Category: CD

DREAMING IN THE SAND

Bentley String Quintet

Move Records MCD 620

It’s hard to get a handle on this newly-recorded work. Robbie James is an unknown to me. although he has a listing in the Australian Music Centre files and he’s well-documented on web spaces like Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and he clearly has a firm guitar-based relationship with the group GANGgajang and was at one time a member of the Yothu Yindi personnel. For all that, you won’t find much material about the composer and what material there is on internet sources is repetitious and not very informative.

Matters are complicated by the official data on his works at the AMC. For one thing, this particular disc is not mentioned, but four other string quintets are. First off is one from 1999 called Suzannah, which follows a female First Fleet convict who, at the work’s end, is left ‘dreaming in the sand.’ Next came Kangaroo in 2003 which gives you the animals’ view of the arrival of Governor Phillip in 1788. No. 3, as listed at the AMC, bears the title of The Dreamt World and dates from 2016. And finally – and somewhat confusingly – we come to String Quintet No. 4 which was produced in 2009. This is entitled The Marree Sisters and follows the paths of a mother and her four daughters who leave the small eponymous town at the fundament of the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks to find new lives in Adelaide; these women are/were the composer’s own relatives.

So far, so fair. The out-of-sequence dates for the later two works aren’t that important. What is perplexing to those of us unfamiliar with James’ compositional trajectory comes with the constituents of this third quintet. The work begins and ends with Dreaming in the Sand tracks, which generic title is meant (I think) to cover all of these compositions. Then we encounter a Kangaroo movement, which could be the first movement of Quintet No 2. A little later, we arrive at Kangaroo Rides the Desert Skies and The Gentle Warrior, which are the fourth and third movements of this same quintet.

Track 3 is called Ghost on the Beach which, as near as I can tell, refers to the conclusion of String Quartet No. 1. Suzannah Sails is a definite reference to the same piece. Dance on the Divide was the original conclusion to the first live performance of Dreaming in the Sand in 2021, while The Crow and the Irishman (this CD’s penultimate track) appears to have no precedent, although James does refer to his use of Irish folk music in the Suzannah work.

So what do we glean from all this? You’d have to assume that the format of this (perhaps) new String Quintet No. 3 uses material from its predecessors. Or possibly the composer has re-assessed his previous efforts and recast them. We’ll probably never know because no recordings of the first two quintets are extant. We do know that the String Quintets 1, 2 and 3 all enjoyed their first performances on October 15, 2021 during Brisbane’s Restrung Festival; The Maree Sisters has been recorded by the ABC on July 29, 2022 as performed by the Bentley String Quintet. This ensemble has changed somewhat over the years but its surviving members are cellist Danielle Bentley and double bass Chloe Ann Williamson. The upper lines on this latest Move product are Camille Barry (violin 1), Eugenie Costello-Shaw (violin 2) and Charlotte Burbrook de Vere (viola).

String Quintet No. 3 has nine movements, as detailed above. The work lasts for 31’44” which gives us an average length per movement of about three-and-a-half minutes, so the aim is non-developmental in the usual sense. Nothing lasts long; the sketches of colonial/aboriginal/natural scenes make their presence known and are gone. The problem that the work faces is that very little of it is memorable; pleasant enough music-making, certainly, but nothing to challenge, astound, delight, or arouse. It’s not a half-hour that you grudge but I can’t go along with those commentators who find profundity or insight in these old-fashioned vignettes.

According to what I can glean from the available online sources, Robbie James is an auto-didact (according to the Australian Music Centre) as far as serious composition goes. Which is fine and not that unusual if you accept the claims of several writers who claim that they gained nothing from their teachers. What you have to do if you teach yourself is to work twice as hard so as to make up for what nobody tells you, and that’s why this quintet strikes you as well-intentioned but diffuse. Not that James should have taken to studying his Boccherini and Dvorak; who wants to offer interference? But writing without an awareness of what precedes you is to put huge trust in yourself and your capabilities.

James’ first track, Dancing in the Sand (part one), opens with a single diatonic line, joined by two other instruments; then the rest emerge into a nice harmonic mesh of no complexity. Another scrap emerges on the violin, is repeated, then supported in a restatement by underpinning sustained notes. It’s a nice tune that doesn’t venture outside a simple scale format. We get an antiphonal response from the lower strings, then another collegial chorale before an abrupt change where the lower strings provide a hefty chugging underpinning for a few bars, before a reversion to the pervading placidity and a final statement of the movement’s tune.

So what we have is statement and restatement, a touch of shared labour/melodic responsibility, but nothing that would befuddle any 18th century composer. It’s hard to se a contour to these pages; you get restatements and a harmonic scheme that would have been unremarkable in the early Renaissance. And that’s where auto-didacticism comes unstuck because, if you don’t know what’s been happening in Western (string quintet) music over the past 300 years, where is your edge?

Kangaroo is an improvement, chiefly because it sets up a mobile rhythm that keeps going until a restrained final page or so. The melodies employed are busy but come one after the other with little distinction. What this segment relies on is a three-note rhythmic figure that attracts more attention than anything else. To be fair, James’ vocabulary here moves up a notch in richness with some piquant added notes. When the composer introduces a few irregularities about a third of the way through, you are pleased, even if the performance level is ragged. But the movement might just as well have been called Magpie or Indian Mynah for all the suggestiveness you receive of the titular animal’s motion or natural standing.

Ghost on the Beach is a slow benevolent lament, I suppose, although for what I can’t imagine; the coming of the white man? There’s nothing supernatural about its colour or emotional landscape as it moves between chords that support a violin line which weaves a long contour holding no surprises. Beginning with a perky jauntiness, Kangaroo Rides the Desert Skies calms down to a hymn-tune and follows a stately path to its ambiguous conclusion; less of the wilderness here and more of a European concept of Heaven.

Who is The Gentle Warrior? Possibly the kangaroo because the movement comes from the quintet that deals with that animal. But no: it’s an Aboriginal male that Suzannah is destined to encounter when she arrives in this new land. Again, the mode is upbeat and jaunty with a few passages of decent part-writing alongside others that are clumsy. The interest lies in the rhythmic patterns, although these are nothing to write home about, least of all in 2024. For a little over half its length, Suzannah Sails states, restates and rehashes what sounds like a British Isles folk song; the polyphonic interplay is unsophisticated and the movement’s progress stops after some semiquaver flurries a little over half-way through before James embarks on another melody. But then I’m not sure whether this melody leads anywhere as later focus falls on a figure that seemed to be an accompaniment provided by the cello.

This is a reversion to the simple diatonic writing of the first movement; not that the language ever got far beyond such a happy state. Nothing novel emerges in that regard during Dance on the Divide which sounds like a hoe-down, especially when the movement forward drifts into some elementary syncopation. I think I counted about five tunes being announced but can’t be sure because they merged into each other and the basic key didn’t change – apart from a couple of try-hard momentary modulations near the end. Still, it was cheerful in character.

As is The Crow and the Irishman which boasts a melody line with some Celtic suggestions, although nothing you could definitely hang your hat on. In essence, it is a cross between a minuet and a waltz, graced with some excellent doubling of a subsidiary chain a little before its somewhat lopsided conclusion; I mean, it stops but not exactly on the note that formed part of your mental projection. Dreaming in the Sand (part two), the longest track, begins with a couple of solo violin scraps before we enter into some full-bodied chords and move along our predictable path where the composer seems to be trying out a few devices but coming back inevitably to harmonization exercises.

You could look on this composition as an essay in naivete. The stated attempt behind the exercise is a symbiosis of two cultures: an imposed white one and a pre-existing Aboriginal one. The trouble is that you look in vain for any traces of the latter; whatever the dreaming going in this particular sand is firmly based in a none-too-advanced European vocabulary, not helped by the fact that the only ‘other’ string production technique employed throughout is pizzicato. For all its aspirations, this quintet remains a divertissement; to get beyond this level, you simply have to have compositional technique – information and knowledge about the craft as it is practised today.

SUMMER WAVES

Len Vorster

Move Records MCD 661

This must be a re-issue because the pianist’s copyright on it goes back to 2004 and the credits listed on the slim leaflet point to original production and design by an entity called MANO MUSIC. This organization is listed as a Norwegian company and the sort of music it publishes these days is (as far as I can tell) soft-core pop. Whatever the history, here is Len Vorster‘s CD under the Move label and this musical content is impressive, if much of it is light. Still, that’s only to be expected when the background to the recording are this musician’s recollections of his youthful holidays by the sea in South Africa.

The leaflet also notes that Vorster is celebrating the centenary of one of the composers he performs: Lennox Berkeley, who was born in 1903 – which puts the recording into an even firmer temporal location. Mind you, it also means that these liner notes have not been updated; more to the point, a biographical screed printed here on Vorster is also possible to date from 2004 or thereabouts because his career details after that time remain unrecorded.

The CD opens with Gershwin’s three Preludes of 1926, familiar pieces that betray a sort of compositional constriction despite the ebullience of the outer numbers. Then we have a clutch of disparate pieces by de Falla: Cancion (1900), Serenata (1901), Nocturno (1896), Serenata Andaluz (1900), Vals-capricho (1900). Two pieces by Lord Berners follow – a 1941 Polka and a 1943 Valse. Continuing the sudden British detour, Vorster airs the 1945 Six Preludes for Piano by Berkeley. Two nocturnes follow – one in B flat Major of 1817 by Mr. Nocturne, John Field; the other more well-known one coming from Grieg’s Lyric Pieces of 1891. Then it’s all Gallic fun with Debussy’s La plus que lente waltz of 1910, Poulenc’s Les chemins de l’amour song dating from 1940 but here pianized, and Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1911 – at close to 15 minutes, the longest track on this recording.

As you’d expect, the so-called ‘jazz’ preludes enjoy an expert airing, the first Allegro not exactly in synch with the published dynamic markings and a heavier accent than most on the last quaver chord in bars 4 to 6, and later when that bass support pattern emerges. But there’s a delicious elegance in the forte-to-piano run pf demi-semiquavers across the penultimate bar and Vorster maintains his syncopated initiative from first bar to last. He takes the middle ‘blues’ prelude slowly and doesn’t really press forward during the middle F sharp Major interlude, taking the right path out of a contradiction between a tempo and largamente con moto.

