth: not a royalist tribute but a piece written for the 80th birthday of Greenbaum’s mother.   It uses an optimistic rising four-note trumpeter’s motive but does not modulate outside its A Major framework; still, it’s emphatically a celebration, an occasion for jubilation, and a suitable conclusion to this lengthy remembrance of things past.

On the composer’s website, you can find analyses of some of the pieces on these discs, viz. First Light and two parts of the Ice Man set.  See http://www.stuartgreenbaum.com

Good start – and the rest?

cliveoconnell

HAYDN OPUS 20

Tinalley String Quartet

Move Records  MD 3374

Tinalley

We’ve enjoyed a lot of Haydn over the past few years; the Melbourne Festival saw to that.  For reasons beyond guessing, the complete string quartets were reviewed   –  by visiting ensembles who generally fitted in some Haydn among other works, as well as local groups taking up the challenge.   Any slack fell to students from the Australian National Academy of Music who lustily joined in the binge.   Not that the composer has suffered from so much neglect that he had to be resuscitated; you find that one of the quartets occupies pride of first place at many a chamber music event – sometimes being treated as a warm-up, on more reputable occasions handled with as much care as the executants give to their Beethoven or Shostakovich.

The Tinalley group has been constant in personnel for some years now: violins Adam Chalabi and Lerida Delbridge, viola Justin Williams, cello Michelle Wood.   At the same time as the members have taken up career positions – Chalabi at the University of Queensland, Delbridge and Williams with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Wood with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – their performances here have decreased markedly in number, cut back this year to  a two-program series at the Recital Centre.   Certainly, the group performs at festivals throughout the year – Perth, McLaren Vale, Townsville, Bellingen, and a few oncers from Albany to Mount Macedon – but, as a matter of necessity, these musicians’ time together is limited.

So this CD of half the Op. 20 quartets – Nos. 1, 3 and 4 – is a welcome opportunity to hear the players in well-seasoned shape.  The works make an excellent exercise in contrasts of all kinds – texture, developmental processes, harmonic elisions and jumps, rhythmic surprises, allocation of responsibility.   More surprisingly, the start of each opus number presents a contrast in ensemble colour; it’s as though the players have re-thought their style of attack each time they take on one of these ground-breaking quartets.

During the first movement exposition of the D Major No. 4, you are taken immediately by the controlled volatility of the triplets in Chalabi’s line, as well as by the finely proportioned weighting of the playing, which obtains also through the following set of variations where the supporting roles remain part of the fabric rather than fading into quiescence.   But the gem in this work comes in the plainest-looking writing: the Menuet alla Zingarese with its clever off-centre shape  –  gypsy music of real character, and treated with controlled elation, notably when Wood takes the lead in the movement’s Trio.  And the work is finished off in exemplary fashion with a smart-as-paint Presto, distinguished by faultless duet work, deft dovetailing across all lines and as crisp a delivery of the pages’ frequent dotted quaver-semiquaver-crotchet rhythmic motif as you are likely to hear.

The No. 1 in E flat is a more galant creation at its opening, more curvaceous in its anatomy than its plain-speaking D Major companion.  Here the Tinalleys give another extended example of their craft with the Affetuoso e sostenuto‘s mezza voce delivery, packed with subtle variation in delivery while giving the impression of seamless uniformity of dynamic, while still giving the work’s fluid motion a few mild sforzando accents where required.   Another crisp Presto ends the performance, notable for the evenness of Chalabi’s syncopations and the interpolation of subtle touches like the slightest of rallentandi at bars 148-9 to give a tonal and metrical relief just before the placid last phrases.

To round out the disc, the Tinalleys have chosen No. 3 in G minor, which begins with unexpectedly asymmetric melodic lines – well, they don’t last as long as they should in a perfect world.   Here, the details are lavishly spread around, like Williams’ semiquaver/trills from bars 41 to 44, brisk without being flurried and mirrored with panache by Delbridge 80 bars further along.   The following Allegretto features phrases of odd lengths but these players pronounce them with a dissembling persuasiveness so that you have to listen hard to realise that Haydn has inserted extra bars.   An arresting event comes close to the start of the Poco adagio where the three upper strings sustain  viol-like chords while Wood outlines semiquaver commentary for ten luminous bars.   It somehow suggests stasis and motion simultaneously and is only one of the praiseworthy passages in this set of pages – for me, the outstanding track on the CD.    The finale is dominated by Chalabi, but you also get to admire again partnership passages of high quality between the two violins and the Williams/Wood collaboration.

Every so often, Haydn inserts a unison, a sort of semi-colon in the narrative.   These musicians handle such tests without flinching and the sympathetic resonances that result speak volumes for their precision.    Of course, these are obvious instances of successful synchronicity and you can find finer instances when the texture becomes more complex in the first movement development sections of all three quartets.   The members maintain a lucidity in their work: no overstatement, no milking a phrase for sentiment, no step off the rational and civilized path that Haydn set down in these light-filled scores.   All we need now is for the Tinalleys to complete the opus with another CD of this excellent standard.

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Old favourites in safe hands

cliveoconnell

SPANISH GUITAR MUSIC

Andrew Blanch

Andrew Blanch

A young artist with no time to waste, Andrew Blanch is a graduate of the Australian National University and he has self-produced this collection which holds, inter alia, several well-known highlights from the repertoire; which is to say, if you’ve been familiar with the work of Segovia and his successors for the last 60 years or so, little on the disc will come as a surprise.  From this exhibition of musical craft, Blanch is quite justified in putting his talent before the public.  The versions that he offers of the staples are freshly considered and capable; as well, there are several pieces here that you won’t hear often these days but which have been allowed unfairly to fall by the wayside.

Inevitably, Blanch presents some arrangements, but they are pretty much all of high quality, including two Pujol transcriptions of extracts from Falla’s El amor brujo, Leo Brouwer‘s straightforward take on a Scarlatti sonata, an expertly constructed version of Albeniz’s Sevilla by expatriate Cuban master Manuel Barrueco, and three other works re-scored by Blanch’s teachers, Timothy Kain and Minh Le Hoang.

