Category: CD

THE SPARROW AND THE MEAD HALL

Michael Kieran Harvey

Move Records MD 3471

The latest in Move Records’ collection of Michael Kieran Harvey’s products – as a performer and composer, often enough both – covers some of the ground covered in the COVID year of 2021. First come Four Ballades for piano; then Sonata, No. 7, called The Sparrow and the Mead Hall, which takes its impetus from an Epictetus dictum; another personal piece, Lawyers are Lovely Misunderstood People and We Should All Be Much Kinder to Them, which honours Hobart advocate/barrister/solicitor Craig Mackie; and an anti-opera, Death Cap Mushrooms, to a text by Harvey’s long-time collaborator Arjun von Caemmerer which takes its brief flight from the 2020 George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.

It’s not accurate to see the ballades as an extended entity rather than discrete pieces, but the composer points to a pair of links between them all. One is the use of Bach’s B flat-A-C-B natural musical signature; the other is the prevalence of a free-wheeling 12-tone series that enjoys exposure at the octave-rich start to Ballad No. 1, Stark. This row is announced in octaves and the first thing that struck me was the significance of the intervals between the initial notes, just as it obsesses number-crunchers in a transparent and willfully eccentric score like Berg’s Violin Concerto. Yet, before you have gone far in this movement, the composer-pianist’s flights have once again carried you off into his realm of ornate imagination where you can (after a few listenings) trace the intervallic sequence – or, more properly, fragments of it. That’s before you take on Harvey’s ambience which embraces so much.

He himself points to Liszt, Szymanowski, Bartok and Herbie Hancock as jumping-off points for these ballades, the investigation of any of which could take months. For example, I don’t know the Liszt ballades (all two of them) but am pretty au fait with some of the Legends with which the former have been linked by performers and editors. And, while boasting a fair acquaintance with Bartok’s piano output, the Elegies (again, both of them) have not crossed my path, at the keyboard or in the hands of anybody else. Ditto Szymanowski’s Masques (three in number) and Hancock’s 1973 album. All of which is more of a salute to Harvey’s catholicity of interest than anything else.

In spite of the two common attributes that permeate all four of these pieces, you will do your head in trying to work out the compositional processes at play.  For instance, the following Implacable ballade opens with a solid 5/4 bass sequence of chords which goes through a slight alteration in tessitura before a slight change in tempo, while all around the firm opening motivic construction disintegrates into patterns of angular quavers and clotting triplets that move into a whirlwind landscape occasionally broken up by semi-impressionist oases.

You can’t pass off Chopin’s four ballades as a sequence, like elements in a sonata. Each is emotionally discrete and - as far as I’m aware - there are no common elements shared between them; unlike Harvey’s compositions which might come under a communal umbrella. But this embrace won’t really wash because the differences between them all are vast and the shared elements are often near-impossible to find, let alone hear. When it comes to the third in the set, Quasi fantasia, the pages pass as a kind of phantasmagoria, images that rustle or thunder with even the delineation of the B-A-C-H motif in transposition hard to pick out, although the nature of the writing tells you that it must be there. 

Matters are a bit clearer in the final Fast manic bop which lives up to its name with a good deal of insistent double octaves and syncopations to invest a typically urgent energy into this finale which reminds us of Harvey’s earlier works (I’m talking of at least 20 years ago) where the impetus proved irresistible. Even in this ballade, the hectic nature of the musical progress is anchored in recognizable elements that pile up in dynamic terms before a gripping conclusion. Here again, the fecundity of this composer’s imagination is on display in a technical display that shows no breaks, no cracks in development.

With his new sonata, Harvey is in an abstract world of something between self-consciousness and good old-fashioned existentialism. He takes the Greek philosopher’s reported dictum – Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo – and uses each clause as a heading for his four movements. As you can imagine, the results are peculiar to the composer and I doubt that listeners will find easy engagement with the work’s intellectual underpinnings. For all that, the music is startlingly clear in its statement-chains as life’s progress follows the simple progress of a bird from darkness to darkness; there is no beginning and no end, is the message, and we are given the short life-flight only.

The assertion of past existence is both opulent and muted in Harvey’s first movement where high decorated lines contrast with emphatic bass plosives. The tentative string-plucked opening light-pricks give place to dramatic rhetoric, which could represent our individual striving to enter the world, the effort bringing on a formidable series of pre-creative efforts that come to nothing in the end, the initial texture coming back as a commentary on Epictetus’ sober evaluation of non-being: you have a sort of gestation, prodigal in its output, but finally coming round full circle, as the Buddha tells us. For all that, the pages are laced with vitality rather than navel-gazing and the main impression is of the pianist operating at two distinct levels of action; what they represent is left up to you to solve (or leave alone).

Moving to actually being in the world, Harvey labels his second movement ansioso, or eager.If you like, this is the composer in full spate, the notes pouring out in rapid virtuosic hammer-blows right across the keyboard.  It’s as if the executant wants to operate his life’s potential to full capacity, restlessly urging us to the next experience or sensation in page after page of exertion. Then, suddenly, it stops and we have returned to the opening movement’s initial stasis: single notes plucked out of the ether, as though the self is returning to its pre-conscious state. As changes of pace go, this one is hard to beat: the tumult and the shouting die and you’re left with an all-too-familiar plane of non-activity.

When it reaches the abnegation of existence, the music becomes appropriately disembodied with a sequence of tamped trills, sustained notes and a few abrupt Boulez-type stark four-member gruppetti before Harvey returns to the opening of Non fui – note-for-note, the first 9 bars. It’s a rounding out of sorts: we start out in the abstract, and so we end. This third movement is as long as its predecessor but here the style of communication is on resonances, a fermata dangling over the ending of each bar in the main body of the relevant two pages.

To end, we are faced with another movement that divides into two parts. Harvey uses the term distaccato to direct the requisite attack mode and the implied difference is essential: the right hand plays a set of three-note chords, the top note always E flat, the bottom note initially F and then moving to D flat while the inner part proposes a sort of melody. Still, the chords are repeated in a 5/4 pattern of three crotchets and a minim, occasionally leavened by a 2/4 bar of two crotchets. These aren’t brusque or classic staccato, but they are detached. Eventually, the left hand produces the by-now-familiar bass thunders and this briefest of the four movements crosses halfway through its length into the detached plucked strings mode that has run across this sonata as a dialectic connector. To my mind, this conclusion serves that creditable purpose of illustrating the indifference claimed by Epictetus (and probably by Harvey) to the passing of life: filled with light under the mead hall’s roof, but empty at both ends.

Coming to the lawyer-lauding piece, the listener is moved into a regular Harvey compositional world where the furious speed is well-matched with brusque syncopations that show what can be done with rock-jazz materials when the composer has a mind. It’s a headlong rush, something along the lines of the preceding sonata’s second movement but more aggressively jaunty, even menacing in its several frenetic moments. Harvey wrote this as a payment for lawyer Garvie’s professional services, along the lines of the post-impressionists and Cubist masters settling their cafe bills with art works now more valuable than the establishments that claimed them. It’s a genial concept but one that I can’t see being pursued in these nasty times of economic depression. All the same, it has to be said that Harvey’s piece shows the composer at his most coruscatingly brilliant.