And I liked the alternation between arpeggiating some of those 10th left-hand stretches and landing the notes together; sort of in keeping with the relaxed ambling pace of the composition’s most successful pages. For the final Allegro prelude, Vorster maintains a consistent rhythmic and dynamic output; my only complaint is that the final statement of the theme in octaves across the score’s final 8 bars impresses as hard-won rather than the virtuosic powerhouse made of it by other interpreters.

Fall’s Cancion follows Gershwin’s ternary shape and stands as an unremarkable, melancholy piece of salon music with a deftly reinforced re-statement of the composer’s balanced tune. A bit more national colour flavours the Serenata which is given with an agreeable rubato that invests the piece with a quasi-improvisatory ambience, even if all the notes are there to be articulated – in this case, with great sympathy. Not much distinguishes the Nocturno, apart from an infectious descending figure of two demi- and one semiquaver across a Major/minor 3rd; which lends the piece a kind of Andalusian kick. Otherwise, it’s a Chopin rip-off with no claims to longevity.

Speaking of that province, we come next to another serenade in the Serenata Andaluz which is a tad more diffuse in its shape than its precedents by this writer. Here, the colours applied have a very familiar character, not least the triplet that comes at the start of the bar which concludes several of the main tune’s phrases (after we get to a tune, 16 bars after a frippery-filled preamble). The piece oscillates between D Major and minor, expanding to a polonaise-rhythm coda that eventually recalls the decorative opening as de Falla harvests his material – sort of. But Vorster’s reading is infectious and eloquent.

After this composition, we enjoy yet another just as fulsome in its expression. The Vals-capricho is an ebullient piece of semi-virtuosic salon music, certainly more digitally challenging than anything we’ve heard in the Spanish composer’s output so far. The performance is excellent, finding out the rather trite sentiment and its flashy expression, maintaining a steady pulse throughout, handling the right-hand flights in alt with obvious mastery.

But it’s about this stage that I started to wonder about the relationship between Gershwin’s brassy combination of Latin rhythms and jazz, de Falla’s ambivalent unhappy fusion of his country’s folk music with the effete ‘art music’ of his youth, and Vorster’s summertimes at home in South Africa. You might call it all holiday music, possibly: nothing heavy, most of it pretty skittish, a lot of it amiable and forgettable. And the vivacity keeps on coming with the two dances by Berners, the Polka a heavy-handed romp with a penchant for ending a phrase on an inappropriate note, but the atmosphere jaunty and vulgar in a 1920s style – impossible to imagine without its generic forebear in Walton’s Facade of nearly 20 years previous. Vorster sounds comfortable with the piece’s flourishes and loud peroration, but the piano sound is inclined to be harsh and jangly.

The Waltz is longer as well as more polished in its modulation scheme and shape. Vorster performs it with a liberal rubato and plenty of languid hesitations but the most interesting element lies in its irregular phrase lengths and the whimsical interchange of the anticipated with the eccentric. You wouldn’t call it a serious dance by any means but you are drawn in by its impetus and spiritedness. Both these Berners pieces are emphatically tonal; any of the contemporary experiments and rule-breaking that the composer would have been more than well aware of, considering his rich field of acquaintances, find no place in his own work.

You have to assume that the inclusion of Lennox Berkeley’s Six Preludes would be partly due to Vorster’s friendship with Michael Easton, a pupil of the venerable English composer. While you might find traces of holiday romps in Berners’ frivolities, these almost contemporaneous pieces have more gravitas to them. The first, Allegro, is a serious near-toccata with a continuous run of triplets underpinning the aggressive chords that constitute the central matter. As becomes the pattern in the series, the second prelude is much more relaxed in tempo, a slow-moving Andante, following a recognizable developmental path and staying within the rather sophisticated harmonic boundaries that Berkeley set himself.

No. 3 of the set, Allegro moderato, is the shortest and another busy construct, loaded with purposeful activity and clever in its progress, if not leaving much to roll around the tongue. The following Allegretto is a slow-moving waltz based on a simple enough melody memorable for a mid-motion demi-semiquaver snap, its evolution cloaked in a sequence of ever-mobile modulations; the whole finely realized by Vorster whose delivery is both deliberate and insouciant.

No. 5 is an Allegro whose outer segments appear to be in 7/8, the central page moving to a regular 6/8. The material is light-hearted at either end with a piquant, elliptical stepping melody that is subjected to less stressful handling than its predecessor. Finally, the longest of these preludes, another Andante, takes us back to the quiet and contemplative ambience of the other even-numbered pieces, serving as a rather sentimental envoi to the set, here handled with excellent suppleness. Berkeley’s work, more than anything so far on this album, might suggest the happy days of the performer’s youth, if one spent in elevated company.

An odd miscellany follows, starting with Field’s Nocturne No. 5 that is distinguished for its gentle charm and dexterous right-hand writing, Vorster takes his time over the fioriture but gets to the heart of the gentle sentiment that colours these two pages. He brings admirable breadth to Grieg’s Notturno, notably the concluding nine bars where he makes a good deal out of the composer’s sleight-of-hand coda. As well, you have to admire the precision of those quiet, exposed trills in bars 16, 19, 57 and 60.

We end in France, first with Debussy in slower-than-slow mode. Here, the rubato direction is employed fully and the interpretation is one of quite legitimate pushes and pulls, fits and starts, action and languor. Even if it was written as a benign satire, La plus que lente is a highly effective, moody score that oozes seductiveness, more persuasive than pretty much anything else in the belle époque‘s musical output. Poulenc’s waltz-song, originally to Anouilh’s words, has a genial spirit with a considerable sweep to it, but it seems to me to be indistinguishable from many others of its type. Further, its language smacks of the music hall and presents as simplicity itself when compared to its Debussy companion. As we’ve come to expect, Vorster’s reading is excellent: an enthusiastic rendition of a piece of fluff.

Ravel’s collection of eight waltzes is remarkable as an extended essay in pianism if unsettling in its juxtapositions of tonal high spirits and bitonal or added-note chords in eventually-resolved discord-to-concord movement. Each of the constituents, apart from the concluding Epilogue Waltz 8 which is a downward-looking Lent, passes by rapidly. There is a kind of contrast available – for instance, the stentorian call-to-arms of the first Modere – tres franc, followed by the 7th-rich ambivalence of the following Assez lent. But the impression is of studied cleverness in the clashing thirds and fourths that pepper the No. 4 Assez anime which in turn is set alongside the quiet appeal of the lilting pp and ppp calm of Ravel’s Presque lent No. 5.

I’m not much of a fan of the middle F Major (ostensibly) pages in No. 7 where the accents get displaced and the outcome is a blurred mess; not Vorster’s fault but a triumph of smartness over sense. Still, the final quietly resonant pages with their premonitions of Britten’s Moonlight interlude bring this odd, challenging miscellany to a cogent end. Yet, for the last time, I have to wonder how these off-centre waltzes put us in mind of holidays. To me, they anticipate the 1920 La valse which some see as a glorification of the dance form, while the rest of us find it close to a post-war nightmare.

EVENINGS WITH THE FRENCH HORN

Mark Papworth & Rosa Scaffidi

Move Records MCD 640

For his latest excursion into the byways of horn performance and composition, Mark Papworth is again allying himself with pianist Rosa Scaffidi, following the success of their 2020 Siegfried’s Story disc with tuba Per Forsberg.   This time, the horn-piano duet presents two works only: a bona fide sonata for natural horn by Adolphe Blanc, a versatile 19th century chamber music composer whose life-span overlapped with that of Hector Berlioz, whose six-part song-cycle Nuits d’ete has been arranged for this recorded performance by Papworth.

Admittedly, this latter popular sequence of chansons has been arranged over the years since its first publication.  Originally set for mezzo or tenor and piano, later versions by Berlioz accommodated baritone, soprano and contralto.  But then, he directed that specific songs be addressed by particular voice types; ah, what a character.  That detail is ignored these days where  –  in concerts, recitals and on CDs  –   one singer is enough to cope with the series.  Nevertheless, as far as I can see, the composer didn’t arrange any of the set for a solo instrument; certainly not by the time he got around to finishing his orchestration of them all in 1856.

Naturally, in this new format the nature of the work changes and Gautier’s verses become unnecessary; well, without a voice, they would, wouldn’t they?   It’s fair to say that the horn is not the most malleable of instruments for this set of songs and this is apparent from the opening Villanelle which strikes me as laboured, right from the opening Quand viendra in the vocal line.   It’s as if Papworth is at pains to articulate each note, rather than handling Berlioz’s phrases as lyrical continuities.   As well, the horn’s weight sounds at odds with the repeated quaver chord accompaniment.

Le spectre da la rose works better, possibly because of the rhapsodic nature of the vocal line and Papworth does excellent service in outlining his part with well-honed phrasing.  Scaffidi’s reading of the bar 3 right hand differs from my edition and her attack on the two-bar interlude after the end of stanza 1 is too aggressive by far.  For Sur les lagunes, the break inserted in the middle of the held horn note across bars 12 to 14 sounds uncomfortable and the piano’s left-hand chord before Que mon sort est amer! fails to sound convincingly.   As this song progresses, you become aware of some notes in the horn part sounding ‘thin’,; I don’t know enough about the instrument to speak with certainty about the facility of even timbre across scale passages, but I’m assuming that certain phrase-shapes are hard to negotiate with a consistency of output.

But then, it must be a limitation of Papworth’s chosen instrument, which is a French piston valve horn.  This option is almost certainly brought into play because an 1880s horn should best align with the composer’s usual ‘sound’, rather than the later German rotary vale construct that obtains in most (all?) orchestras today.  Chromatic scales seem to be non-existent or rare in horn parts until late Romantic works.

Anyway, we proceed to Absence which presents as suited to the horn’s colour.  As well, the simplicity of the recurring refrain gives Papworth room to employ several modes of articulation while taking minimal liberties with the song’s caesurae and downward-plunging arpeggios.  You can enjoy some fine moments in Au cimitiere, even if the tempo is rock solid and the pleasures are mainly harmonic, like the piano shift in bar 5 and again in bar 12.   But the approach is head-down, tail-up and you miss a singer’s ability to invest tension generated by Gautier’s spectral suggestions.