For the rest, the disc’s content is exactly what it promises.  Along with Tarrega’s all-too-familiar Recuerdos de la Alhambra comes the same composer’s Variations on the Carnival of Venice after Paganini, three of the 24 Caprichos de Goya by Castelnuovo-Tedesco (all right – an honorary Spaniard), three transparent Catalan folksongs by Llobet, and Turina’s haunting Fandanguillo.

Blanch’s readings are expertly shaped, trusting to the music to make its own points without having to exert any theatrical gestures.  For example, the opening track – the Miller’s Dance from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat ballet (arranged by Kain) – is handled with a welcome sense of give and take.   Its biting farruca rhythm and the concurrent patches of rasgueado propose a stately drama; then Blanch pulls the tension back for the open-ended melodic theme that follows, and even the stringendo climax is articulated with controlled excitement rather than the customary lurch towards applause-inducing hysteria.  The third piece of Blanch’s Falla bracket, Song of the Will-o’-the-Wisp, offers a similar study by emphasizing the striking colour of the surrounding framework while delivering the lyrical melody itself with a comparatively restrained dynamic.

Tarrega’s well-known tremolo study coloured by memories of the Granadan palace/fortress is given an unexpectedly moderated reading, Blanch’s maintenance of the melody carried out without any automatism but with precisely managed and appropriate touches of rubato, the piece’s digital difficulties negotiated with a reassuring uniformity of attack.   Later, in the first of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Caprichos, El sueno de la razon produce monstruos, the twin lines of melody and active supporting bass come across with mutual clarity; nothing is underplayed or recessed but the central lyric remains perceptible.  For all that, the emotional content itself is hardly indicative of the monsters that Goya envisioned; too controlled in its vocabulary to bring horrors to the mind, I would have thought.

The Sevilla by Albeniz (Barrueco’s transcription sticks to the original piano solo’s G Major) is less busy than many another guitarist makes it, Blanch giving a slight emphasis by way of a minute fermata to the full chords that start each phrase in the outer segments.   But his semiquaver figure-work is immaculate and the central C minor meno mosso delivery offers an unusual but appropriately musing interlude.  With the three Llobet settings, Blanch fleshes out pretty stark material on the page with a wealth of vivid detail, including carefully articulated harmonics in the outer folksongs.  The simplest of these, El testament d’Amelia, provides one of the more sensitive interpretations on the CD, Blanch taking pains to give weight to the top line at the two points where the melody moves to octave harmonics and also on its final appearance when it is positioned inside the accompaniment.

The performer outlines Llobet’s Scherzo-Vals with a deft application of humour, especially in the articulation of the piece’s signature acciaccaturas, and then throughout its length with an old-time elasticity of metre, hesitating before nodal points and then launching back into the dance pulse with gusto.  He takes this sample of salon music and infuses it with affection and bonhomie, right up to a supple account of the brief coda.  The following pair of Scarlatti sonatas remain in their original keys, Brouwer’s version of the G Major K. 146 the more successful for its easy flow of arpeggios and busy sequences of repeated 2nds.  Minh Le Hoang made fair work of transporting the A minor K. 175 to this new medium but the piece ranks among the composer’s more percussive sonatas  –  full of drama, punctuated by harmonic clashes and requiring a hefty dynamic output.   Once heard, Rafael Puyana’s explosive 1966 recorded account set the bar for the work’s fierce emotional imprint, which is only faintly echoed in this gentlemanly treatment.

Still, the Carnival of Venice variations are a congenial way to end this self-introductory display.   Not as ferociously finger-stretching as the Paganini set that inspired Tarrega, they offer plenty of challenges, although Blanch – like any sensible player – picks the most congenial and personable from the composer’s uneven sequence.   If you want legerdemain, it’s here in spades: after a lengthy introduction comes a high-spirited gambol to leaven some of the the collection’s more sombre, meditative tracks.

In all, this disc bears strong witness to the guitarist’s interpretative skill as he turns from cornerstones of the instrument’s repertoire, through exacting arrangements, to virtuosic show-pieces.  It’s an auspicious and welcome start to his recording career and you can find further details about him at http://www.andrewblanch.com

A true individual speaks

cliveoconnell

PSYCHOSONATA

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Records MD 3368

Psychosonata

Composer/pianists weren’t thin on the ground in the 19th or even the 20th centuries, times when the modern instrument came into its own as the instrument of choice for postulant musicians, even if it’s been superseded by the guitar over the last 50 years.   The species is not unknown in Australia.   There’s the grandfather figure of Grainger leading the team, with Dulcie Holland, Miriam Hyde and Malcolm Williamson a few decades later.   Keith Humble knew his way round the keyboard, as does his near-contemporary Larry Sitsky.   Richard Meale comes to mind for his famed Messiaen interpretations, although I never heard him play his own work.  Carl Vine is an outstanding representative of this cross-over musician type.    But the younger creator-performers remain an amorphous quantity   –   plenty of composers but few are exponents of their own creations for piano.

Then there’s Michael Kieran Harvey who has set the bar for virtuosity in this country for about 25 years, with the capacity to turn his hand(s) to anything he’s asked.    A generous exponent of other writers’ works, he shows on this CD that his compositional craft is just as formidable.   Mind you, much of this music speaks to Harvey’s actual pianism: restless, driving, dexterously complex, reminding you at every turn of his live concerts and recitals where the act of music-making becomes startlingly physical as the material gushes from the piano in an unstoppable stream, whether it’s Brahms or Bartok.