I’ve not much to report about the anti-opera, written for the Australian National Academy of Music’s ANAM Set (2021). Its initial direction reads Muscular arrogant swaggering and the propulsive piano pulse that starts it off is eventually joined by a drum kit, vocalist Benjamin Cannings growling out von Cammaerer’s punk-poet text in one fell swoop, while Theo Pike alternates between piano and toy piano with Alex Bull generating the percussion contribution. The afore-mentioned Cannings also provides a guitar line in the work’s later stages. 

The work is a satirical slap in the face of Canberra’s politicians (with a side-kick at Trump) and the group mindlessness of American law and order when seen at its worst. For Harvey, this serves as a protest that takes on the mindless head-banger violence reinforcing prejudice and stupidity in this country (see Artarmon) and throughout the territories run by our great ally. While full of justifiable rage, the track makes an unnerving finale to what has been, up to this point, remarkable music-making of high quality.

Death-Cap Mushrooms is dedicated in its score to Hannah Pike; in the CD leaflet, the dedication is to Theo Pike. According to the Australian Music Centre’s site, Hannah and Bull played the premiere performance at ANAM on October 26, 2021; Theo is credited in the leaflet.  It’s all rather confusing, but not a vital distraction to any auditor who enjoys the slightly outrageous.

SHICHISEKI

Michael Kieran Harvey, Miwako Abe, Alister Barker, Martin Niedermair

Move Records MD 3470

As I understand it, this latest release in Move’s Michal Kieran Harvey Collection draws on recordings that have been made over the last 15 years or so, now brought out of the company’s archives and here released for the first time. Harvey is performing works by four contemporary writers – Kanako Okamoto from Japan, as well as Australians Andrian Pertout, Mark Pollard and Gabriella Vici – as well as three songs used in Barrie Kosky’s adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart: Bach’s Agnus Dei from the B minor Mass, Purcell’s Music for a while that comes from his stage music for Oedipus, and Wolf’s Verborgenheit which is one of the Morike Lieder.

Harvey contributes to each track, collaborating with violinist Miwako Abe in Okamoto’s Shichiseki of 2008 from which we hear the Romance first movement, and Pollard’s Beating the rusty nail of 2006; later working alongside cellist Alister Barker for Pertout’s 2007 Rishis and saints: for violoncello and prepared pianoforte, as well as accompanying cabaret tenor Martin Niedermair in the three Kosky-invested songs. He is soloist in Pertout’s Cinq petites melodies: for pianoforte of 2008 and Vici’s Piano Sonata written in 2020.

Most of this music saw Harvey participate in its first performance. Pollard’s work was first heard at the Perth International Arts Festival, inaugurated by Abe (its commissioner) and Harvey; ditto, Okamoto’s title track.  Pertout’s little melodies were premiered by Harvey in the Tasmania Conservatorium of Music and he recorded Vici’s sonata on the eve of the COVID pandemic. Barker and Harvey were co-presenters of Pertout’s Rishis and saints on its debut performance at the Resonance Music Series sponsored by the Bayside City Council. And, of course, Niedermair and Harvey worked together on Kosky’s theatre piece during its Malthouse presentation in Melbourne.

The disc begins with Okamoto’s movement: the first of two exemplifying peace, the second illustrative of anger. This is in line with the underpinning legend pf Vega and Altair being allowed to meet once a year by an Emperor angry at their clandestine marriage. So Okamoto is presenting us with (I think) a representation of the stars’ falling in love and being happy in their connubial bliss until the interference of secular authority who wanted to put the female forced (Vega) to work once again. This once-a-year meeting resulted in the (earthly) Shichiseki celebration in Japan held annually on July 7th.

The Romance has Harvey setting the scene high in the piano before Abe enters with a long arc of self-pivoting melody. A sequence of piano chords prefaces some impassioned repeated double-stops before a real duet opens out with the keyboard rumbling continuously under a series of rising violin ejaculations that pause each time on a striking 2nd or 7th that suggests strife and astral discord rather than spherical harmony. A scale-rich piano cadenza leads to a high-pitched petering out, like a satellite signal, followed by another violin solo.

What follows is a reversal of an earlier procedure, Abe supplying a high descending single-note support while Harvey coruscates with his inimitable flair and incisiveness before the violin flies alone to a high-altitude melismatic conclusion. The piece has great appeal for its wide-ranging emotional breadth and a searching-out of each instrument’s sonorous potential, as well as a fair allocation of responsibilities, even if Abe enjoys the more striking performance ambience.

Pertout’s piano bagatelles were created as a homage to Elliott Carter on his 100th birthday.  They use Mayan mythology alongside dance rhythms from Latin and South American cultures, all of which will mean more to the Chilean-born composer than to those of us inextricably bound up with an Anglo-centric transplanted musical culture.  Pertout gives his pieces French titles connecting colours with compass directions, e.g. Noir de l’ouest, Aqua du centre. This, plus the references to specific rhythms – Festejo, Toque de Sao Bento Grande – has the virtue of specificity couched in an alien language. Still, it means something to the writer and the rest of us must make the best of it.

For his first offering, Noir de l’ouest, Pertout uses two rhythms: Lando and Festejo, both distinct in content if not in tempo and, in the best miniature fashion, over before much has registered.  Jaune du sud employs Zamba and Chacarera, and these are very disparate despite sharing the same 6/8 time-signature; as well, the Zamba gets much more space than its companion with a high tessitura before a more solid and racy concluding section. Possibly I picked the turn from Plena to Bomba in the third Aqua du centre when the distribution of labour changed from right hand decoration over a mid-level melodic mass to the reverse; an alteration in texture more than a split.

Something similar came across in Rouge de l’est where the Toque de Sao Bento Grande led by way of a cadenza-like series of rising gruppetti into the Samba Partido Alto which glittered at the piano’s top reaches while the Toque had made much of the instrument’s low-to-middle register. Finally, the Blanc du nord makes a simple rhythmic shift from a 6/8 Bembe to a Guaguanco in 2/2 (albeit a fast and complicated one). Throughout, you hear traces of dance patterns but never anything as blatant as a heavily accented series of consecutive bars. But these short pieces are expertly written and articulated with a ringing clarity.

Pollard takes his impetus from blues and funk, with a rhythmic infusion from Taiko drumming. Well, the first is present in some chords from Abe’s violin, the funk in this case is irregular rock and its manifold repetitions of melodic, harmonic and dynamic patterns, and the Japanese element escapes me because my experiences with this form have been formed by occasional visits to Melbourne from Sydney’s Ian Cleworth and his Taikoz ensemble and those nights featured your normal range of time-signatures, not the jumpy quaver alterations of Pollard’s opening and closing pages – 7/8, 5/8, 3/8. 4/8 – surrounding a soft, placid middle. The composer suggests that he is beating out your usual systems of performance into new (possibly flattened) shapes. It’s vehement enough and the performers seem to be in sync throughout; whether you’re experiencing alternative modes of communication depends on your musical knowledge, I’d guess. Admire the players, sure, but the music-making doesn’t strike me as living up to its aspirations.