As at the start, so at the end.  The concluding L’ile inconnue suffers from an orchestra’s absence, even if the work has an infectious grandiloquence in its best moments.   Scaffidi’s semiquavers underneath the second stanza are muffled and her dynamics are often at odds with the  original, e.g. an f for a ppp at the end of this section.   Papworth presents a malleable line, touching at the conclusion where the soft reprise of some of the poem’s opening lines offers a fine realization of the poet’s gentle questioning.

As for the sonata, here the ‘faint’ notes become more prominent because of the nature of Papworth’s instrument: a natural horn, the kind that would have been used by Mozart but which you rarely hear employed in live performances of his concertos for the horn  –  at least, in this country.   These performers repeat the exposition  of the first movement Allegro which strikes me as unnecessary because the form and melodic character are easy to assimilate and the orthodox lay-out of these pages means that you aren’t faced with any difficulties in recalling what is being established as subject to expansion.   No complaints about the horn line but Scaffidi’s quaver octave sequences are suspect in the opening pages and the semiquavers that follow the second subject’s treatment would certainly have benefitted from re-recording; at one point, they simply don’t appear.

However, this is solid writing with no surprises, even for 1861 when post-Berlioz orchestration was affecting a large number of French writers.   Much the same could be said of the following Scherzo which features an unexceptional falling arpeggio figure as its main impetus; the horn’s in F, the arpeggio’s in F, the movement’s in F, and the following harmonic shifts in the B flat Major Trio almost exclusively apply to the piano.   Once again, I’m not sure about some of Scaffidi’s imitative work in the first segment of this movement but the horn is untroubled in a set of pages that offer no real challenges.

During the third movement Romanze, you have more opportunity to notice the instrument’s ‘faint’ notes and engage in the perennial puzzle as to why the overtone sequence works the way it does.  As far as content is concerned, this is a Mendelssohnian bagatelle in A flat Major with a neatly shaped main melody and a middle interlude that begins in F minor and walks an uncomplicated path back to the home key.  Scaffidi’s work is reliable and Papworth exercises his presence in pages where the keyboard initially assumes the dominant role.

The concluding Allegro opens bravely enough but it’s in a hefty 6/8 in F and the horn’s inevitable weak notes are more common here than anywhere else in the sonata and more noticeable because the metrical accents are heavy.   Neither performer is totally convincing across these pages, the piano part occasionally clumsy in semiquaver passages, notably in the piu vivo coda which fails to sparkle but flounders along its path.   It makes an unsatisfying end to this recording that aims to give us an insight into the sound world of the horn as most of us don’t know it.   You’d probably need to to be a devotee of this particular musical corner and more receptive than most to its limitations and oddities.  As a final note, the CD is rather brief, coming in at a few seconds over 54 minutes long.

SUN FUN AND OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS

Michael Easton

Move Records MCD 657

First off, an admission: I knew Michael Easton – fairly well, in fact. We were, for a time, co-critics on ‘The Age’ in Melbourne before he was rusticated for asking in one of his pieces the perfectly reasonable question of why was Mahler such a melancholy manic-depressive? A touchy editor who revered the composer took umbrage and so I lost another – and by far the best – in a long line of associates. He took me to lunch several times which, among other things, showed what a genial host he was – a bright light in the faded rooms of the Savage Club.

Further, he was a complete musician, far more at ease in his work than any other writer I have come across, except Peter Sculthorpe who shared with Easton a courtesy and ease with his fellow man that was most appealing in the context of Australian composition during the latter half of the last century. Like Sculthorpe, he never complained about criticism of his work – a more rare characteristic than you’d think among their peers. When he died untimely back home in England, he left a hole in the musical landscape of Melbourne where he was indefatigably active until his last sad years.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Easton’s death, Move Records has issued this CD which I think was originally put out in 1994, then reissued in 2004 by Len Vorster. Certainly, the prefatory comments on the Move disc’s attached leaflet by Michael Hurd speak of the composer as alive, so no work has gone into updating that appraisal; which would be particularly hard to do as Hurd himself died in 2006. And the time span of the works presented lies between 1981 and 1993 – just before Easton arrived in Australia (1982) and then three years after he co-established the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival (which continues to this day).

Two works date from 1981: Moods for piano solo, and the duo piano Cocktail Suite for two, five movements of which three are on this CD. Vorster plays the first of these – a four part collection – and collaborates with Easton in the alcohol-inspired dances. The Moods were written in the garden of the composer’s sister; they show Easton’s reaction to British pastoralism and are conveniently paired into slow-fast partners – In reflective mood, High spirits, Alone and lonely, Practical jokes – and last a little over five minutes as a collective.

None of these is particularly deep; they’re just deft expressions of . . . well, moods. All are concise and neatly argued constructs; a benign good humour peeking out of the odd-numbered ones, with a cleverly piquant sprightliness in the others. The language is unabashedly tonal – E minor, B flat Major, E flat Major, C Major in turn – with plenty of bitonality and harmonic quirks to keep us and interpreter Vorster on guard. But not aggressively; the set comprises four bagatelles, well worth the attention of inquisitive pianists of the time.

Easton and Vorster begin their duets with the Whisky Sour Waltz where the composer plunges happily into the world of the lounge pianist with an appealing melody that dodges and curves its way across the dance floor with post-Straussian gusto; the performers stay in sync for most of its progress. The following Martini Melody suggests Tea for Two and is loaded with Easton’s panache at imitating/encapsulating the two-step mode with a clever control of the keyboard, even if these executants tend to some sloppiness in their synchronicity close to the piece’s conclusion. Finally, the Schneider Cup Charleston refers to a drink that I don’t know. The Cup itself is easy to trace to an aviation prize in the Charleston era (roughly) but it’s not served in any bar I know. Still, the piece is suitably racy and suggestively derivative; your speakers will fairly drip with reminiscences of Bright Young Things.

How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear sets five of the master’s products: three of the limericks, Mrs. Jaypher, and the work’s self-ridiculing title poem. Baritone Ian Cousins is accompanied by Vorster in another group that takes a little over five minutes to perform. There was an Old Man who said ‘Hush!’ is a clever take on Britten with its carry-on lines and angularity; There was an Old Man of the Hague presents to my ears as a lesson in bitonality; There was an Old Man of Whitehaven makes syllabic additions to lines 4 and 5 but offers a progress from Victorian-era sentimentality through an atonal glaze to a placid Edwardian resolution.

As for Mrs. Jaypher, Easton gives us a brilliantly lively setting – but of the first stanza only. Cousins is required to go falsetto for most of the heroine’s direct speech but it’s probable that the composer found little inspiration in the lemon-invested second stanza, which would also have required a massive amount of artificial sound-production. In contrast, we hear all eight stanzas of the title song which – for most of the time – follows a rhumba pattern and offers both executants some tests in pitching (for Cousins) and malleable rhythm (Vorster), which they master, for the most part.

The CD’s most substantial work is the Piccolo Concerto of 1986, written for Melbourne Symphony Orchestra flautist Frederick Shade and here recorded at the Port Fairy Spring Festival of 1992 with the Academy of Melbourne and its founder Brett Kelly conducting. You notice straight away the constant presence of the soloist, orchestral ritornelli being kept to a minimum. The score asks for an escort of strings with a percussionist contributing occasionally; in the first Allegro, it’s side-drum and tambourine, I think. The ambience is British pastoral, although the phrase lengths of the first subject are slightly off-kilter; still, the work follows a sonata form layout and this reading holds only one point where the soloist turns slightly flat on a sustained high note,

Easton’s following Andante con moto opens with the main melody confided to a solo cello, Shade eventually taking over with a counter before putting everyone in their places by following this opposing idea while the orchestra continues with the quiet lyric. Once again, the soloist is almost a continuous presence, even if his function is mainly high-pitched decoration or serving as an anti-strophe.

As with the first movement, Easton’s concluding Rondo features a principal theme that is slightly irregular rhythmically but loaded with an attractive piquancy that sets off the intervening episodes very cleverly. Here, the strings have more tutti exposure, if only for a few bars each time, but the work’s procedure offers a clever contrast between Malcolm Arnold-style humour and a controlled lyricism that could be Delius if the older composer held more firmly to a harmonic focus. Just before an ornate final main tune restatement, Shade is given an athletic cadenza which interrupts the prevailing jolliness just long enough.

From 1987 come Deux chansons pour l’arriere-saison – the first a Verlaine setting, Colloque sentimentale; the second by Gerard de Nerval, Dans les bois. Here the singer is soprano Kathleen Southall-Casey, with Vorster accompanying. The first might be familiar from Debussy’s setting of the same lines, but Easton makes it more of a rather difficult cabaret number; not that difficult for the pianist but quite a stretch for the vocalist. While the vocal line has an attractive elasticity, there is not much attempt to differentiate the separate lines and attitudes of the former lovers’ conversational gambits.

As for the rural excursion, the mood is frivolous with a modicum of regret in the third and final stanza. Of course, there’s not much you can do with a short outline of the love-life of a bird but Easton gives his pianist plenty of dexterous exposure and the final lugubrious suggestions are dismissed with a dismissive tail-flick that puts this frivolity in proper perspective.

Bidding farewell to the 1980s is the solo piano piece Conversations of 1988, here performed by Rebecca Chambers who does an excellent job of re-creating Easton’s mercurial temper. The work recalls a tedious restaurant dinner during which the composer was distracted by what he heard coming from other tables which contrasted with the far-from-sparkling talk at his own. It opens with a series of Prokofiev-like scrambles, before a change to a more measured dissertation (his dining partners?). But the bustle and buzz interferes in a less-than-subtle manner, illustrating all too well the composer’s suppressed irritation at being stuck in a conversational trough. Chambers’ reading is suitably aggressive and languid and she invests this brief outburst with the necessary vigour of precise articulation and dynamic heft.

We arrive at the 1990s through the CDs title work which sets four poems by Betjeman, with Southall-Casey again in Vorster’s company. You are instantly puzzled by the first piece, Song of a night-club proprietress which is also known as Sun and Fun; as well, there’s a rather well-known and predictable setting of these lines by Madeleine Dring. Easton views it as a sort of scena with a piano support that works as punctuation for a recitative-like vocal line which gets increasingly vehement and self-obsessed as the poem lurches through its five stanzas.