Harvey takes part in all seven works recorded here.   He opens with the longest construct, his Psychosonata, Sonata No. 2.   Its title is due to the work’s commissioning by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, the first performance coming at that body’s Hobart conference in 2012.   Divided into three movements, it begins with furious action that does not let up; even when the dynamic level reduces, Harvey’s fingers keep flying.   The composer’s notes refer to sonata form and every so often you feel a developmental pattern – but mostly not; rather, episode follows episode with the spirit of Bartok looming large through the work’s percussiveness and use of ostinati.   As for the work’s language, it presents as enthusiastically atonal, with concords intentionally avoided.   At points, the right hand action is impossibly mobile; you cannot conceive how the action is sustained for so long.    Sill, the  sound is splendidly engineered, catering for Harvey’s tendency to work simultaneously at both extremes of the keyboard and producing a clear-speaking mix.

The work’s movements meld into each other, so that the slower second one is upon you without notice.   A more passive emotional atmosphere prevails, the activity conducted above a resonantly gruff bass register continuum for some time; the advance goes slowly with insistent decorative interpolations in the treble that move to rapid scale passages in both hands before a return to aggression at about the 3:20 mark.   Yet Harvey maintains a discipline over any outbursts, while not letting go of the expressionist nightmare his musical scenario proposes here, passages of near-placidity merged with obsessive freneticism.

The final movement moves straight back to the athletic vaulting of the sonata’s opening.  After a temporally confusing introductory few pages,  it settles into a triple metre  – Harvey’s concept of a vivace gigue , possibly.   The lava flow is disrupted by relieving interludes, moderate in attack and fluency.   Even in the last pages where the activity halts for isolated blurts, the underpinning restlessness is never far away.  Yet, as a picture of psychopathic or psychotic thought processes, the sonata presents as organized and directed, its processes too purposeful to convince the listener of any erratic mental depictions.

Cellist Alister Barker collaborates with Harvey in Kursk, referring to the Russian submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000 with all hands killed.   This duet has the piano generate a relentless underpinning, as though the sonata is being revisited.   Barker’s cello line presents as angular, sharp-edged writing.   The work is clearly speaking in anger, in protest as both instruments remind you of racing pulses reacting to the catastrophe.  This moves to a lament that suggests life dwindling, the  souls’ candles extinguished.   A cello cadenza rises to an uncomfortably insistent high sustained note and the last moments revert to the aggression, the string instrument executing a rising scale with double-stop support while Harvey’s piano smashes out punctuating chord clusters, the whole ending with a fierce assertiveness and insistence: you don’t forget, you can’t forget.

Fear, the disc’s second-longest work, features violinist Natsuko Yoshimoto.   Harvey takes his impetus for this duet from Bertrand Russell’s 1943 An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, citing a paragraph that concludes with the philosopher-mathematician’s well-known observation: ‘To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom . . . ‘    Which is fine as an aspiration, an ambition, although this piece’s tone appears to be more neurasthenic than the disc’s eponymous sonata.   The keyboard is confined to the upper part of its compass as it escorts the violin through various characteristics of a fearful state – a nervous tic, an urge towards hysteria, a burst of compelling trauma.    Yoshimoto works through several cadenza-type passages that present aural images of nervous twitching, a teetering on the edge of control, until the violin is left alone at the end, a single voice that doesn’t reach any resolution.

For Melbourne pianist Stephen McIntyre’s 70th birthday four years ago, Harvey produced his Mazurka, which has traces of the more heroic products of Chopin,  with one absolute quote near its end from the B flat Op. 7 piece.   Both an ebullient and a neat tribute, it is unabashedly more representative of the writer’s personality than that of the dedicatee.

A four-movement Homage to Liszt continues the references to Harvey’s virtuoso composer forebears.  With Eugene Ughetti‘s percussion seconding the pianist’s assured bounding, the opening Ballade attracts through its jazz-influenced starting pages, its liveliness punctuated by a reference or six to actual Liszt pieces.  The following Waltz seems to be nothing of the kind, even if the piano and drum-kit partnership makes an infectious combination; the Harmonies du soir study is discernible if you stretch your ears.  A Csardas offers a brisk parody of the Hungarian dance, at its most striking in a piano/percussion statement-response passage.   Consolation contains a melody line in the piano doubled by a keyed percussion instrument I couldn’t identify, but the piece’s surrounding preamble and coda come from a different world than the Liszt pieces referred to in the title.

Tristram Williams gives an invigorating interpretation of the Etude for Trumpet in C.  The composer plays rhythmic games non-stop in this brightly-textured piece that begins as a piano toccata escorting a jumpy brass line.    As in the preceding duets, the keyboard doesn’t take a back seat but insists on equal status, and equal work-load.   At 3:40, Williams employs a mute so that the heat fades somewhat, even if the impetus is not slowed, the combined output remaining spiky.   Of course, the mute comes out for the last brisk minute and the collaboration – a taxing one with its metrical complexities – comes to an abrupt end.

City of Snakes – using B flat bass clarinet, piano, bass and drums – refers to Hobart, Harvey’s home town and apparently a city subject to reptile infestations in bush-fire season.   This brings into play Ashley William Smith, who impressed me mightily with his ANAM account some years ago of the Lindberg Clarinet Concerto.   The final piece on this CD is a vehicle for Smith’s instrument which occupies the sonic forefront.   In its very accessible be-bop rush, Ughetti takes the floor for a substantial solo break and Harvey keeps himself busy.  The bass player remains unidentified and his/her actual sound is an inconclusive one – is it electric, natural, or over-miked?    Whatever, the work’s effect is optimistic, summoning up memories of 1960s Melbourne jazz club fare, if more exciting in its bravado than much that you heard live in that decade.

Harvey as a performer is full-frontal, unapologetic, master of a rolling sonority even when the music is emotionally recessive.   This exhibition of his compositions shows how complementary the acts of creation and performance are for him.   While the shorter duets and concluding quartet hold your attention for the craft exerted in their combinations and alterations of sonorities, I think that the half-hour sonata gives the listener a bitingly clear picture of the remarkable musician’s intellectual and  –  for want of a better word – spiritual attributes.   As a study of the composer/pianist at work, this Sonata No. 2 gives us unmistakable essential Harvey.