Pertout’s second work seems redundant in its title; as far as I recollect, a rishi is a saint. Whatever the definitional problems, Pertout has moved into another cultural world, albeit one closer to this country than the Americas. His one-movement composition was tailored for the talents of Barker and Harvey, who both get off to a frenetic, pattering start in a specific Indian tala before graduating to others. Both instruments begin with a repeated A that slowly moves out semi-tonally, a system that is further complicated by the prepared nature of the keyboard and a percussive rattling that I imagine is not generated inside the instrument but achieved with a stick. 

About a quarter in, and the percussively insistent rhythmic pulse changes to a slower and more meditative ambience, the cello providing the supporting rhythmic one-note pulse while the piano explores its topmost notes.  If you had the patience/energy, you could follow the composer’s employment of three variants to the triputa tala, but I find it hard to separate one grouping’s start from another. Further change brings us to a rapid, descending scale pattern, delivered almost at the pace of the opening, leading to an amalgam of the descending scale-mode and the percussive tapping of the work’s first section. I believe we end with the repeated A that kicked off the score, this time more ‘friendly’ as the players frisk around with interlocking scale patterns.

I appreciate Pertout’s energetic disposition of his material, as well as the vivacity with which Barker and Harvey address their work. Very few Australian composers have attempted to incorporate the intricacies of Carnatic rhythms into their own creativity, many of those extra-national writers from the 1960s on looking to easier fields like the Japanese or Indonesian musical languages – not to the mention Australian Aboriginal sounds which have been confined to the textural rather than the rhythmic. Kudos to Pertout for the incursion, then, and a final observation that his rishis must have effervescent minds and bodies if this piece is intended to depict their physical-philosophic status.

Niedermair takes easy options in Purcell’s well-known aria, mainly with breathing where short phrases feature some unexpected breaks. He and Harvy take their time over the bar 13-14 setting of ‘eas’d’ and bars 35-36 where ‘all, all’ seems to be heading for a full-stop. As well, the last 8-note vocal line is taken over by the piano, possibly for dramatic reasons. The singer’s voice is amiable and breathy, not urging itself to take on too many of the song’s high notes, hence worthy to stand alongside Sting’s readings of Dowland.

When it comes to the Wolf song, we enter new ground. Niedermair starts alone, without the two-bar piano prelude, and with no reference to the original vocal line’s sliding semitones but with a freedom of rhythm that would have surprised the composer.  Harvey joins in at bar 7 and interpolates some extra bars through the central strophes, presumably to give the singer time to collect himself. At the final reprise, Lass. o Welt, the piano moves into its upper reaches and contributes a skeletal support until the final bar which is left to the singer alone. Here again, the approach is cabaret; lieder aficionados get no comfort here.

Oddest of all is the Bach Mass segment where Niedermair moves into falsetto voice, giving a fairly decent representation of the alto solo that opens the Agnus Dei. He abandons the vocal line at one stage to recite some of Poe’s narrative; later, he takes advantage of the mid-movement caesura to give us Poe unaccompanied, then resumes the aria, Harvey filling in the vocal and instrumental lines as he sees fit, and speeding up the pace to disrupt the reverential nature of the original – which would be in the nature of the drama being presented, you’d expect. Niedermair comes across with much more vocal security than anticipated in his artificial production mode – on pitch and generally faithful to Bach’s melodic contours.

Last comes Vici’s three movement sonata, the disc’s longest entity. In her first movement – Fantasie. Adagio misterioso – the greater part is taken up with a powerful flurry in a harmonic vocabulary that suggests Scriabin, even if the material sounds more diffuse than that of the Russian. Harvey is a magniloquent apologist for these powerful, virtuosic pages, staying within the composer’s later Romantic dynamic range and presenting a vibrant interpretation, subduing his attack for the concluding slow segment which reverts to a language that is essentially tonal, if with dissonant accretions. Vici works on a large canvas here, the executant stretched although Harvey sounds as if he’s coping with impressive command.

A short Allegretto con grazia follows, taking the shape of a minuet-and-trio movement with a wry humour underpinning its progress.  These pages are reminiscent of many another reversion to Classical forms, in this case illuminated by a sophisticated harmonic array – loaded with contradictions to its melodic simplicity but made quietly appealing thanks to Harvey’s balanced treatment. 

For this pianist, Vici’s finale – Toccata. Allegro vivace – is an ideal vehicle, reminiscent in some ways of Harvey’s own compositions. The movement is episodic, time taken out for placid oases in between pages of driving energy and insistence. Parts of the more virtuosic pages are engrossing, as at the harnessed freneticism of the opening where the composer seems to be balancing three levels at once. Further, the piece takes on characteristics of every toccata you’ve heard – from Buxtehude’s alternations to Khachaturian’s inexorable drive with a dollop of Bartok’s Allegro barbaro in the mix.  As with the sonata’s other segments, a prime tonality obtains, supporting a wealth of action but Vici’s is an individual voice, if one whose career and characteristics remain elusive.

NIGHT THOUGHTS

Len Vorster

Move Records MCD 647

As you’d anticipate, a lot of this disc is given to nocturnes: by Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann, Faure, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Jillian Rose Tymms, Sculthorpe, Satie, Poulenc, Michael Easton and Leonid Desyatnikov. The other five tracks – by Bloch, Hindemith, Duparc, Peter Klatzow and Copland – use ‘night’ in their titles, not least the American whose work gives this CD its title. Just as importantly, the content has a general tendency to be slow-moving and ruminative, thereby giving rise to a generalization or six about music for the night coming from less joyful reaches of the compositional mind, if not downright depressing ones.

Vorster opens his recital with Bloch’s In the Night – A Love-Poem, an effusion from 1922 which comes in the rare key of A flat minor, even if it ends in the more erotically self-supportive A flat Major. This is a fluent effusion, bearing traces of impressionism, mysticism and a hint of exoticism, all calibrated with care by Vorster who observes every accent and expression marking to produce a gem both brooding and passionate. No 4 in Tchaikovsky’s Op. 19 Six Pieces of 1973 is a gentle C sharp minor Nocturne with a simple ternary shape, its coda based on the middle Piu mosso material; it has the requisite melancholy and enjoys a fluent expounding with plenty of rubato and a fetching recapitulation section where the melody shifts to the left hand and the upper part decorates with that slight intrusiveness typical of this masterful composer.

Clara Schumann produced a notturno as the second of her six Soirees musicales, written and published in 1836. V orster treats this with much the same latitude as he did the preceding Tchaikovsky, and with a similarly lavish use of the sustaining pedal. In this piece’s reprise, the main theme is kept in the right hand but transformed into a more ardent character. As well, the composer’s harmonic progressions intrigue momentarily, even if nowhere near as much as those of her husband. Faure’s Op. 104, composed just before World War I, comprises two pieces: a nocturne in F sharp minor and a barcarolle in A minor; Vorster presents the first, which is probably just as well because the alternative is oddly garrulous. By this stage, the composer’s harmonic language had become very sophisticated and this set of pages offers a wealth of chromatic shifts, carried off with sympathy and clarity by the executant.