Harvest Hymn is a savage critique of contemporary farming with its pursuit of profit over the countryside’s good – an old story but a gripping one for those who believe in the myth of Merrie England. Easton’s setting is suitably feisty in the best Brecht-Weill manner; the piano part sets up a nightmare landscape where the machines are winning out while the voice declaims bitterly against the landowners’ greed and enslavement to possessions and wealth. Just a pity that the composer decided to resolve his penultimate, biting discord.

With In a Bath Teashop, Betjeman presents two lovers – an ordinary woman and a thug – looking lovingly at each other. Easton gives this everyday vignette a lavish Straussian vocal line and a throbbing accompaniment that might suggest the devotion underpinning the lyric. Southall-Casey gives a fine sweep to the higher aspirations of the song in its finishing couplet. To end, we get the Dame Edna-suggestive How To Get On In Society which treads the same boards as Walton, if the texts are more mundane. The poem is a monologue by a woman setting up her house for a tea-party; all very middle-class and concerned with trivialities. Easton captures the fussiness and self-absorption of the narrator, the vocal line appropriately four-square and affected. For some reason, the poem’s middle stanza is omitted. And I’m pretty sure – from three different sources – that the line runs ‘I know that I wanted to ask you’, rather than ‘I know what I wanted to ask you’.

From 1993 come two final works. The first is the Flute Sonata written for Richard Thurlby whom Easton met while the latter was studying at the University of Melbourne; from which point he went to the UK and since seems to have sunk from sight. For this CD, Thurlby is accompanied by Len Vorster. The work lasts for about 10 minutes and speaks the French-inflected compositional tongue that Easton inherited from his teacher, Lennox Berkeley. The opening Allegro malicioso strikes me as nothing of the kind, centred around a simple gruppetto of four semiquavers leading to a sustained upper note which serves as a sort of focal point for the movement that unfolds in concentrated swathes before a muted conclusion at odds with the swirling action that has preceded it.

Easton’s following Nocturne: Andante cantabile offers a fine fusion of sentiment and power; the emotional language sounds more determined and sincere than much on this CD. The composer was never one to scale the heights of modernity and the spices he employed in his work were usually mild; these pages in particular speak to the man’s professionalism and the ability to find a particular spectrum of operations, then explore it effortlessly.

The last movement is a moto perpetuo that brings to mind the Presto that rounds out Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, including a final flourish that appears to borrow a leading figure from the French writer’s pages. Easton revisits that four-semiquaver motif from his first movement, as well as offering a reminiscence of his nocturne just before the final leap back into action. If the frenetic character of this movement reminds you of the Concerto, it still has its own quiet acerbity as both these executants turn it into an entertaining tour de force, eloquently written for the instruments themselves.

The second of these 1993 compositions is another four-part song-cycle: Dorothy Parker Says. This was originally the title of a stage-show for Australian actress Deidre Rubenstein, from which exercise Easton has extracted these vignettes; on this CD, Rubenstein is the vocalist, the composer is her accompanist. The set begins with General Review of the Sex Situation. The poem is a wry eight-line sequence of male-female generalizations that run past as a calm cabaret number, which is then repeated, half in quick-time, then back to the prevailing languor for the final quatrain’s repeat.

With the Song of Perfect Propriety, Parker belts out her desire to indulge in the derring-do of a modern-day pirate behaving like Blackbeard, but she is constrained, at the end of all this wishful thinking, to write slight verses. The song starts with a recall of the Ride of the Valkyrie and ends with a spurt from Mendelssohn’s Spring Song; in between, Rubenstein recites-sings with gusto her bloodthirsty ambitions for a once-upon-a-time masculine life on the ocean wave, etc. The obverse to this comes in Fulfillment which is half-spoken, half-sung. This reviews the writer’s early life under her mother’s care and the disillusionment of disappointed love in adulthood. In medias res, Easton enjoys a solo break before Rubenstein returns to repeat the poem’s final quatrain. It makes for a depressing plaint, if a familiar one and the vocalist makes excellent work of its torch-song potential.

Speaking of which, the last of these songs is a perfect example. But Not Forgotten speaks of a woman’s thoughts at the end of a relationship, one which has been intense enough to linger in the memory well after its disruption. This is a quiet, strolling reminiscence of no great overt passion but delivered with a fetching, breathy calm that finishes off this CD in a highly relevant way: it is hard, at least for some of us, to forget Easton and his unflappable skill.

NORDIC MOODS & BAROQUE ECHOES

The Marais Project & Duo Langborn/Wendel

Move Records MCD 656

Not the longest of CDs, this one comes in under 40 minutes. Marais Project regulars – Susie Bishop (violin and voice), Tommie Andersson (guitar and theorbo), Jennifer Eriksson (viola da gamba) – collaborate with the duo of Catalina Langborn (violin [baroque violin]) and Olof Wendel (cimbalom).

As for their music, it’s an eclectic combination, as you’d expect from the Marais organization. For the oldest serious music, they have lighted on Charpentier: his Sans frayeur which is an amiable chanson of unrequited love that might have something to do with Corneille’s play Melite. There’s a little bit from their eponymous hero: three movements from his opera Alcione. As well, we hear a sonata for violin and continuo by Johan Heinrich Roman, a Swedish composer from the first half of the 18th century. This four-movement work I can only find in print as an oboe sonata but the composer was a professional player of both instruments and, let’s face it: we’re talking about the Baroque where anything goes, doesn’t it?

A little closer to our time is Pavane: Thoughts of a Septuagenarian by Esbjorn Svensson who was a formidable jazz pianist and composer before his unfortunate death through a swimming accident in 2006. This is a homage/arrangement by Andersson, who also worked with Wendel in re-scoring the three Marais opera scraps.

The CD begins with a traditional Swedish song, Death of the beloved, which eventually transmogrified into the country’s unofficial national anthem. It ends with another Swedish lyric: The crystal so fine. Both of these have been arranged by Wendel – the first for everybody, the second for his own duo. More from Wendel comes in his composition A leaf falls, which involves both ensembles, and there are two works by Eriksson: the first simply called Anna, written for a sick friend; the second a kind of binary product called Marais Echoes & Nordic Moods which initially takes the French viol master’s La Mariee and a Menuet as a jumping off point before yet another Swedish folksong arrangement, The flowers of joy, that the composer-arranger thinks has some resonances with the second Marais dance.

As you can see, this is a miscellany with several bearings on the CD’s title. As with most collections, some segments work well, while others struggle to find a relevant place in the mix. The opening track sets a sombre tone, as it describes the process of a young man riding home to find that his wife is dead. Bishop handles the insistent, march-suggestive vocal line with excellent clarity of output and a persuasive directness of emotion. The result is suggestive of Scottish or English folk-songs with a morbid bent; perhaps not as bloody-minded as The twa corbies, nor as eerie as the Lyke-Wake Dirge but running along similar tragic lines to Mary Hamilton. Wendel’s cimbalom makes a striking colour contribution to the keening, trudging accompaniment.

Anna unfolds over a ground bass and could have been written in the late Renaissance or early Baroque. Each of the five instrumentalists enjoys a solo (the composer pairing her violin with Langborn’s, Andersson continuing with his guitar) as the work unfolds in a sequence of predictable progressions, yet it lives up to the proposed semi-descriptor of echoing the Baroque. The real thing follows in the Menuet, Prelude and Gigue from Marais’ opera; the first of these concludes Act IV, the second introduces Act 3, and the third I can’t find anywhere, although it’s jaunty enough to come out of the sailors’ scene as well as being unexpected enough to form part of the final chaconne. All these scraps repeat their material several times and their content is charming and plain-speaking – unlike compositions by the composer’s better-known operatic contemporaries. Eriksson and Langborn make finely-matched upper lines, while cimbalom and theorbo reinforce each other with admirable discretion.

Svensson’s slow dance moves gently past, with just enough exposure for all in the quintet even if the violins are favoured. The composer sustains a quiet, nostalgic atmosphere across his blues-suggestive piece which follows an orthodox modulatory chain and ends with a quiet, mildly regretful four-bar coda that contrives to encapsulate the downward-heading nature of the pavane with the resigned consolation of reaching the title’s specified age; a pity that the composer only made it to his mid-forties.

La Mariee comes from Marais’ Book 5 of lute pieces and is an amiable bouree-of-sorts, here given to Erikkson (of course) in partnership with Wendel’s cimbalom and (I think) Andersson in a reinforcing bass role. The brief Menuet seems to feature the Marais Project personnel only; Andersson on theorbo, if those resonant bass notes are any guide. The version offered here of The flowers of joy is in three sections: the first an outline of the tune from Duo Langborn/Wendel, then a stanza sung by Bishop with Andersson’s guitar, finally an everybody-in with two violins and Andersson (I think) back on theorbo. All three pieces are presented as a harmonic compatibility but you’d be struggling to find much other connection between the Marais pieces and the folk song – in mood or melodic shape. Also, in other readings of The flowers of joy you hear a good many more stanzas, but I’m thankful for the timbral variety offered here.

Langborn plays the top line in Roman’s pleasant G minor sonata with Eriksson’s viol and Andersson’s theorbo serving as joint continuo. Across the opening Largo, the violinist was happy to cut a few notes short and not sustain others which led to a somewhat erratic output. The movement’s first part comprising 7 bars was repeated; the second section, 12 bars long, was not. Neither half of the following Allegro was repeated, but the jerkiness that interrupted the first movement’s second part was here more evident with several over-curt phrase endings.

Luckily, Roman’s Intermezzo is only 16 bars long, so both halves enjoyed repeats for an evenly distributed reading of this placid, courtly E flat Major interlude. A recurrence of the curtailed note-length practice emerged in the final Allegro which sounded more brusque than necessary, e.g. the truncated minims in bars 5 to 8. It might have been that the executants were trusting in the considerable echo that prevailed in their noticeably resonant recording situation at Atlantis Studios, Stockholm last July. Whatever the case, Roman’s score came across as spasmodic in its fast even-numbered movements.