Eternal City, plus water

cliveoconnell

CARPE DIEM

Arabella Teniswood-Harvey

Move Records MD 3410

Carpe Diem

Quite rightly, this pianist subtitled her disc ‘piano music from Italy’.    Not all the composers she performs are Italian; in fact, only two of the six were citizens – Respighi and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.    The others are a mixed bag: that citizen-of-the-world-if-originally-Hungarian Liszt, New Yorker Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Poitiers native Pierre Petit, with Sydney son and this performer’s husband, Michael Kieran Harvey, providing the album’s title work.

And the geographical spread of the music is a limited one.  Liszt’s Les jeux d’eaux a la Villa d’Este celebrates the lavish fountains near Rome;  the Roman Sketches by Griffes depict four aspects of the city, although only one is site-specific; Petit’s Rome, l’unique objet  .  .  .  refers specifically, in turn, to the Pincio Hill, the Tiber complete with sea nymphs, the church (probably) of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, with the Villa Borghese’s riding track bringing up the rear; the Australian composer’s work takes Respighi’s Pines of Rome as a launching-point.

As for the native-born, Castenuovo’s contribution is Onde, two studies helpfully differentiated as Short wave and Long wave.   Respighi gives vent to one of his interests in Tre preludi sopra melodie gregoriane; repeated listenings with a score have failed to help in detecting which Gregorian chants were used.   However, neither composer suggests anything Roman in these pieces.

The other element that permeates he CD is water.  Liszt’s description of the Este estate’s fountains is one of piano literature’s most impressive aquatic flights of fancy before Debussy and Ravel.   Another fountain, that of the Acqua Paola on the Janiculum, inspired the third part of Griffes’ suite and he draws an accomplished, brilliantly pointed series of images, remarkable for several reasons, not least that the composer never set foot in Rome.   Castelnuovo-Tedesco follows Griffes’ impressionistic approach for his two types of waves, while Petit’s river-picture populates the stream with Nereids – and he knew the city because he won the Prix de Rome in 1946.

Teniswood-Harvey handles this sometimes arcane material with admirable command.  The Liszt work is a restrained reading compared to those recorded by more flamboyant, effect-craving pianists, and its pages are negotiated without interpolated histrionics or nerve-tightening  fluster.  Real rarities, the Griffes pieces enjoy excellent treatment, their author’s uneven key signatures and mutating metres enunciated with an underlying stability that gives the composer great service, especially in his The Fountain of the Acqua Paola and White Peacock sketches more than in the not-as-original Clouds and Nightfall movements.

Both here and in Respighi’s preludes, Teniswood-Harvey makes her most eloquent cases. If the Gregorian is undetectable, the virtuosity needed to handle demands on sheer stamina in the middle one and sustaining the elongated tension in the last is impressive.  Further, the pianist keeps the preludes’ textural complex lucid, particularly in the three-stave spread of the concluding Lento.  By comparison, the Petit pieces strike me as amiable atmospheric rambles, the San Carlo section making a striking initial impression for its unexpectedly determined statement while the Galoppatoio bridle path, despite its suggestive title, could be depicting anywhere.

Harvey’s work, an injunction to action before it’s too late, was written as a birthday present for its current interpreter.   Aggressive, restless, packed with notes, it grabs attention straight away – like its composer in action – and doesn’t let up, even when the dynamic level sinks.   Inspired by the pines in the Villa Borghese gardens, Respighi’s opening movement depicts children playing – actually, rorting around the place with no concern for the plant life –  and Harvey mirrors the original’s frenetic action, although the emotional effect is more serious.   At the same time, it offers a final reaction to Rome that brings the disc to a close with a driving contemporary edge.  It’s all well worth hearing, both for the high quality performances and for the opportunity to hear some illuminating rarities.

Remembering the gentle man

cliveoconnell

PETER SCULTHORPE: A RETROSPECTIVE COLLECTION

Various artists

Move Records

Peter Sculthorpe

He was the most fortunate composer of his time and place; everything came to him without apparent effort – critical plaudits, friends, commissions, public appreciation, honours and prizes.  Nobody had a bad word to say about him, although some of his contemporaries were snippy at his run of successes.   Even his failures served as momentary hiccups rather than career-threatening disasters; the 1974 opera Rites of Passage at the Sydney Opera House scored some favourable reviews.  When Peter Sculthorpe died two years ago aged 85, a national presence closed up shop and suddenly we were poorer for it.

Critics and composers usually react uneasily together; I don’t know many of the former who go out of their way to offend deliberately – a few, always unqualified for the job – but many musicians have no desire to read anything but praise and, if they are writers, have little charity with even the most benign mind that grapples with their work and reaches an ambiguous or a disappointed finding.   Sculthorpe, pretty much alone in my experience, had broad shoulders for public appraisal; moreover, he seemed to bear no grudges.

I met him once only but had some slight correspondence over the years.   Attempting an eventually futile M. A. in 1974/5 with a poorly equipped supervisor, I contacted three Australian composers about specific pieces in their respective oeuvres.  One of them informed me where I ‘might’ be able to buy a copy of his deathless masterwork; another refused to correspond except through his publisher; within a few days, Sculthorpe sent back a Faber edition of his score with an encouraging inscription.   A bit less than 30 years later, this time essaying a M. Mus., I contacted four composers asking for interviews.   All obliged, but Sculthorpe as host in his Woollahra house was particularly welcoming – affable for hours, unflappable when confronted with unintended impertinences and, after he finally read the thesis, generous in remarking on its few strengths.

This CD offers a miscellany, much of it familiar to hardened concert-goers because of certain pieces’ popularity with musicians, but nearly all of the content speaks in Sculthorpe’s own language.   The tracks come from previous recordings, nearly all on the Move label with one ring-in from the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School Chapel, New York. The period covered is two decades – 1975 to 1995 – but one piece harks back to the occasion of a memorable Sculthorpe success: Love 200, written for a 1970 Sydney Symphony Orchestra Town Hall Proms concert and featuring the group Tully.   You won’t find that psychedelic extravaganza here, nor any of the Sun Musics or Kakadu; all of this particular retrospective is confined to chamber music.