At this point, Vorster introduces a work by a former piano pupil, Jillian Rose Tymms. This is Silberstreif and takes its impetus from Melbourne’s lockdowns during the COVID years, the title suggesting a light at the end of the infectious tunnel. The work proposes a general restlessness, despair and a longing for the way out; what we hear is, apart from one short harmonically disjunct segment, a Mendelssohn song without words, loaded with the rippling arpeggios and scales familiar from the German composer’s salon output. I’m sure it’s sincere and Vorster gives it mellifluous address but the music itself is too sweet and lacking in bite to match the times it represents.

Hindemith’s 1922. Suite fur Klavier has at its centre a Nachtstuck which bears the composer’s duality lightly. The harmonic language is tightly organized and sturdily framed; there are clear melodic shapes that are dealt with and revisited; the time signature (non-existent, really) stays at a pretty constant 3/2 (or 6/4, if you like); and the ternary structure features a sparkling central section to contrast with the framing more sombre pages, the dynamic climax reserved until bars 80 to 83 in a piece that lasts for only 97 of them. Vorster works through its three pages with a calm flexibility that belie Hindemith’s reputation for academicism.

Aux etoiles by Duparc either refers to the first part of Poeme nocturne, an orchestral triptych of 1878 of which this first section only survives, or (more likely) it’s the 1910 piano solo, orchestrated in the following year. This is an honest piece of atmospherics which opens and ends in C Major but moves to odd places in its long centre, which involves a not-very-convincing return to the tonic 15 bars from the end. It’s subtitled as an entr’acte pour un drame inedit; a slow-moving hiatus in the projected work, then. A brace of lines from Verlaine about a willow reflected in a pond preface the Notturno of Charles Tomlinson Griffes as we lurch to America for a while. This 1915 composition, the middle one of three Fantasy Pieces, is a cousin to Duparc’s starry vision, albeit one with richer chord structures and a plethora of rhythmic variations. Its rich-textured mixture of languor and virtuosity suits Vorster’s interpretative skills most adroitly.

A little touch of Sculthorpe in the night with the Tasmanian-born composer’s Nocturne – Seascape, a piece of plangent romantic/impressionist charm in E flat Major, all 1′ 57″ of it and with a free-flowing charm from the 19-year-old fledgling composer, still occupied with his European forebears. Satie’s Nocturne No. 1 precedes four others from 1919 and moves past with a reassuring placidity. My only gripe with Vorster’s reading of this slightly curious piece is his tendency to pause before changes in register, e.g. bars, 3,4,5 and 6. I felt more assured during the central Un peu plus lent qu’au debut break. Poulenc follows with his Nocturne No. 4, Bal fantome, from the 1929 set of eight. This also is not long – 1’29” – and stands as a waltz falling into four-bar clauses with muted harmonic spice to ginger up its C Major basis.

Michael Easton, an Australian-British colleague of Vorster who died in 2004 (can it be so long?!), appears next with the second movement of his 1993 Flute Sonata, appropriately entitled Nocturne. Transcribed by Vorster, this begins as a slow waltz, changes to a 2/4 rhythm and ends (more or less) in 6/8. It rambles very pleasantly, but not aimlessly and the arrangement has many picturesque touches to leaven the top-line/bass support that emerges in the piece’s middle pages. The Nocturne from Giselle’s Mania forms part of a film score written by Leonid Desyatnikov, the scenario concerning the ballerina Olga Spessivtseva who suffered mental breakdowns in 1934 and 1937. The music makes much of a cell comprising a rising minor 6th followed by a falling minor 2nd, altered to a Major 2nd near the end. This also meanders in a post-Rachmaninov way with some ardent flashes surging out of a melancholy, if not depressing, soundscape.

One of Vorster’s teachers at the University of Cape Town, Peter Klatzow, composed his four-movement Moments of Night in 1968, revising it in 1982. Vorster presents the last work in the suite which is an intriguing night-scape, gifted with a soft sparkle and following a broad, mobile path through a set of concise melodic cells that emerge and disappear sotto voce.

Last comes the CD’s longest track: Copland’s Night Thoughts (Homage to Ives), the composer adding his sub-title to give no grounds to his friends, neighbours, critics, decriers and the whole profanum volgus of commenting on the piece’s occasional similarities to Ives (and, even then, most of Copland’s cluster-bombs are tame compared to those from the older composer – you don’t need to go further than the second bar of Emerson in the Concord Sonata, let alone bars 6 and 7, to see the difference). Written for an American piano competition in 1973, the entrants were required to read the work at sight.

Not that the task is impossibly hard, as it would be to sight-read an Ives piece, say. The work is slowly paced, loaded with accidentals and rapid arpeggiated ornamentation. Even when the composer moves to four staves, the complex is easy to read and deliver. What the actual thoughts are remains open to each listener, but the work is not programmatic like Central Park in the Dark (particularly the opening); if anything, the suggestions are of long-held resonances (bells?), if discordant ones – albeit this night is full of more surprises than most. For all that, Vorster’s reading is firm and dynamically balanced – far more so, I’d suggest, than anything coming from those 1973 sight-readers, but that’s what you’d expect.

Copland’s work acts as a kind of capstone to this CD. It’s the most contemporary work of the whole 15, expressed in a language that is well removed from the smooth sweetness of many among its companions. If it offers more food for thought than bagatelles like the Duparc, Tchaikovsky or Poulenc pieces, Night Thoughts reminds us of serious music’s potential for spartan, aggressive gravity of utterance. For me, it concludes Vorster’s compendium with a quiet assertiveness – not exactly putting its predecessors on a shelf but relegating them to secondary status, no matter how expressive and circumspect they may be in their emotional and technical content.

OVER UNDER

Luke Severn, Evan Fein

Move Records MCD 611

This disc comes out of a long-term, long-distance relationship between Australian cellist/conductor Severn and American pianist/composer Fein. A marriage of two aesthetics has apparently come about here and the musicians have a fairly well-established performance history (USA in 2019, Australia in 2022) from which comes one of the two works recorded here: Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor. Following the California/New York accounts of Fein’s first Cello Sonata, they’ve set down here the other constituent of their Melbourne/Bendigo/Frankston recitals: Fein’s second essay in the form.

And that’s all there is: 28′ 55″ for the Fein, 28′ 34″ for the Brahms; near-equivalent in temporal terms. But, while you can admire the American’s work for its coherence and bursts of brilliant writing, its thunder is stolen by the Brahms reading which is distinctive in its vision and delivery. Which is the chief problem with this pairing: much as you’d like to find high merit in the Fein, the other outclasses it, to the extent that you wonder why the composer didn’t think to give his work a less striking companion.