Wendel’s melancholy autumn-scape brings in the whole ensemble, Andersson moving to his guitar. There isn’t much to this piece which has an appealing central figure and a prominent cimbalom solo. But the composer sustains his aural ambience well enough, right up to the last leaf’s settling, Perhaps the landscape has a touch of the Orient rather than the maudlin world projected by Joseph Kosma and Johnny Mercer that falling leaves always bring to mind. Still, you might just take it as a straightforward illustration of a Nordic mood. It partners neatly with Charpentier’s bouncy chaconne that begins and ends with Andersson’s theorbo setting out and finishing off the constant bass line. Bishop’s light soprano is a treasure in this mobile construct for which the instrumental lines are lithe and restrained, especially Langborn’s sinuous violin.

The last track features the guest duo in a specially soulful instrumental setting of a song about longing for a girl from the singer’s village. But he also addresses her as ‘most noble rose and golden chest of treasure’; she is also ‘outstanding in virtue’, which to me puts the beloved on a Marian level. The melody as outlined by Langborn is wrenchingly sad, like all the best love songs, with the cimbalom offering a decorative, original backdrop. So this CD ends in a minor key and suggests a bare physical and emotional world where hope is grounded in disappointment. Not exactly Nordic noir but, as a musical equivalent, coming close. Thanks to all for those extracts from the flashy Baroque – a fortunate complement/antidote.

PERTH CONCERT HALL RONALD SHARP ORGAN

Jangoo Chapkhana

Move Records MD 3464

We do live in two different countries. I’m not alone in knowing very little to nothing about serious musical activity in Perth, except that we share in the big travellers, i.e. the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Musica Viva. If you listen to ABC Classic, there’s every chance that the West Australian Symphony Orchestra will be heard at some time during the day and most individuals who come to Australia for a capital city tour will include the country’s most isolated one in their visitation rounds.

But I’ve never heard the Sharp organ in the Perth Concert Hall, although the leaflet that accompanies this CD gives a fair amount of information about its construction, its maker and its registration. Sharp built the organ in the Sydney Opera House, and this West Australian instrument is the maker’s second-largest creation; that’s by a long way, incidentally, as the Sydney organ has over 10,200 pipes while its companion has about 3,000. Also, I’ve not encountered Jangoo Chapkhana either, but a simple online check shows that he’s a considerable presence on the Perth music scene, a veteran choral conductor as well as an expert jazz pianist.

You might be puzzled by the choice of repertoire on this disc. Chapkhana pays homage to some of the grandfathers of organ composition: Sweelinck, Buxtehude, J. S. Bach and Balbastre. All fine and perfectly acceptable – just what you’d expect of a compendium to show off the organ’s capabilities at an apical point in composition for the organ and its surrounds. But then we leap forward two centuries from the Balbastre work of 1749 to a couple of Messiaen works of 1939 and 1951/2, a Langlais oddity of 1977, one of Eben’s Four Biblical Dances of 1990, a very short scrap from British organist Gary Sieling, and Chapkhana’s own seven variations on the chorale Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – the CD’s most recent music dating from 2006.

The CD opens with Buxtehude’s chorale fantasia on Te deum laudamus which falls into five sections, the post-Praeludium segments based on fragments of the Gregorian chant. Chapkhana’s output speaks a forward language, the pedal register exceptionally clean and welded into the fabric of the mini-fugue that makes up the Praeludium‘s second part. A slight misstep occurs at the fourth bar of the Te deum laudamus but otherwise the movement proceeds with unstoppable forthrightness, the pedal line now dominant as it handles the melody line with reed-rich reinforcement. As for the long Pleni sunt coeli et terra setting, apart from the felicity of the part-writing, a good deal of interest comes from the manual chopping and changing, even if the overall timbral mix difference is slight in this reading.

For the In Martyrum, the pedal is again entrusted with the chant material, for which Chapkhana employs a resonant brass/reed stop (trumpet or trombone, I can’t tell) which is neatly balanced by the busy and sparkling upper lines. Last of all comes the four-subject fugue (not very elaborate) that blossoms during the Tu devicto arrangement. Both these latter stages continue along the firm, determined path that the interpreter traces with considerable eloquence throughout this happy harbinger, written when Bach was approximately 5 years old.

There’s no end to the arguments about the instruments you can use for Sweelinck’s keyboard music and I’ve heard the Fantasia Chromatica on organ, piano, harpsichord, even arranged for strings. Chapkhana’s interpretation is welcome for its clarity of line and, as with the preceding Buxtehude, an authoritative directness of address, the alterations in timbre respectful and organized in a manner that stays within the possibilities of an organ from the composer’s time. You will find it hard to fault the supple understatement of the lower lines and the dearth of encrusting ornamentation.

Suddenly, we hit the big time with Bach’s Komm, Heiliger Geist Fantasia BWV 651 and Chapkhana does it proud with a powerful full organ for the manuals and a splendid, full-bodied pedal outline of the cantus firmus. The interpretation manages to make an eloquent fusion of the three-part fugue and its thunderous underpinning, where the line-concluding note lengths follow traditional editions. This track kept drawing me back to revel in its digital agility and the welcome lack of delay in the pedal work; mind you, that attraction might also have been due to the buoyant image of the Paraclete’s endlessly beating wings over the resonant hymn of appeal and adoration from a militant humanity.

This is followed by another of the Eighteen Chorale Preludes: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659 – the first of three settings in that publication. As every Bach-committed organist knows, in this setting the chorale tune is given by the right hand but is decorated to within an inch of its sustainability, here riding high above its placid, walking support with nasal penetration, probably helped along by a mixture stop (can’t be sure, it’s so long since I had access to an instrument of substance). What is also distinctive about this reading is its lack of self-indulgence in the face of the linear ornamentation; the organist sticks to his last and preserves the metrical pulse without any rubato, as far as I can hear.

Concluding the Golden Oldies section, Chapkhana airs one of Balbastre’s noels, specifically Votre bonte Grand Dieu from the Second Suite. I’m more familiar with the same type of composition by Daquin but this track shows a similarity between these contemporaries. The score comprises the tune itself and five variations with a rustic 6/8 interlude between the last two. Once again, the approach to this piece proved metrically consistent and packed with variety as the variations’ repeated halves swung round (except for the Leger Sans vitesse interruption). I came across only one flaw in this dangerously clear-voiced account: at the bar 96 repeat, a muffed right-hand A.

Then we jumped to our times, beginning with one of Langlais’ Book 1 Mosaiques: Sur le tombeau de Buffalo Bill. I believe that the famous bison killer was buried at Lookout Mountain, Colorado and the composer might have visited the site on one of several tours across the United States. In any case, the work was written in 1977 and begins with a gentle, melancholy theme that is subjected to several variations which become increasingly elaborate melodically before the work ends with a quiet reminiscence of the initial melody – a conclusion that might suggest Western plains and the wide open spaces that the dead man inhabited. It’s a rarity, a piece about which little has been published, but this account imbues it with a certain whimsical appeal.

Messiaen is represented by two works: Joie et clarte des Corps Glorieux from (unsurprisingly) Les Corps Glorieux, and the most well-known of the movements from this 1939 compendium; then Chants d’oiseaux from the centre of Livre d’orgue of 1951/2. It’s always enjoyable hearing how organists adapt what they have to the specifications that the composer asks for; in the first of these, the problem is less demanding because the work stays on an even keel for most of its length, but the changes asked for the orgy of bird-calls is ridiculously demanding.

It strikes me that Chapkhana is a sympathetic spirit when faced with Messiaen’s insistent ecstasy in fast mode. He invest the first of these excerpts with a disciplined excitement, even when dealing with its less voluble moments, as when the composer alternates two chords repeatedly. But the basic opening pattern and the following recitative-like flurries come off with infectious elan; it’s like listening to a more focused elder brother to the exuberant Transports de joie from L’Ascension of 1933/4. In contrast, the Chants d’oiseaux is a minefield requiring agility and control of the necessary resources. It has more timbral variety than the slightly later Catalogue des oiseaux – which is stating the obvious – and Chapkhana works carefully through its flurries of action and many punctuating points d’appui.

The composer is an intriguing character, mainly because of the arcane characteristics of his language – the Oriental rhythms, birdsongs, modes, febrile athleticism alongside super-slow meditations. I saw him once, in Hamer Hall, at a performance of the Turangalila-symphonie which he followed with a score; the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra had to import a last-minute player for the ondes Martenot because the originally scheduled artist couldn’t handle the work’s demands. But my favourite anecdote came from colleague Anna King Murdoch who accompanied the composer and his entourage to the Dandenongs in pursuit of a lyrebird’s song. At the crucial moment, Anna trod on a twig, which silenced the bird – to the chagrin of the squawk-fancier who was unable to transcribe the call into his lengthy collection; yet another case where love’s labour’s lost.

It’s inevitable that the Czech composer Petr Eben should be compared to Messiaen in that both were formidable players and composers for the organ. Juxtaposing the Chants d’oiseaux with Eben’s The Wedding at Cana from his Four Biblical Dances made sense, although the extract from Les Corps Glorieux sounds more relevant. Eben doesn’t go in for those pages of unbarred bird-song recitative or abrupt three-chord ejaculations but is more likely to treat with a full-blown melody. Mind you, he can do so with the same riotous facility that the French composer relishes, but this particular work sits in a more comfortable, orthodox framework. The dance is a lively one – no reverential pauses for water-to-wine miracles – and seems to feature a virtuosic role for pedals towards the end.

Gary Sieling’s Pavan differs from most of its kind by running to the pulse of 5/8. Chapkhana employs flute stops for this placid 2004/5 exercise in charming inoffensiveness where an ordinary harmonic vocabulary is spiced up by the gentle presence of a mild dissonance (see the piece’s last chord). The composer is something of an all-rounder in the best British tradition: he’s credited in the CD’s liner notes as Director of Music at Bromley Parish Church in London but no, he’s moved on from that to Reading and seems to be a mobile force in the UK’s organ world. His Pavan is a well-constructed bagatelle, a welcome pause on the way to this recording’s finale.