A few of the pieces are arrangements, some of them enthusiastically endorsed by the composer, like Wagogo Plains (originally the Morning Song, one of the composer’s more popular lyrics) which has Max Cooke and Darryl Coote performing the piano duet parts but superimposed is throat singer Dean Frenkel contributing a high flute-like melody above a softly whirring vocal support drone.   Reshaped for plucked instrument ensemble, the Little Suite of 1983 sounds more French in flavour than ever, the Concordia Mandolin and Guitar Ensemble timbre dripping Piafian nostalgie; Michelle Nelson‘s orchestration suits the opening Sea Chant, its string ripples and sizzles highly atmospheric for the lilting main melody; the following Little Serenade with its rueful sequences of 2nds veers closely towards the sound world that Sculthorpe aimed for in the suite’s concluding Left Bank Waltz.

The version of Songs of Sea and Sky that opens the CD is performed by flautist Derek Jones and pianist Leigh Harrold.   Of the original work’s seven parts, six appear in this reading, quite obviously with Sculthorpe’s endorsement.  Based on a Torres Strait island song, the suite is an integrated composite, even with the introduction of bird chirps in the Mission Hymn movement which turns the basic material to illustrate a Western evangelical end. The performance has all you could want: flawless articulation from Jones and an unflurried handling of the keyboard part, notably at the start of the Dance-like movement.

The odd-man-out from New York is guitarist Jonathan Paget playing From Kakadu, for which the composer re-employed the main theme from his large-scale orchestral work.  Written for Darwin’s 1993 Shell Guitar Festival, this sequence of four movements sits astride complementary worlds of remote landscape musing and responsive observation.  For example, the initial Grave suggests isolation, a lonely figure in a country without horizon; the following Commodo gives the impression of a complaisant visitor, ambling through the Territory, mirrored in the warmly responsive account that Paget gives of the final Cantando –  contented music without much exertion to interrupt the atmosphere of languor.

Dream Tracks for clarinet/violin/piano trio is another Territory piece in four sections that offers exposure to all its executants: a long piano solo for Stephen Emmerson at the start, an unusually concordant duet for Floyd Williams‘ clarinet and Michele Walsh‘s violin during the  third Lontano movement, while Sculthorpe revisits one of his distinctive Arnhem Land chants, Djilile, in the even-numbered movements to hypnotic effect, the whole rising to a sort of cock-crowing jubilation and peroration as the finale circles onto a rousing D Major full-stop.

The piece that harks back to Sculthorpe’s 1970 Proms triumph, Night Song, appears in an arrangement for violin, cello and piano performed by Trio Melbourne (Isin Cakmakcioglu, Rachel Atkinson and Roger Heagney respectively).  Its minor mode melancholy still has great appeal; a slow-moving work, it makes few demands on its interpreters or its listeners – a placid, sonorous oasis.  The Melbourne String Quartet plays Sculthorpe’s 9th exercise in the form:  one movement with five sections, the first two accomplished very quickly, soundscapes of little depth preceding a long central elegy which boasts a 12-note melody which is humanised by plenty of tonal unde

rlay.   I’d forgotten how this ensemble   –  violins Carl Pini and Gerard van der Weide, viola Jane Hazelwood, cello Arturs Ezergailis   –  could produce a laudably clean and mobile output on its better days.  This version has no surprises outside a few in the score itself, like a sudden ponticello slash of semiquavers across a quiescent soundscape, showing the teeth behind the muzzle.

The collection ends with 11:59 PM, originally the Nocturnal of 1989 which Robert Chamberlain recorded the following year for Move.  Over his agile piano part, Dean Frenkel offers his own superimposed throat-singing commentary.  Once again, it must have been all right with Sculthorpe as he has included this superscription in his catalogue of works; after the Wagogo Plains effort earlier on this disc, I think that a little goes just far enough.

At the end, you have heard a fair sample of the composer’s smaller works, enough to give those unfamiliar with his voice a good idea of his individual language and his emotional breadth, as well as an unabashed statement of connection to the continent’s vastness as he perceived it.  For those of us with more years of Sculthorpe experiences than we might care to remember, some of these pieces surprise by their power to recall those years when the 20th century came alive in Australia’s music, and when a new work by this amiable musician was a matter to generate passionate discussion and interest.    And it brings back to the mind  –  well, this one  –  memories of a kind, generous and gentle soul whose avuncular presence is greatly missed.

Everything you ever wanted to know

cliveoconnell

RUSSIAN RARITIES

Larry Sitsky

Move Records MD 3328

Russian Rarities

Heading towards his 82nd birthday,  Larry Sitsky is a surviving member of that group of composers who came to prominence in the 1960s when Australia’s musical world woke up to the 20th century.   Not part of the Sydney collation of Sculthorpe, Meale and Butterley; non-allied with the Melbourne league of Dreyfus, Werder and Gifford; Sitsky has made his base for many years in Canberra, where he is still Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University.   His renown as a pianist has endured through his teaching and recordings, this particular one being a double album released in 2010; on it, one of his major preoccupations is given ample space and you would find it hard to detect a similar undertaking elsewhere.

Born in China of Russian parents, the composer/pianist studied with Egon Petri and, through him, can claim some descendant status from Busoni.  Throughout these discs, you come across example after example of a 19th century European virtuoso approach to interpretation where the letter of the law is not strictly observed, the player comfortably taking liberties, mainly with respect to rhythm which becomes a moveable feast.  Much of this music I’ve not heard before and some of it fails to engage immediate sympathy.  Yet the enterprise is much more than a musicological research tool and the performer’s authority of utterance is mightily impressive.