The modern work is in four movements: Serene, warm; Redemptive, resonant; Molto scherzando; Lively, playful. It begins with a simple rising two-note cell in the cello that expands on itself. Straight away we’re in a benign atmosphere of something approaching hymn music, broadening to a firm declamation couched in a harmony that Brahms would have found comfortable, if eccentric. Then the work seems to meander into an episode rich in piano triplets, shared with the cello, and a development that moves into new material, both instruments in a close interface.

Once again, the declamation arises and we’re in late Romantic territory – both firmly assertive and ruminative as the opening cell recurs and the exposition’s processes are revisited. This is a music of alternating moods which, near the end, seems to see the triumph of the serene. But not so: Fein ends with a presto flourish for both players; it’s almost as though he’s providing a contrast with the placid rhythmic tenor of his movement’s procedure up till now.

When it comes to redemptive music, I’m not sure what to expect; it could be anything from the Dies irae to L’Ascension, and a world or six of religious music in between. Here, we have a slow sequence of repeated chords in the keyboard under the cello outlining a well-woven melody that stretches for some length towards a climax, that breaks off and then resumes its path with cello and piano more synchronised in their thinking, although the keyboard’s initial repetitions seem to be the spur to action. We are led to a consoling stretch of diatonic affirmation that ends up resembling a Bloch cantillation.

A sequence of common chords leads back to the opening repeated chords under the meandering string line; the same crisis, with the keyboard sustaining its support for a final mellifluously brooding semi-cadence. In these pages, the emphasis for me fell more on the resonant, the performers reaching two points of impressive suspense, as well as a brace of powerful statements that emphasized the possibilities for broad statements. For all that, the harmonic language is, in the main, orthodox; we just have to accept this mode of contemporary composition that is content with titillating the past, not building on it.

The following scherzo strikes me as far from molto, possibly hampered by a rhythmic irregularity/juxtaposition that obtains from the opening but gives way to a smooth body of play across the movement’s centre before returning to round out this simple ternary structure. The instruments are busy with some clever canonic scale descents that inevitably bring Shostakovich to mind, if without that composer’s verve and ferocity. Still, I did like the cello’s final ‘bent’-note slight portamento.

Further reminiscences come bursting in at the finale’s opening, chiefly of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the animals with the piano’s high-register tinkling while the string line follows its restrained jollity before swinging into an amiable, crowd-pleasing melody. Much of what follows appear to be variants on these two elements with some late attempts at post-impressionist harmonic adventurousness. But Fein doesn’t stray too far from well-trodden paths; just when you think he’s heading in a dissonant direction with an unexpected modulation, he hauls us back to the plain-speaking path of diatonicism. Listen to the final minute or so which is an excellent example of leading towards calm acceptance before a semi-aggressive, if defiantly positive, resolution.

I need hardly record the players’ obvious intensity and painstaking care with Fein’s score. Is either of them taxed by this music-making? Not that much, although some parts of the last two movements have their pressure-points. Yet the sonata presents as rather lightweight, for all the grandiose passages in the opening movements. Certainly, Fein has produced a highly competent work yet it doesn’t hold much that could be termed striking or original. Even its passion is tautly leashed and its appurtenances fail to catch this listener’s interest.

What follows – the Brahms sonata elucidation – is quite remarkable. In the CD liner notes, Fein observes that ‘we dare to hope that some of our bolder musical decisions allow audiences to enjoy this beloved sonata in a new light’. Well, to those of us with a long-standing affection for the piece (many thanks, Daniel Horrigan, for those hours of tolerant rehearsal), this reading offers many insights. The duo takes the first movement’s ma non troppo direction seriously; this is a stately progress through the first subject, its only defect coming through an over-amplification of the cello line. But Severn and Fein have a fine eye for the work’s inner accelerations and dynamic contrasts which make this allegro an absorbing experience, with a good deal of the commonly accepted bravado muted into the composer’s inimitable introspection. Only an odd misfired cello A in bar 18 disturbs the exposition’s accuracy, which is flawless on the repeat.

The most obvious of those interpolated accelerandi comes at bar 50 in the vehement build-up to the B minor explosion of bars 57-8. What follows is a masterful depiction of the descent to gloom across bars 74 to 77. Later, in the development, a gradual increase in tension starting at about bar 102 is accomplished by a simple consensus of dynamic heft working towards the fortissimo F minor resolution of bar 126. Further re-acquaintance with the artists’ approach comes in the recapitulation which follows a similar pattern of subtle speed and dynamic increases and subtractions, highpoints the cello’s vital high in bar 222, determines a dark-shaded coda approach from bar 235 on, and culminates in a moving processional across the movement’s final 20 bars.

Severn and Fein hit on the ideal approach to Brahms’ Allegretto. It is given a minuet’s lilt in the outer sections, Fein picking and choosing which staccato directions he’ll observe (all of them in the opening bars, more selective in the left hand of the second half in this section [bars 16 to 27]). Adding to this excellent clarity of delivery, the central trio from Fein is clog-free with a welcome lack of glutinous pedaling, despite the direction to sustain from bar 79 in my old Breitkopf & Hartel edition. This helps give the movement a kind of unity, ensuring a continuity of output, even if the minuet’s return still piques because of the absence of its trio’s continuous two-semiquaver-plus-quaver pattern from the keyboard and a reversion to ye old-fashioned rustic courtliness.

To end, Brahms starts out a fugue, but it doesn’t sustain its formal characteristics. Fein states the subject with plenty of detached notes; not quite abrupt enough to come under a staccato heading and still maintaining a melodic contour. And the first climacteric at bars 24 to 25 is a true Brahmsian welter, if one where the instruments maintain audibility and their lines carry distinctly right through the interleaving of lines up to bar 53’s light relief and the rubato brought into play at bar 61 where dance wins out; the same gentle hesitation that the duo employed in the previous movement’s trio. I was struck by an odd tuning error from Severn on the B in bar 72, and a Fein slip in the C minor triad of bar 93. But almost immediately, the lack of brutal teeth-marks in the closely-argued mesh from bars 115 to 123 merits strong approval for its communication of polyphonic stress rather than instrumental effort.

If Severn and Fein come close to your traditional Brahms thickness round the waist, it’s in the final pages from bar 152 and through the coda Piu presto which is, compared to the rest of the interpretation, thunderous and virtuosic in the best sense of serving the score through craft. It brings this reading to a highly satisfying consummation. In the end, it realizes that declared intention of shedding ‘a new light’ on the score which here takes on an unexpected transparency in its instrumental interplay and a welcome immediacy due to an enlightened approach to dynamic levels and care in sound production.

BACH PIANO 2

Judith Lambden

Move Records MCD 653

For the first of her Bach CDs for Move, released in 2021, Lambden presented four of the toccatas, the Italian Concerto, and the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue: a deft combination of the present-but-unexplored alongside two familiar scores. Something of the same combination obtains in this latest offering which comprises five works. Those that have general currency are the French Overture BWV 831 and the Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother BWV 992. As for the arcana – well, I have barely encountered them – they begin with the Overture in F Major BWV 820, move to the Aria variata alla maniera italiana BWV 989, and wind up in the perplexing Fantasia and Fugue in A minor BWV 944.