Which comprises Chapkhana’s set of variations. He states the chorale in a setting notable for crawling chromatics which manages to raise the unlikely combination of Ives and Reger. Moreover, you can forget that lilting 9/8 metre used (twice) by Bach in his Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben cantata, as well as those amiable concordant memories associated with Myra Hess’s arrangement(s) because here the chorale is given in 4/4 time. Variation 1, Alla Danza, is a saltarello for the right hand with the chorale – now in its original triple tempo – below it; the whole effect is bitingly bitonal, thanks to insistent treble dissonances above the imperturbable tune. Then we have Alternating Chords which are really thirds that set the theme as a quick-step duet for flutes.

A Scherzino follows, pitched at the top of the instrument’s range and passing very swiftly in a variant unflustered by any deviation from utilizing the melody straight. The canonic Variation 4 puts the chorale back into 4/4 in a prominent left-hand role while the softer upper line offers an elaboration of the tune with piquant harmonic clashes. A Plenum movement flattens the tune out into a march with plenty of filler to produce a thoroughly British ambience, suggestive of a fast voluntary heard in a provincial cathedral. Next comes a three-line Contrapunctus where the interplay is suggestive of an Art of Fugue exercise written by Hindemith: disciplined, possibly over-cerebral, cheerful.

Bringing the disc to a close is the final variation, a Toccata with the chorale thundered out by the pedals while a coruscating dance, like Variation 1’s gigue, bounces around in what I think could be octaves – a single line with occasional cadential moves into two independent parts. This strikes me as the most substantial segment of the score and it gives us a buoyant conclusion to a work that doesn’t take itself too seriously but shows a very able mind at work – and an excellent musician, as evident in the totality of this enjoyable CD.

BY THE WINDING RIVER

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 652

I think this is the shortest of the three CDs of Lachlan Brown’s music issued recently in one fell swoop by Move Records; By the Winding River comes in at about 44 minutes. The 13 settings are of Chinese poets: six by Tu (Du) Fu, three by Ou Yang Hsiu (Xiu), two by Su Tung P’O (Su Shi) and one each from Li Ch’ing Chao (Qingzhao) and Mai (Mei) Yao Ch’en. As for participant musicians, these have appeared on one or both of the preceding Brown CDs: tenor Lyndon Green, soprano Jenna Roubos, pianist Len Vorster, and violinist George Vi.

Kenneth Rexroth’s translations are used, with no Mahler-like interpolations from the composer, even if the promotional material for this CD mentions Mahler and Das Lied von der Erde – the go-to score for a fusion of Chinese poetry and Western music. Indeed, Brown’s first song, Chang’s Hermitage by Tu Fu, the second-longest track on the album, speaks a kind of pentatonic language in both piano and vocal lines for long stretches, the piece a steadily pulsing commentary on self-isolation and its benefits as seen by an envying visitor. The song is dynamically restrained to match the quietly angular accompaniment and a vocal part full of repeated notes. It could be likened to Ravel’s La flute enchantee except for the absence of harmonic adventure.

Both this work and the following Green Jade Plum Trees in Spring (Ou Yang Hsiu) involve Green’s plangent tenor with Vorster accompanying, opening the second track with a one-hand (right, I suspect) outlining another pentatonic-suggestive melody that meanders pleasantly before the vocal entry, signalled by a more conventional underpinning. This song falls into two parts: the first a calm observation of the season’s fruitfulness; the second, a quieter evening scene where the human (tempting girls) appear and tint the landscape with warmer, more bass-heavy textures. This split personality of content is mildly mirrored in Brown’s harmonic vocabulary which enjoys the best of both worlds – suggestive Orientalism and French harmonic richness.

With the next song, Su Tung P’O’s Spring Festival, Green and Vorster come to a more straightforward compositional landscape where, for much of the time, three strands weave around each other, the keyboard being more mobile and steady in its regular quaver progress, the harmonic language firmly major key-centric. There’s a brusque shift of tonality in the last two lines, while the last itself – a kind of envoi – is unexpectedly passionate after an otherwise staid series of observations. The tenor’s output is framed by substantial prelude and postlude excursions.

Fisherman by Ou Yang Hsiu evokes a bleak scene, Green employing a small range while Vorster sets up a chain of drooping chords in a setting that attempts to depict a vague picture of a lone fisherman who can be faintly discerned in a landscape of high reeds, shrouding rain and secreting mist. This piece has a surprising effect: clear in every respect but emotionally veiled.

Apart from a short hymn-like passage near its conclusion, Farewell once more to my friend (Tu Fu) maintains the same pattern across its length of a left-hand rising arpeggio in pentatonic mode which works as a kind of binding cord for a lyric which is essentially nostalgic and regretful, the poet/singer happy for the meeting but almost in despair now that the good times have come to an end, probably never to be repeated. Brown doesn’t wallow in these depressing observations, although his low-pitched setting of the final line mirrors the poet’s pointed nihilism.

A change of pace now as soprano Roubos sings We Are Apart by Li Ch’ing Chao, the only female poet to grace the disc but her lines generate the composer’s longest response, albeit the concluding postlude is remarkably long. Here is an art song with no nationalistic colourations which might have been produced by a Delius aficionado if not for the chains of thirds that occur in Vorster’s right hand. Here you notice a peculiarity of Brown’s vocal line – repeated notes as the syllables glide past. You hear flickers of movement at some lines’ endings but you also come across a single note used for an entire line of these touching verses. The piano enjoys an extended solo before the final quatrain which finishes off the poet’s juxtaposition of nature and longing with luminous grief – and that, I suppose, is the rationale behind the lengthy concluding piano solo which offers its own harmonic ambiguity.

After this, naturally, we hear the CD’s shortest track in a playful Mai Yao Ch’en frippery, An excuse for not returning the visit of a friend. The reason for this social embarrassment is that the poet’s children are clinging to him – apparently not in fear but from that perverse affection which insists that a parent keep his focus where it belongs. Brown gives Vorster a lightly tripping accompaniment while Roubos vaults through her apology which at the end sounds ever so slightly manic.

Another Tu Fu meditation follows, this time Snow Storm which is unrelievedly negative, a series of observations of the natural world’s harshness and the futility of human contact. Brown’s piano accompaniment presents as a chain of ascending and sometimes descending arpeggio-type figures while Green’s tenor sets out a pretty dreary monologue with an odd attempt at word-painting on the word ‘coiling’. Its unfinished conclusion is echoed in the following The Spring will never reach me (Ou Yang Hsiu again) where Vorster’s piano ends the song with a kind of half-close. Here, Vi’s violin sounds as though it is being played at some distance from the central participants, oscillating between offering a linear support to piano,. then singer, then back again, etc. The harmonic vocabulary is bare but liable to resolve into concordances across this lyric of regretful nostalgia and longing for home in a bleak, unfriendly environment.

That delight in postludes becomes even more clear in Brown’s setting of another Tu Fu poem, By the winding river in which the instrumental post-lied commentary takes up almost half the track. Yet again, you are conscious of the composer’s preference for delivering whole lines on a single note; indeed, there are few requirements of Green to leap about his compass – just a spaced-out common chord or the shift of a 2nd but nothing to disturb the temperate self-questioning of the text which contrasts the universal quest for happiness with the writer’s own sacrifices for the sake of a career. As for the vocabulary, you can detect traces of Delius and Faure but the harmonic structures are simple when set alongside the chromatic slurries of these two formidable masters.

Nothing new arises with the setting of Su Tung P’O’s A walk in the Country. The piano provides a quaver support that stays in the same major key for much of the song while Green follows a (by now) predictable path with plenty of repeated notes and small excursions like the last two lines that involve two notes. The song moves pretty rapidly through the set lines and sets no problems for either executant. Much the same can be noted about the penultimate track, The House by the River (Tu Fu), in which the main interest comes from the initial rising tetrachord figure in Vorster’s part, across which Green sets out another quasi-recitative with few moments of linear curvature; see the last two lines (again) which phase out in a near-monotone before a postlude with one (possibly two) moments of harmonic interest, the merest frissons of change from the predictable.

Finally, Tu Fu’s South Wind involves both singers. Green sings the 8-line text, then Roubos joins him for a repeat, omitting one line for reasons that I can’t quite fathom. Suddenly we are translated to an atmosphere that is packed with Mendelssohnian sweetness, including some melting linear vocal 6ths and a fluent barcarolle-like accompaniment to this rather saccharine Spring scene complete with blossoms and coupling birdlife. It’s an amiable enough song and comes to me straight from the 1840s, making an odd conclusion to this collection that has veered most of the time to modal and pentatonic frugality.

What does all this amount to, once the 13 songs are over? Brown lives up to his claim of writing music in Romantic and Impressionist styles, and his take on Chinese poetry fits in with his chosen vocabularies. But the music is not original, despite some attempts to summon up your Oriental taste-buds. He is content to follow his masters – Mahler, Debussy, Delius – but he isn’t offering much else beyond imitation and faint reflection. As with the two preceding CDs recently issued of Brown’s music, you’ll find nothing to offend and not much to excite – just pleasant music performed with sympathy by under-stretched interpreters.

 

 

 

 

CHAMBER WORKS

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 651

Here is another in the series of three CDs put out by Move, all dedicated to the works of Australian composer Lachlan Brown. These chamber scores are a bit of a mixed bag as far as format is concerned. You have four piano solos – three performed by Len Vorster, one by the composer. Brown’s String Quartet No. 1 is preceded by a brief piece for the same format (different performers) and a similar short work for guitar quartet. Two duets appear, one for harp and cello, the other for violin and piano. As well, two other solo tracks are included – one for organ, one for harp.

First of the piano solos is Vorster’s reading of Little Emily in the Garden which has a series of stepwise descending 7th chords as its main motif and stands as a sanitised piece of post-Impressionist composition, not exploring new ground but happy in its quiet sprightliness. Pushing the painting nomenclature even more closely is Monet’s Garden which is very close to a Debussy prelude/esquisse with carefully pointed arpeggios along harp lines and suggestions of foliage and water droplets to animate the original paintings – those that have a definite scene rather than the water-only mammoths I think saw decades ago in the Jeu de Paume (or perhaps it was l’Orangerie).

Third in the piano solos is A New Day, played by the composer. This is a restrained ramble tending to wander around a falling Major 2nd motif, generally confined to the middle and lower reaches of the instrument. What you hear sounds quite conventional, not virtuosic but a gentle lyric with limited ambition in a regular diatonic framework. Finally, Vorster returns for the most substantial of these products: A Passing Cloud – near 6 minutes of placid slow-waltzing that gets an idea, toys with it for a fair while, then moves to something else. It’s all rather like a Satie composition without the quirkiness of melody.