Towards the end of Disc 2, the program  moves to an assemblage of small pieces, several of them so slight in length and substance that they almost disappear simply through weight of numbers.  But the chief works that Sitsky presents constitute a remarkable journey from the next-to-last stages of Russian Romanticism, through the outbreak of mysticism spearheaded by Scriabin, to the Constructivist movement that followed the 1917 Revolution.  These focal tracks begin with Anton Rubinstein’s Op. 88 Variations in G, Vladimir Shcherbachev‘s Sonata No. 2,  Nikolai Roslavets‘ Second Sonata, and the First Sonata by Alexander Mosolov, the man once famous for his Iron Foundry orchestral essay in Futurism.   Scattered between these are  smaller scores by Leonid Polovinkin, Nikolai Obukhov, a suite for sophisticated children by Rebikov, and will-of-the-wisp bagatelles by Vladimir Deshevov and Stravinsky’s one-time intimate, Arthur Lourie.  And that’s not all: some scraps by Roslavets and Mosolov offer slight fleshings-out of these writers’ sonatas.

Listening to these discs in succession is certain to lead to empathy overload, sometimes disguised as fatigue, so you’re best advised to oscillate between the long and the short in bursts, rather than embracing Sitsky’s program as a one-sitting continuum.  Not that the opening  Rubinstein Variations offer many difficulties.  Unlike the rest of the album’s contents, this was a live performance from 2006, performed on an elderly Ronisch instrument at the Canberra School of Music.  Rubinstein wrote his solid construct in 1871, and Sitsky’s piano was made for the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 so there is a kind of historical congruence to the recording, even if the Ronisch is not exactly in tune in parts of its higher compass.

The theme is a noble extended chorale that emerges after an opening recitative for bass octaves.  Sitsky adopts a free approach to the bar-line’s exigencies as early as Variation 2, by which stage you realize that the shade of Chopin is present, even if the Polish composer’s inspired manipulation of the keyboard is not.   The Marcia Variation 3 would never do for any parade ground, thanks to lots of indulgent arpeggios.  The Vivace of Variation 6 comes over as leaden-footed, a Teutonic romp.  During the following two variations, the work takes on a predictable format; Rubinstein is never happier than when leading you into the obvious.  At Variation 11, Sitsky employs a different rhythmic pattern to the printed one, and lets fly with the individuality in the final segment with octave transpositions, hefty use of the sustaining pedal that blurs any rapid-fire passage work, idiosyncratic emphases of notes, semiquavers transform to triplet quavers.   All of which could have been part of contemporary practice in the composer’s era, especially as we know that masters like Liszt and Paganini delighted in adding quirks to stable if ordinary structures. The only real objection to this interpretation is a looseness in the joints, too much rubato when strict persistence in the pulse would give the work some flesh-strengthening muscle.

The Shcherbachev Sonata was written in 1914 when the composer was 25 and gamely experimenting.   A one-movement rhapsody, it shows an awareness of developments in harmonic vocabulary, at times a less hard-edged Prokofiev tongue, at others a Rachmaninov-like chromatic facility with much roaming anchored in tonality.   This composer is prone to employing a strong-voiced melody with plenty of surrounding ferment, his climactic moments as rhetorical and passionate as anything in the preceding Rubinstein variations.

On Disc 2, Sitsky’s first major reading is of the Roslavets sonata which reveals – as do several other tracks on this album – the influence of Scriabin, although this later composer differs from his predecessor by being pretty keen on octave declamations in both hands.   Sitsky continues to treat the set tempi erratically, with clipped triplets and a breezy treatment of time values in gruppetti.   The single-movement sonata follows the Liszt practice of referring to itself but what impresses above all else are Sitsky’s pains in mastering its myriad chord structures, its abundance of trills and its typically 20th Century tendency to leap inconsiderately across the full compass of the piano itself.

Mosolov’s vocabulary is about as confronting as Soviet music gets; the Iron Foundry is an object lesson in depicting industrial, i.e. factory, power with relentless drive, and my only other experience of this writer’s work,  Susanna Stefani-Caetani’s execution of the Piano Concerto No. 1 with her husband Oleg Caetani and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in August 2006 was memorable for its execution more than its material.   Sitsky gives the opening tone-row outline plenty of breadth before the inevitable barrage of massive block chords oscillating with discernible melodic motives over bass rumbles.  Once again, this sonata comprises one movement that juxtaposes episodes of varied texture, employing cells rather than more solid continuous arches, but at the core its world is pure Constructivist, heading towards the brutal.   Mosolov is happiest pounding ideas around the instrument rather than settling in for a good round of development.  For all the talk of his use of rows and a genre of 12-tone writing, the composer was no doctrinaire in his composition’s organization, as witnessed by the multiple repetitions of notes, chords and phrases. Sitsky contrives to preserve the 1924 sonata’s ebbs and flows of tension, right up to the soft, gloomy concluding gestures.

Of the less substantial pieces, Polovinkin’s Ereignis VII stands out.  Three internally fraught fragments make an arresting sequence, enigmatic in their terseness.  During the second, L’action, the composer inserts some notes for prepared piano – a card inserted between some centre-range strings – that startle for their unexpectedness.  The third, Souvenir, loses its drive as the performer again suits himself about both pulse and pace.

Lourie’s Formes en l’air, written without bar-lines or time signatures, reveal a moody quiescence, typified by some staccato pointillism and abrupt blurts of activity.  The last of the three pieces is formally apprehensible, the most impressive – and impressionistic  – of the set, with some Ravel washes initiating an unpretentious if brief experimental paragraph.  This composer’s slightly earlier five Syntheses occasionally startle by their anticipation of the sort of writing that came into vogue about 1950, but the revenant at this particular feast seemed to me to be Schoenberg; while Lourie’s brevities seem flighty, there are suggestions in them of the 1909 Drei Klavierstucke.  Like his great contemporary at this developmental stage, Lourie is not breaking away from his time, yet these tracks are like nothing else in Russia from the period – at least, judging from the context of these discs – and much more sophisticated in their elements than anything that his colleague Stravinsky had produced at this stage.   If one of the Syntheses stands out, it is No. 4: fertile in manipulation of material, its movement both strong and delicate.