Unlike a few recent publications on this label, Lambden’s CD runs a substantial length at 76 minutes (actually, adding up the individual tracks, I believe that it comes in closer to 79); nearly 33 of these are taken up with the first eight tracks: the French Overture, or Overture in the French style which is the longest suite in Bach’s keyboard catalogue. Immediately, you can see that this offering is a continuation of the pianist’s 2021 disc; there’s an authority at work but the performance is not a perfectly bland surface with everything in its allotted place. You can hear patches – no, seconds – of unevenness: glossed over notes in brief runs during the Ouverture‘s stately preamble (e.g., second time through, last three right-hand notes of bar 14), a slight slowing down as the voices accrete in the 6/8 fugal-gigue that follows.

And there are also interpolated passages of play that deliberately slow down the rhythmic inevitability beloved of contemporary performers who operate their Bach craft with metronomic regularity. You can hear plenty of examples in Lambden’s progress through this marvel, as at halfway through bar 85 when she simply changes gears, or the slight accelerations that push the envelope, like in bar 115 and beyond. The return of the stately opening impresses as more individual and imaginative with a more free approach to metrical regularity. I don’t want to complain too much but the executant refrains from repeating bars 20 to 163; yes, it’s exhausting for the pianist but there are so many linear delights to be savoured in these pages.

Still, this suit-yourself approach is everywhere in the following Courante which is packed with small pauses throughout, in both hands. The fluency is hard to cotton on to until the first half’s repeat where you learn to make adjustments for the piece’s occasionally fitful outline. During the Gavotte I‘s left-hand semiquaver groupings, you can detect some notes being articulated unevenly the first time round. on the return, nothing is out of place, each group sounding true and clear. Lambden treats the pair of Passepieds with a similar studied nonchalance which results in a certain amount of latitude with ornaments, as the start of bar 28 on each of its three appearances.

But there’s something to be said for this room-space. For sure, when the musician is taking time to insert acciaccature, mordents and appoggiature, you won’t be able to dance this suite with absolute certainty; but is Bach writing for potential footloose and fancy-free Leipzigers, or just using the form? The latter, of course., so Lambden is quite at liberty to pause where she sees a hiatus point, or – consoling the dodgy pianists among us – where the going gets a tad tough. I’ve got nothing but praise for the mobile Sarabande which is given without exaggerated gravity, notably in the thick (relatively) chords of bars 24 and 25.

The Bourrees enjoy direct treatment, especially the first where the opening detached note approach rouses us from a bucolic torpor. Still, there is the occasional missed (or misfired, probably) note and the slight ritardandi in Bourree II puzzle more than please. The Gigue that follows is handled with excellent calm; nothing is hammered in this chaste framework and the outlook is almost placid, even if a few (two?) notes go missing in the little bursts of semi-scalar fioriture/demi-semiquavers. Finally, the Echo swaggers past amiably, my only problem Lambden’s lengthening some of the bass quavers (bars 22 to 25, then bars 54 to 57) which brings to mind, in a small way, Busoni’s Bach transcription exaggerations.

This large-scale work is followed by a small relative in the BWV 820. Its short Ouverture is packed with ornaments in its opening 13 bars, a few of them wisely omitted here. Then the 3/8 burst into fugato energy comes across with quiet security that is rarely ruffled – although I’m coming round to thinking that those short breathing-spaces (scarcely that, in fact) are Lambden’s system of punctuating the work’s thrust, avoiding the Tic-toc-choc metallic assembly-line approach. In the Entree, this player introduces a great many more dotted quaver-semiquaver patterns than occur in my admittedly antique Breitkopf und Hartel score. Nevertheless, here the slow march holds the right Charpentier strut in its slight two-part sinews.

Not much to report about the Menuet-plus-Trio, Bourree or Gigue. As with the post-Ouverture dances in the BWV 831, Lambden observes every repeat faithfully, offering a piano repeat on the odd occasion but for the most part retaining those ornaments that she introduces first time through. Mind you, these three dance movements are brief and lacking in digital complications; Lambden’s slight rhythmic relaxations prove handy enough in adding some quirkiness to what are simple and internally repetitive structures.

Some desperates have been pointing to the Capriccio as one of the first examples of tone-poem narrative in Western music. Not really: it had plenty of choral and instrumental antecedents. But its brief pages hold some moving emotional content, especially in the Friends, Dangers, Lament and Farewell segments, Lambden making affecting work of the first, third and fourth of these scenes while somehow suggesting the Goldbergs‘ penultimate Quodlibet in the angular second. Especially honest is the melancholy character realized in the Lament mini-passacaglia, and the well-there-he-goes stolidity of the brief Abschied.

About the two concluding Postilion movements, I’m not so sure. There’s nothing urgent about the Aria which doesn’t propose a speedy journey but more of a leisurely jog as the octave jumps that are intended to imitate the driver’s instrument have no bite or energy. The Fugue would have gained from a more rapid tempo and a good deal more energy in the thicker meshes (bars 27 to 38, for example; even bars 45 to 47). Still, Lambden works through this last with careful craft, making as much as possible from one of the least satisfying final bars in the composer’s output.

Once again, the performer indulges in more hesitations and pauses while she works through the Aria variata’s unremarkable arches, laden on during the repeats with ornaments delineated in my edition. It sets up a ruminative atmosphere which is probably for the best with this undistinguished material. The trouble is that few of the following 10 variations have much to delight in them, but more an unusual number of disappointments, like Variation 2 with its going-nowhere triplets (bars 5 and 6); ditto Variation 3‘s bar 7; the aimless right-hand repetitions of shape and actual notes across Variation 5. In fact, it seems that inspiration flagged pretty consistently in the third bar of each variation’s second part. So much so, that it’s a relief to get back to the Aria‘s paraphrase in the final Variation 10.

It seems to me that Lambden is not really challenged by this work, its twists and turns rarely unpredictable – on a par with the preceding Capriccio. But her reading is composed and undemonstrative, the strands well balanced and distinctive, if some of the phrasing shapes sound a tad contrived and the short suspension of action for the sake of a grace note starts to grate in the repeats. Speaking of which, the second part of Variation 9 is not played again: a shock in continuity as every other part of this work is given a second run-through.

To end, we are offered the BWV 944, which opens with a fantasia that you improvise yourself on a series of 18-and-a-half chords, with the between-staves interpolation ‘Arpeggio’. Some publications spell it out with arpeggios travelling from one hand to the other; Lambden goes the same route but arpeggiates in contrary motion simultaneously. Nothing unusual in that, although it’s a rather ordinary way of negotiating the problem. Still, you can go a long way before you find somebody with an original take on these 10 bars, e.g. not just splaying out the chords or maintaining their written range.