Beginning the album are harp Megan Reeve and cello Zoe Knighton with Early Spring. You might expect something bucolic, possibly suggestive of those gentle miniatures written by British composers to celebrate their own soporific countryside. Which is what you get, beginning with a gently arpeggiated supporting line from Reeve and a winding, mild melodic cello melody that could go on for miles. Knighton generates a finely shaped senior voice while Reeve enjoys two short breaks/cadenzas and has the final delicately flourished word.

George Vi and the composer present the Romance for violin and piano with earnest emotional commitment although the string line is liable to clumsy production; not in its tuning so much but in the conviction of its bowing. Mind you, the line moves into the instrument’s highest reaches pretty soon after the opening and rarely moves into the territory of the lowest, or even the D, string. Here is another, if more focused, meander for the melody line while the keyboard confines itself pretty much to background chords – like the harp in Early Spring, but more so. The final impression is of a genteel charm without much harmonic levity.

On the Promenade, the first and briefest of the quartets, employs the talents of Vi as first violin, Marianne Rothschild on second, Karen Columbine‘s viola and cello Michelle John. A neat little study in 3rds for the violins while the viola provides a rather aimless secondary melody line and the cello gives a pizzicato bass, this is – again – restrained and Anglophile in its language, leaving no lasting impression. Pavane is played by the Melbourne Guitar Quartet: Dan McKay, Jeremy Tottenham, Ben Dix, and Michael McManus. A gentle, stepping motion from all participants sets a suitably grave, processional framework, and the opening melody has what can only be called an antique charm. Not much happens as the dance works through its patterns and repetitions with some chromatic slips occurring in two spots and passages with quiet triplets emerge from the consistent 4/4 rhythm. I can’t see that any players were over-stretched by this placid sequence.

Brown’s first essay in the formal string quartet four-movement lay-out is here played by violins Kathryn Taylor and Nick Waters, viola Helen Ireland, and cello Knighton. Here is a full-blooded composition, still written in a language that was extant a century ago but the first movement, for instance, has an unexpected intensity and spatial balance that shows a solidly informed mind engaged with his work. You can hear traces of Delius in the linear spaciousness of individual lines, but then Brown has cited the English writer as an influence. Mind you, the score starts off with some chord clusters that aggregate promisingly, but the whole breadth of these pages sticks to an orthodox tonality.

After the initial ‘Moderately’, the second movement is headed ‘With gravity and intensity’ and reminds you of the ardent chorale-like steps in the late Beethovens. Brown is keen on resolving his chord progressions quickly so that nothing hints at dissonance, apart from a slight subordinate semiquaver rustling right at the end – as though the devil is not quite muffled in this peaceful, hymn-suggestive atmosphere. For all that, the lower voices enjoy little prominence and the real action comes from the top violin.

For his next stage, ‘With movement, like a changeable wind’, the composer has invested a good deal of his effort; in fact, this segment alone is equivalent in time to the other three combined, being close to 12 minutes long. To my ears, it appears to fall into four chapters, the last echoing the first, with a concord-establishing coda. Along the way, we encounter passages in rich thirds for the upper lines, later lowered; another of Brown’s floating melodies that seems to operate around the most nebulous of axes; some thick contrapuntal pages that could have been attributable to an entrant in the Cobbett Prize; and whole sentences that promise stringency but eventually come down on the side of righteous resolution.

It’s an intriguing set of pages, more so than much else on the CD, probably because of its breadth and emotional concentration; not to mention the clear commitment and intonational clarity of its interpreters, viola and cello being long-time collaborators in the Flinders Quartet. And finally, we arrive at the fourth movement, ‘With easy movement, like a pleasant dance’, which is rich in concordant 3rds and 6ths for the violins and smooth sustained-note duets for the lower voices. It is pleasant and free from stress with not much argument and a fairly intact repeat in this ternary-shaped movement (not uncommon across this writer’s output).

Finally, you have the two non-piano solos: Snowcaps from James Leitch playing an unspecified organ, and Gentle Rain which lasts no time at all on Reeve’s harp. The first of these is the second-longest track here and another surprise for its harmonic writing which is packed with 2nds and 7ths, along with parallel chords of some complexity that suggest Messiaen but without the hysteria – not too many traces of alleluias sereins – but you encounter a hard-minded embrace of the instrument’s potential for dissonance similar to passages you can find in Jolivet.

This organ construct takes up a wide, sonorous canvas and Leitch exploits his instrument’s registrational potential with high efficiency, so that he makes a fine case for the piece’s melodic construction and coherence. On a smaller scale, Reeve makes easy work of the harp solo which maintains a falling series of 4ths as an upper ostinato throughout; it’s occasionally mirrored in the lower strings but the impact of this carefully crafted bagatelle has an unmistakable reference to its title, each scintillation droppeth effectively.

On this CD, I found more originality than on Brown’s The Night Sky Glory collection of vocal works. Some of the tracks leave little impression, yet you can see indications that the composer’s vision is not as easily defined as you’d think. He may have confided to us his empathy with Delius, Mahler and Debussy – and you can find traces of others in his output – but works like his string quartet, Gentle Rain and Snowcaps demonstrate a clarity and individuality that rouse your interest and generate hopes for further essays with similar adventurousness.

THE NIGHT SKY GLORY

Lachlan Brown

Move Records MCD 650

The good people at Move have just published three CDs devoted to the work of Australian composer Lachlan Brown who – as far as the internet is concerned – remains an enigma. That is to say, I can’t find any information about him apart from what is on the Move website – and that’s very meagre. So you’d have to expect something out of the box from a writer who manages to get the country’s prime Australian composition promoter to publish a set of recordings – put out simultaneously, what’s more – that features a performing group involving some high-profile musicians.

This first offering features pianist Len Vorster, soprano Jenna Roubos, soprano/altos Holly Haines and Alison Rae-Jones and Elspeth Bawden, treble Jimmy Hilton, tenors Timothy Reynolds and Alastair Cooper-Golec and Lyndon Green, the composer himself doubling as tenor and bass, harp Megan Reeve, violins George Vi and Marianne Rothschild, viola Karen Columbine, cello Michelle John, and organ Lachlan Redd. As you can see, some of these participants have been (and continue to be) significant members of the country’s (mainly Melbourne’s) musical community.

But what of the music they reproduce? One of the few ‘facts’ we can learn about Brown is that he has been influenced by Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, Delius and Faure: a worthy clutch of late Romantic and Impressionist writers – in fact, a few of them sit on the cusp between those schools/groups/ delineations. But I become instantly wary when such names are presented, chiefly because I suspect that what we are going to hear is derivative – not so much influences as imitations. Further, is any composer in current operation harking back this far? All pay homage to Bach, but is anyone writing continuously in his style? Or that of Beethoven? Or Wagner? Still, you could pursue this topic into odd corners where composers are happy to boast an affinity with Schoenberg or Stravinsky (but never Hindemith), while the fad for Cage, Stockhausen or Boulez is well and truly over. Now, the trend is towards Radiohead, Philip Glass or Lady Gaga.

Back to Brown and his first track. a Rilke setting: Fruhling ist wiedergekommen which is the 21st of the Sonnets to Orpheus, here carried out by Roubos and Vorster. Well, it’s sort of that particular sonnet with the first part revisited at the end for the sake of balance, I suppose, and a few lines and a stanza, at least omitted. The musical language is a cross between 19th century operatic cadenza and post-Schumann lied, both A parts of this ternary composition opening with a sort of vocalise. This is amiable, salonesque music which manages to sound open-hearted and optimistic, like the poem.

Vorster and tenor Cooper-Golec then present a Victor Hugo setting: Hier soir, which is fully Romantic but lacking in subtlety. It’s as if Baudelaire had never been born. As for the setting, it treads a conservative line in chromatic sliding, except for some questionable moments at the end of the first stanza. Cooper-Golec’s tiumbre is a touch over-nasal for a piece that might have been better suited to a baritone; as it is, the song sounds like a kind of plaint rather than an assertion of devotion. The whole reminds me of Duparc but without much attraction in its melodic curve.

Brown then takes on a well-known set of verses in Heine’s Auf Flugeln des Gesanges, forever associated with Mendelssohn who set the poem in his Op. 34 Six Songs. This new version employs two tenors – Reynolds and Green – with the string quartet mentioned above, the lower strings pizzicato while Vi weaves a third line around the intertwining vocal chain of 3rds and 6ths. It’s very mellifluous and just as richly conservative as Mendelssohn’s work in its vocal demands and its harmonic vocabulary.

Next come a pair of actual vocalises. The first involves Roubos and harpist Reeve and is an amiable enough exercise with a fetching vocal line above instrumental arpeggios, mainly (always?) rising. Brown stays fixed in a completely predictable metre with a few gestures towards late French Romantic modernity. To their credit, both artists handle this slender piece with sympathy. The second uses the boy treble Hilton with Redd providing supporting chords on an unattributed organ while the singer follows a melodic path of no particular character, alternating a step-wise melodic motion and a widely-spaced arpeggio three-note pattern. Again, there’s nothing here that speaks to any of Brown’s influencers, except possibly some suggestions of Faure of the Requiem.

Rilke enjoys another outing through Schon horch, also from the Orphean sonnets – No. 25 in the cycle – and Cooper-Golec and Vorster return for this number. Here we might be stepping into the 20th century with some efficient Delian slides and a setting of some drama, particularly for the singer who is tested across a wide tessitura. If it suggests anything, it’s one of Berg’s early songs, chiefly for the solidity of its piano material. But I can’t find much of a link between the text and the music; my fault, of course, that I never embraced the German poet’s taxing imagery.

We now arrive at the CD’s title-work, which is another vocalise for what I assume are multi-track voices. Only two are cited. Haines and Brown. but both are credited with double vocal types: soprano/alto, and tenor/bass. What we hear is a series of four-part (or are there more?) chords, revolving around a mobile axis in yet another very circumscribed harmonic ramble. Again, you’re reminded of Delius in a vague sense, but I don’t know the English master’s choral scores well enough to play pinpoint the similarity.