Rebikov’s Music for Children and three extracts from the Op. 15 Melomimiques enjoy fine service from Sitsky, the former not as patronising as you might think, certainly not over-saccharine in flavour but packed with whole-tone, bitonal, and suspense-through-non-resolution surprises. The program concludes with two samples of Obukhov’s pianistic mysticism.   Revelation consists of six excursions into metaphysical areas such as Death, Immortal, and The Distress of Satan.   In atmosphere, the suite is placidly neurasthenic, hard to penetrate because of the composer’s mysticism where The Void turns out to be a pretty active plane.   The state of perpetual existence is typified by bleak isolation, and the Devil’s agony lasts only long enough for a few punitive pin-pricks.  The final diptych of Le temple est mesure: l’esprit est incarne and La paix pour les reconcilies would have delighted Messiaen with its three-stave spread and clangorous chords juxtaposed with reserved lulling.

A labour of love, then, this large-scale exercise.   You have to admire Sitsky’s dedication and erudition, as well as the clear evidence throughout these recordings of his innate virtuosity.   A lot of it makes for hard listening – not just the sheer percussiveness of a morsel like Deshevov’s Rel’sy which imitates Bartok’s Allegro barbaro in several respects – but the sustained aural onslaught of the three focal sonatas.   This music-making gives some welcome substance to our knowledge of a strikingly fertile time in Russia’s musical activity that, for many years, was in danger of being wiped from the memory of all but a few true believers.  We should thank Sitsky for his remarkable gift of restoration.

Impressionism lives

cliveoconnell

THE SKY IS MELTING

Marianne Rothschild and Glenn Riddle

MOVE Records MCD 505

The Sky is Melting

Here’s a window into a corner of the country’s musical composition world, one that is centred around Melbourne.  Both performers are locals: violinist Rothschild studied at the Victorian College of the Arts and the Australian National Academy of Music and has freelanced round the country; Riddle is currently Lecturer in Keyboard at Melbourne University’s Conservatorium of Music and a pedagogical force in the national music sphere.  Much of what they present on this now somewhat dated disc (released in 2014) is bound up with their collaboration; in fact, the major work on this recording, Linda Kouvaras‘ Bundanon Sonata for Violin and Piano, was written for the duo.  Andrian Pertout‘s Sonus Dulcis – a construct that the composer keeps on re-framing – was arranged for these executants, who also gave the premiere performance of William James Schmidt‘s Argentine Etching.

Kouvaras has provided both the opening (and title) piece of this CD, as well as the substantial sonata.  Both have connections with the composer’s stints as artist-in-residence at the Shoalhaven River estate of Arthur and Yvonne Boyd.   In the brief initial vignette, Kouvaras gives the piano high arpeggio patterns to offset a slow-moving violin melody which suggests the heat of mid-day at Bundanon, although the images come courtesy of an impressionist sound-world so that the pictured countryside has a Gallic tang complete with whole-tone chords and little rhythmic variety beyond a 4/4 pulse.  Some double-stops around the 4:20 mark make a small change of diet, but the last pages move into a more satisfying atmospheric area with the violin meandering in desultory style above a stolid piano part, this combination making a fair proposition for sonic heat exhaustion.

Stuart Greenbaum‘s six Occasional Pieces are just that: bagatelles written for two specific birthdays, as well as a birth-day, a funeral, a marriage and the last of the set (and longest) serving as a wedding gift.   How to be in the world makes for pleasant listening, Rothschild’s violin operating in a high register for the most part, with inescapable shades of Vaughan-Williams’ lark, some small jazz interpolations disrupting the idyllic sweetness.  The lament of Life Cycles emerges as a violin solo; a slowly striding line, generally diatonic in matter, punctuated by some Celtic-style skirling and a series of ‘snaps’.   For Alette begins with  brisk pizzicato that moves to a rising scale motive with Riddle’s eloquent piano doubling the string line until the ternary shape is finished off with a sparser version of the opening gestures.   Ideas follow each other in quick succession during The 4th Saturday in April piano solo, which offers no real development but maintains an optimistically major tonality, appropriate for this small-scale epithalamium.   Another violin solo, Curves on the Great Ocean Road, proposes a pattern of self-reflecting turns, nowhere near as unsettling as the real thing, but its central section has intimations of the drive’s rugged terrain. Finally, The Lake and the Hinterland revisits the British early 20th century folk music arena with a broad tune treated in turn by both instruments, a dour middle interlude, before a reversion to the Midsomer landscape.  Some spikiness interferes with the prevailing harmonic sweetness but the piece concludes in an unambiguous D Major.

Better known to me as a pianist, William James Schmidt avoids the temptation to do a Piazzolla in his Argentinian Etching, although you can hear a plethora of Latin suggestions as well as irrepressible murmurs of a the dansant.   It maintains a steady common time pulse in a combination march-tango.  Following the crowd in this disc’s ternary form feast, Schmidt stops for a gentle meander, charming if aimless, which comes to a mutually reflecting and reinforcing climactic point before the duo hurtles back to the dance where the cross-rhythms and syncopations become pronounced and the dynamic tension heightened.

Sonus Dulcis by Andrian Pertout has a Japanese modal foundation, yet it’s not as simply utilised as it would have been in less interesting hands.   On occasions, Rothschild makes sounds that could suggest a bowed lute but, apart from some pizzicato, a dash of col legno and a hefty sprinkling of piano movement in fifths, the Orient is hinted at more than imitated.   At about the 3:30 point, the unlikely spirit of Spain and de Falla emerges, interrupted by a violin cadenza loaded with Japanese folk colour, before the Hispanic/Nipponese combination returns in a sort of 6/8 gigue finale. Most of the works that Rothschild and Riddle perform can be taken at face value; this piece offers more of an interpretative challenge.