The fugue opens bravely and confidently but the arrival of the third voice in bar 18 sees some initial fumbling and, by the time we get all bass-operative at bar 38, the pace has slowed, only to pick up a little further on. Also, the executant seems to slow down to accommodate a cadential trill too often for comfort. She finds the going tough from about bar 106 on to the bass pedal B that lasts for 4-and-two-third bars at the work’s centre; the polyphonic interplay here sounds laboured – which it is but it shouldn’t come across that way.

Near the end, the spirit of Liszt/Busoni takes over and there is a pronounced acceleration from about 19 bars before the conclusion, the dynamic level moves into a near fortissimo level, and the approach to the fugue’s concluding bars smacks of the grandiose. Mind you, the player can hardly be blamed for a touch of triumphalism after this active, long web of fabric. It makes for an unexpectedly assertive last word to this disc that is for the greater part characterized by restraint and a pliant, relaxed approach to rhythmic regularity. These offerings bring together an interesting range of works – from the highly demanding to the simple – and reinforce Lambden’s standing as a sincere and informed interpreter of Bach’s keyboard catalogue.

TANGO FANTASY

Ken Herrera

Move Records MCD 649

The composer/pianist presents four of his works on this disc: two short isolated pieces, and a pair of collections, finishing with the five-movement, 33-minute-long Tango Fantasy. Herrera studied piano at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, then moved into composition. He appears to be self-taught in this latter field and – unfortunately – it shows. You’re not getting many contemporary sounds here; Herrera is content to manipulate a harmonic vocabulary of rudimentary proportions and his professed devotion to the tango is not persuasive when it comes to putting that particular dance into his own language,

For instance, the opening Tango Waltz begins with some flourishes that might suggest a tango but, 30 seconds in, the piece has settled into a 3/4 rhythm. Following this straightforward move to waltz-time, Herrera doesn’t move out of it. Furthermore, the melodic content is rather wayward; sure, there are repetitions of his basic tune, punctuated by episodes that have little relation to anything but themselves. Apart from a well-pedalled scale eruption about two-thirds of the way through, there’s not much here to raise expectations of virtuosity; some flourishes are welcome but the 2018 piece is couched in a pre-Nino Rota/Fellini atmospheric without the original’s spartan melancholy.

Pairing up with this waltz is the album’s other brevity, Herrera’s Third Nocturne from 2012 which aims to suggest a Latin American night spot complete with its atmosphere-establishing piano in a blending of bossa nova and blues. Well, you get the first-mentioned’s rhythm, all right – it obtains throughout – but the blues consists of some predictable chords and not much besides. Our nocturne isn’t in the Field/Chopin line but more along the lines of something you might hear at a cocktail bar; sadly, not one where you’re tempted to tip the pianist. As with the waltz, the piece sounds aimless in its right hand which wanders at its own sweet will in a chain of 7th chords and tinklings.

Herrera’s first major construct is a Suite dating from 2013. The inspiration comes from Bach – a laudable aspiration, although the shape of the collection puts it closer to Grieg’s Holberg or even the Karelia of Sibelius although its four elements are given non-suggestive tempo titles: Allegro, Allegro, Andantino, Presto. The first is proposed as an introductory toccata but the only shadow of that form comes close to the end in a quasi-improvisatory passage that recalls some of the foibles of Sweelinck. For the most part, it proceeds like a fitful study with left-hand cross-overs for excitement, building to a loud highpoint rather early in proceedings but, like a Buxtehude toccata,. owning several sections.

At the end of this opening, you’re also left with several questions about the movement’s harmonic shape which tends to follow a predictable path, if sometimes an ungainly one because it veers off from its own patterns more than little self-consciously. We’re in much more solid Bach territory with the second Allegro which begins like one of the Inventions but lacks the rigour to follow a simple contrapuntal matrix, the left-hand settling into a bass role where you expected a mirroring of the initial statement. Progress is sometimes quirky, but not in an adventurous way – for instance, a sequential pattern is held up for a moment when a repetition is interpolated so that you’re left feeling unbalanced when the sequence is resumed. Later, when the left hand gets hold of the initial line, the treble provides a functional harmonic accompaniment rather than a complement. At about the 1’30” point, we enter a new world of repeated chords for a moment, returning almost instantly to the suggested/unrealized linear interplay of the opening.

Herrera sees this as a lively dance movement; to me, it’s more in the nature of a march in that I can’t see any potential choreography beyond a military stamp. When it comes to the obligatory slow movement, we are offered an Andantino that opens with a simple old-fashioned melody, followed by a series of episodes that numb with their predictability in terms of shape and modulations. Added to which, the composer reaches some points where inspiration is at a premium and we experience a good deal of repetition and note-spinning, e.g. at about the 3′ 50″ mark and at 5′ 00″. An abruptly determined conclusion sits at odds with the placid opening; it’s as though the writer has turned semi-aggressive and avoided a tempering of his mood.

When we reach the Presto, Herrera points to the gigue conclusions to Bach keyboard suites and proposes a further historical reach by wanting to summon up the Irish jig spirit as well. He opens bravely, with a flourish that hints at Litolff’s Concerto Symphonique No. 4 Scherzo before we reach a melody peppered with hemiolas. Before long, the jig has turned into a momentary waltz, then coming back to jig with some slight suggestions of a blues chord or two. A descent to the bass register moves us back into the land of the totally expectable, followed by a rise in alt – and we’re back to Litolff, albeit rather laboured. A chromatic rise brings us to a reprise of the opening material, and a soft-dynamic ending with preparatory booming bass and ornamental sextuplets on top.

This is the most effective of the suite’s movements, mainly because of its energy and occasional charm, yet it still leaves an impression of beating the bounds through interludes – to the point where the exercise sounds like a disjunct rondo.

But there’s more. Herrera’s final offering is the 2016 Tango Fantasy in five movements that begins with a solid Andante – Allegro – Allegretto – Presto sequence. The opening is a sort of recitative, beginning with a single line that acquires another as well as some gruff bass burps before reaching for some chord chains that would have satisfied more if the composer had been more severely self-critical, giving coherence to his modulations and animating the piece by using his instrument’s outer reaches with some purpose.

The remaining three sections are all tangos, taken at various speeds, the fourth being something of a recapitulation of the second although the pace doesn’t justify the Presto label. I found it difficult to detect how the Allegretto was related to anything else, although it opened in a quasi-improvisatory manner that suggested the piece’s first pages/bars. But a great deal of territory is covered by the fantasy nomenclature, so – as with Chopin and Schumann – you just have to go with the prevailing flow. We now come to a Vals – Allegro vivo which follows a similar Rota-type insouciance as we heard in the opening Tango Waltz; the main tune opens deftly enough but fails to live up to its promise with a rather aimless consequent to its initial statement. Here the intention is clearly to spike up the piece’s orthodox harmonic scheme with some wrong-note interpolations. That might have come off if the overwhelming tenor of the movement was not so traditional at its many harmonic fulcrum points. Added to this, some of the movement’ phrases didn’t balance; and you’d be working hard to find much vivo in these pages.