The composer is still indulging in vocalise for the next three tracks: Meditations for choir III, IV and V. The pairs of singers (each contributing at least two vocal strands) have no words, just an open vowel sound as they slowly meander around a rather ordinary sequence of chords. Rae-Jones and Brown are the personnel for the first two of this clutch, the No IV having more interest for the momentary individuality of line at its centre. The last, involving Bawden and Brown, builds slowly to a fine climax, and impressed for its multi-choral effects, but by this point my attention was wandering in an aural landscape where the elements were proving interchangeable..

More harmonic originality appears in a brace of Forest Voices from multi-phonicised Haines and Brown, still textless. The writing is loaded with droning open 5ths and some biting 2nds and 7ths that speak a language that is more contemporary than anything we’ve come across this far. Further, these pieces have a definite atmosphere: the forest they depict is no sweetly-wooded series of groves but something more menacing and aggressive.

To end, we have Night Falls in the Forest which continues the atmospheric suggestions of the preceding two tracks but much less stridently. Bawden’s soprano and alto have the melodic running although Brown’s tenor and bass are not stuck in the subsidiary positions they held in the Voices tracks. But seven tracks in a row of harmonic shifts and vocalisations seems to me to be too much of a moderately good thing.

When facing modern composition, I’m still sympathetic to Stockhausen’s saying that he asks ‘two things of a composer: invention, and that he astonish me.’ That’s still a tall order which might be more useful if the combination was actually a pair of alternatives. Brown’s music is not impressive for its inventiveness but moves along well-trodden paths, compositional tropes that are very common territory. Much of it is pleasant and deft in its organization but it ignores most of what has happened in Western music over the last 120 years. As for the question of astonishment, it does not arise. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to experiencing further facets of the composer’s creativity in the other two Move CDs that were issued alongside this one.

A BEETHOVEN ODYSSEY VOLUME 9

James Brawn

MSR Classics MS 1473

So here we are at the grand finale of Brawn’s exposition of the 32 Beethoven sonatas, having left two of the most demanding scores till this climactic point. It’s a late period pairing: No. 28 in A Major (1816), and No. 29 in B flat Major (1818). Both make great demands on executants, the latter Hammerklavier a pianistic high-water mark of concentrated expression and formal skill. While the appearance of this particular A Major work on a recital program is not common, you can wait from one decade to the next to hear a pianist of stature presenting the big B flat score, most musicians happy to follow the usual round of Pathetique (No. 8), Moonlight (No 14), Waldstein (No. 21), and Appassionata (No. 23).

I believe that the last time I heard the Hammerklavier attempted was by Michael Kieran Harvey who participated in one of Stephen McIntyre’s Piano Landmarks days at the then Congregational Church (now St. Michael’s Uniting) in Melbourne’s Collins St. eastern heights. From memory, the first two movements passed along successfully, but then matters became directionless in the lengthy Adagio sostenuto; at all events, Harvey left the platform with the work incomplete. Mind you, he’d done this before when tackling Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata for the Astra people; he lost his way but returned to finish the monster off. As did Carl Vine with the same work some years later, I seem to recall.

Since that truncated Hammerklavier, I don’t think the work has come my way in live performance; perhaps once. But you can see why, right from the first full bar with its right-hand minor 9th stretch – impossible for those of us with Dupuytren’s contracture without an arpeggiation. And there’s worse to follow in bar 3 with a full Major 9th. The left hand isn’t left unscathed; see bars 193-4. This first movement Allegro is necessarily peppered with these first theme statements in full (or even half) cry, before we even consider the intervening fluctuations in attack and digital negotiation across the pages.

As you’d expect, Brawn has no problems in handling these stretches. Following his customary path, he takes time to give breathing space to phrase changes as the exposition’s setting-out moves past and observes his own dynamic markings in the first outline and again in its repetition; the former straight after the change to G Major across the sequences in bars 47-62, while the latter is observable in the restrained sforzandi (in my Henle edition)) of bars 28-30 (actually, I think they’re ignored). Later, this pianist takes considerable pains to give a focus to the movement’s eccentric development with its taut fugato stretch and focus on cells (e.g. bars 189 to 200), even if the material come across as intractably dogged – which in other readings can result in plenty of hammering.

As shown throughout this odyssey, Brawn has a rare sensitivity to Beethoven’s apparent baldness of statement, pitching his responsiveness to a simple acceptance of the score and handling the work as a product of its time; which is preferable to turning a rhetorical movement such as this one into a hurtling monument to virtuosity and sheer heft. The following scherzo is handled with dispatch, its central motive in occasional danger of blurring the central repeated note/interval/chord that gives the movement its rhythmic interest and urgency. Even the central trio, with its going-nowhere arpeggio statements, passes in a blur before the oddities arrive with a disorienting presto, cadenza, and brief temperamental flurry in bar 113.

The conclusion to these pages with their double octave insistence on near stasis serves to unnerve the listener because, although Brawn conveys lightness and impetuosity in combination, you may be left uncertain as to the intention of the entire movement. Is it meant to be a throwaway bit of badinage with irritated outbursts, or should we prospect for deeper veins of impatience and dissatisfaction? Whatever your finding, Brawn inclines to the mercurial, which comes as a welcome intermission before the sonata’s great challenge. This Adagio is 187 bars long and often strikes me as interminable because, while its shape is apprehensible (eventually), the process of reaching a resolution is hyper-extended. Not that this reading is as wearisome as you can find in other recordings; it’s just that Brawn is ultra-sensitive to Beethoven’s tonality fluctuations and also inserts pauses that may point up phrase shapes but also substitute emotional sympathy for momentum.

Where you can see why the executant pauses before the move to G Major at bar 14, I can’t see why there is a hesitation before the totally anticipatable A Major opening to bar 39. Or the arrival at D Major in bar 53 where a comma breaks up an already inevitable sentence. A little further on, the written note values are treated pretty cavalierly (e.g. bar 62), but the handling of that ornate batch of demi-semiquavers from bar 87 to bar 103 shows a high degree of empathetic responsiveness to some awkward writing. Just as well-placed realizations come at the two points where a main motive is shared between bass and treble (bars 45 to 52, again at bars 130 to 137, with an after-taste at bars 134-138).

Also, as at the work’s opening, you can admire the even accomplishment of those frequent hand stretches (here, of various 10ths) that come across with remarkable facility; the last bars in particular indicative of the interpreter’s mastery of technique and sustained atmosphere. Nevertheless, it’s always a relief to leave these morose pages for the work’s finale which – after some more eccentric fantasia-like interludes – eventually arrives with the Allegro risoluto/yes-very-determined three-part fugue. There’s no way any executant can make this sound orderly and a post-Baroque example of the form; it’s neither. What marks Brawn’s effort is its clarity.

In part this comes from a modest employment of the sustaining pedal, notable right from the opening entries where the aim is linear probity which verges on the percussive. In my book, that’s fine and infinitely preferable to washes of fabric, no matter how imposing the sonorous output produced. What is significant is the way this player continues as he began with a welcome transparence in harmonic conflicts like those chromatic clashes (well, semitonal juxtaposition clashes) that begin with the change of key signature at bar 53). As well, you have to give credit to the deft treatment of Beethoven’s increasingly manic trills that reach their apogee of frequency between bars 235 and 246 before the overwhelming bass one on B flat that lasts between bars 373 and 380.

As a capping stone to this solid sonata, these pages stand as an extraordinary achievement, informed by an unstoppable vehemence and drive which simmers even during the D Major episode across bars 250 to 278. Brawn is able to sustain your involvement through his vivid approach that gives proper value to each line in what can become some of the thickest piano writing produced by this composer. I won’t say it’s not a relief to get to the end – it always is – but Brawn carries you along with a clear mastery of form and a confident delivery that eschews flashiness and pomp for plain-speaking and (God help us) bonhomie.

As for the Op. 101, the interpretation on offer has an attractive honesty, its character well established across the initial Etwas lebhaft – only a bit over a hundred bars of generally peaceful melodic arches with some unforgettably graceful, syncopated chord punctuation. Brawn is handy in implementing the empfindung that Beethoven asks for, but he has a keen eye for finding a phrase’s point – exactly where it should aspire and decline, reserving his heftiest dynamic until the climactic fulcrum at bar 86 before that lean digest of material in the last seven measures.

More formidable problems emerge in the ensuing march where the hand/finger shifts can prove ungainly. But you have to strain to fault the player’s contained impetuosity, which is only slightly decreased in bar 37, a scrap that comes across as hard-won for no apparent reason. Later, the canonic interplay that constitutes the main part of this movement’s trio flows with excellent precision, the lines lucid and carefully mirroring each other. Then Brawn lingers over the brief Langsam, stretching note-lengths liberally to make as much emotional hay as possible across this interlude.

Before he breaks into the sonata’s longest segment, the Geschwinde finale with its generally happy fugue centring the movement, the player has the welcome task of referring us back to the work’s opening phrases: one of the most felicitous of reminiscences in all Beethoven, a delight to encounter. The Allegro‘s enunciation comes across as slightly awkward in some passages with parallel thirds, sixths or fourths in one hand, but much of this conclusion is closely argued by Brawn, particularly in the more complex segments of the fugal development, e.g. bars 149 to 156 and bars 201 to 206. Moreover, the rest is negotiated with the attention to detail that is one of this pianist’s most consistent characteristics, including a finely achieved account of the fugue’s glowering pedal-point conclusion between bars 223 and 227.

These two sonatas provide a fine ending to Brawn’s readings of all the Beethoven sonatas. To my ears, he has given us interpretations of sincerity and security, packed with felicities that argue for a direct confrontation with the composer’s prodigious output. My generation grew up with compendiums by Kempff, Brendel, and Schnabel, encountering later complete sonatas sets from Barenboim, Pollini and Badura-Skoda. These days, pianists I’ve heard, like Fazil Say and Paul Lewis, have produced complete sets; as well, a plethora of performers I’ve not heard (or sometimes not heard of) have put forward their versions. Fortunately, Brawn is a high achiever in this company: if not as intellectually challenging as some more senior names, then just as pianistically gifted and insightful as his contemporaries.