The Kouvaras sonata, in four movements, has its feet firmly planted in the Boyd estate’s landscape.  The substantial opening, Pulpit Rock, is a sonic view of Boyd’s paintings focused on this geological formation with the violin as unabashed preacher while Riddle underpins with solid, pillar-like chords.  The composer uses brief phrases from the Ein feste Burg chorale and, on tremolo violin, a fragment from Mahler’s Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt song to add a bit of European context to the abstract sermon that this landscape advances.  But the portentous keyboard chords wear out their usefulness well before the movement’s clangorous conclusion where the violin alternates high and low notes as a gravity-loosening device.

For her second movement, The River Changes,  Kouvaras begins with a floating violin line, supported by a supple ripple of piano figuration.  Rothschild generates a clean unstressed arch, her vibrato well-regulated throughout what amounts to a meditation on the Shoalhaven, revisited after a decade-long gap.   As the sonata’s scherzo, Ballad of the Singleman’s Hut takes a syncopated waltz format; not that distracting in its soundscape surroundings but with something contrived about its shape, possibly in the rhythmic basis which lacks consistency, as though the intention is to unsettle the listener by substituting the incomplete for the spectral.

The sculptures at Bundanon, some of which are in trees, gave Kouvaras the impetus for Earth Art Could Fall from the Skies which jumps from one block of activity to another, bringing to this listener’s mind the formal practices of Carl Nielsen.  The action ceases at about 3:22 for an interlude of high tessitura violin and low bass movement – a bush silence passage – and then the rapid-fire action returns with the opening repeated patterns revisited.  A series of smash-and-grab piano chords with violin top notes bring this considerable composition to an affirmative end.

While the performers demonstrate a fine precision and finish in their work, neither Rothschild nor Riddle is greatly overtaxed by much on this CD, the Kouvaras sonata offering fair but not virtuosic challenges.  What makes the collection surprising is the conservative nature of most of the compositions.  Schoenberg said, ‘There is plenty of good music to be written in C Major’; much of the work to be heard here could be used as an attempt to substantiate the thrust of that statement.  Not that this adoption of neo-orthodoxy in compositional parameters should be decried; it’s just something that takes me aback – not for the first time and probably not the last.

A few of my favourite things

cliveoconnell

TIMELESS

Tamara Smolyar

MOVE MD 3372

Smolyar

A luminary at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University, Tamara Smolyar is one of this city’s foremost pedagogue/practitioner pianists.   The product of an extensive number of Ukrainian, Russian and Australian teachers. she is well-known outside Monash circles for her partnership with violinist Ivana Tomaskova in the Duo Chamber Melange recitals at the Melbourne Recital Centre.   On this disc, she performs a pretty broad program of works that she has made part of her repertoire, a few of them familiar but most more honoured by reputation than by performance.  As she indicates, the music itself transcends its own time of creation, having become part of our long-running and all-too-familiar European tradition.

Smolyar begins with the CD’s earliest music, Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, which she works through with assurance and a no-nonsense approach, handling the first eleven of the set as a continuous unit before the tone changes to the major at Variation 12.  The performer is linked to a substantially authoritative and orthodox school which takes its Beethoven without reconstructions or torques on accepted practice, so the return to the home key in Variation 17 continues the direct, somewhat pell-mell attack that leads to the elongated final variant which brings the piece to a determined conclusion.  The work is carried off clearly enough, although Smolyar is not hesitant in using the sustaining pedal, even during the more thick-textured passages.

Next come two Chopin nocturnes from the back of the book: the Op. 62 No. 2 in E Major and the posthumous Op. 72 No. 1 in E minor which are the last and first written in the sequence.   For the E Major Nocturne, Smolyar holds back on the potential for glitter, taking plenty of time over the mini-cadenzas that punctuate the melodic flow but heightening the drama where it should be emphasized from bar 40 on with a sensible subdued thunder in the work’s low-lying central segment.  The composer held back the E minor attempt and, to me, the piece only gets into its stride at the octave restatement of the first theme.  But this interpretation offers a fair case for the nocturne’s survival in the canon, the later treatments of the material handled by Smolyar with sensible restraint and flexibility.

A bracket of Rachmaninov impresses for its internal variety.  The Elegie in E flat Minor makes its points across a canvas of slowly rising passion with some fierce moments of intensity in the later pages, the elegiac quality eventually subsumed in tragedy.  Smolyar comes closest to familiar ground on this disc with the Prelude in G sharp minor giving a generous account of the piece’s difficult central stages, the metrical disposition changing from the continuous current of semiquavers in groups of six.   To her credit, Smolyar makes light work of the many punctuating splayed chords, even if you might have expected a greater dynamic explosion in the lead-up to the D sharp Major climax.  But the outstanding element in this set comes with the Etude-tableau Op. 39 No. 1, coherent for once as a study that tests the right-hand’s stamina and the rhythmic security of the left.  A continuous energetic surge that becomes more impassioned as it progresses, this remarkable exercise in dexterity enjoys an unexpected clarity of texture in this realization.

Shostakovich’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor provide a bracing, slightly acerbic interlude with an enviable lightness in the four-part fugue, all the more appreciated after the fraught, tremolo-informed harbingers of disaster that precede it.

So far, the recording’s origin has been the Iwaki Auditorium in the ABC building, Southbank.   For the last piece, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Smolyar changes venue and piano.   It remains unclear what instrument the ABC provided but she uses a Schimmel Concert Grand for this last offering and the sound becomes less full-bodied; clearer to discern the composer’s contrapuntal interweaving, but more bright in its timbral quality.  The artist handles with calm virtuosity the score’s many demands – the roiling sequential exercises of the first part, those solemn rolled chords in the chorale and the all-in-together-boys textual imbroglio of the work’s last section – yet the final impression is more of a task well accomplished than an engrossing journey from restlessness to affirmation.   Still, the CD as a compendium serves as a reminder of the many byways available for exploration to be found in between (or behind) the better-known masterworks of the serious pianist’s basic repertoire.