Now attention turns to the Milonga, the tango’s precursor; this movement is also set up as a Presto, which it isn’t. Here is a harmonically orthodox dance with some traces of the habanera’s triplets and at least four passages of fortissimo writing that come straight from the Lisztian handbook of virtuosity if not as dynamically sustained or as digitally taxing as in the Hungarian master’s workplace. An Andantino opens questioningly but follows an inchoate path, taking its time before settling into a languorous tango, then seeming to doodle a melodic path leading in no particular direction. In fact, this whole movement struck me as aimless if centred on a minor tonality (G?) – as is so much of the music on this CD – before a concluding over-emphasized tierce de Picardie.

at the start of the concluding Presto, Herrera introduces a key motif of five consecutive semiquavers rattled out like automatic fire before moving into a Piazzolla-reminiscent melody that gives a format to this rondo-tango which comes equipped with a substantial coda. Again, I’d question the tempo direction which, to my ear, sounds in actuality more like a tempo di marcia. But the real problem comes not from the piece’s impetus, which is well-sustained, but from the diffuse nature of its harmonic ramblings which lead into some thorny thickets before moving back into diatonic safety.

Nothing wrong with being a tango tragic. Never forget that splendid man-of-letters Clive James and his installation of a special room in which he could practise this specific dance: that’s enthusiasm. But, for a composer, you have to add something original to a field that boasts the riches of Albeniz in D, Por una cabeza, La Cumparsita, Besame mucho, and even Libertango. This CD is the work of a talent that appears devoted to this specific form but his output needs more focus, not to mention more sophistication.

TREING TO REMEMBER WHAT I CHOSE TO FORGET

Trish Dean, Graeme Jennings, Alex Raineri

Move Records MCD 642

Yet another compositional voice that has passed me by, Millward is best known for his collaborations with film makers and stage artists, although chamber music is a respectable element in his catalogued output. His language runs to the jazz/popular/sonic art vocabularies and his performances seem to tend to pre-recorded. In fact, much of his work has been recorded on three CDs, including a piano works collection by Sally Mays. Matters are further complicated by several works being sub-sets or spin-offs from larger constructs; it’s an instance of cross-transference, something like trying to chart Sculthorpe’s string quartets.

Still, this recording is Millward’s first for Move Records and it features three exceptional musicians. Despite the suggestive titles – Trying to Remember What I Chose to Forget; Contact – Connect – Tracer; Sadness to Madness – all three of the works presented are good old-fashioned duo sonatas. Pianist Alex Raineri is the constant thread in all three works; violinist Graeme Jennings performs the 2019 violin sonata (Trying to Remember . . . ), then tries his viola hand at the second (Connect etc.), written in 2021; Ensemble Q’s Trish Dean manages the two-movement cello sonata which came to fruition last year.

To begin, I’m having trouble with the composer’s CD title which applies not just to the violin sonata but also to the other two works. In essence, Millward is facing us with sounds that he has in his memory as well as sounds that he has chosen to obliterate from his memory – which is a mental tour de force that you confront at your peril. What is being proposed is a scouring confrontation with the self where you easily take into account the positive facets of your personality/identity, at the same time as facing up to events or characteristics that cast you in a less-than-flattering light. Further, Millward proposes that this admission of the traits we decide to eliminate isn’t just a personal failure but a cultural one.

I don’t think any of us would have an argument with this last projection. You only have to look at any arguments against the Voice to encounter a world of unconscious admissions of cultural failure – obvious time-honoured maltreatment dismissed in favour of self-righteousness, led by a character who seizes on Farnham’s words, ‘try and understand it’ while missing the relevance, inherited from his former career, of the lines, ‘How long can we look at each other/Down the barrel of a gun?’ So Millward has concerns with an unassailable truth: we do choose to forget – what we find uncomfortable, unpleasant, unconscionable.

How this translates into his music remains a mystery that could only be solved by a psychological journey into his compositional practice, an analysis separating the wheat from the one-time tares. But then you’re faced with discerning what the composer wants to use as material, has always wanted to use, and presents – but alongside or in between other compositional matter that has been ignored quite consciously and can now be recalled! It’s an intriguing double-take but I fear many of us won’t rise to Millward’s expectations, content in our intellectual sloth to take his work as a composite – that is, if we aren’t being confronted by an entire creative swathe that involves the formerly-repressed rising to the surface intact: not alongside, but instead of the consciously accepted inspiration for the composer’s products.

The CD’s title work opens with Partial Reflection in which Raineri’s part dominates for its block chords while Jennings presents a Hindemith-like strong, if meandering line. The contrapuntal interplay between both instruments is occasionally intense in its tautness but then gives place to some lyrically soaring flights for the string player, especially towards the movement’s conclusion while Raineri proposes an atmospherically varied backdrop. A meditative break follows in Memoire Omissions where an unhappy nocturne finds cells repeated, extended, varied, shared with sudden patches of orthodox harmony penetrating the atonal texture that dominates proceedings. A sudden burst into action from both players heightens the outward tension before a return to the opening’s melancholy reserve and a few aggressive concluding bars.

Which take us through an attacca into the final Tangled Tango. About a minute of violin cadenza reminiscent of Tzigane precedes Raineri’s entry into the partnership before the work’s progress becomes a sort of tango, if one that you wouldn’t have much luck dancing. After a dynamic climax/collapse, the players move into a tranquil zone that eventually takes up the tango rhythm en clair about 2/3rds of the way through before becoming a rather strident exercise in opposing and complementary ejaculations. A return to the tango prefaces a menacing conclusion on a looped phrase that suddenly cuts itself short. For sure, the tango (which bears an odd similarity to a polonaise at certain spots) is a miscellany of sectionalized inventiveness; as with its predecessors, I find it hard to trace the elements or to appreciate what Millward is doing with them. Adding to the unsettling character of this work, Jennings sounds under-miked in the opening movement, a second-stringer to the piano’s aggression.

On to the slightly longer (9 seconds) viola sonata and we seem to have landed in more immediately digestible territory with Raineri outlining a steady quaver pattern rather like an Alberti bass, the viola giving us a lean, meandering melodic line. Both instruments work into an angular duet that follows a steady pulse and into a well-integrated partnership. A change of mood actually means a change of output and emotional prospects with some savage double-stopping for the viola and a willful piano percussive exhibition. The closely-argued relationship of the first section is here a more frantic creature: the quaver pattern persists but much more explosively and fiercely. There is no relief: the pressure is maintained and the movement ends abruptly.

So why call it Contact? Possibly because of the duelling brought into play, both instruments intertwining but also exploding against each other’s activity. Further, the juxtaposition of moderate and rapid tempi exposes a dual arena of sorts in which the tactile scenario is pursued consistently, if under two different guises. It’s a more placid scene in the following Connect, the amiable soundscape a throwback to English impressionism. Where the viola weaves another generously lyrical line, the keyboard ranges across its compass in support as well as shifting backgrounds. The whole piece reminds me of Cyril Scott’s Lotus Land – which is probably being a bit unfair to both writers. But they share a kind of directed languor, relieved by an occasional spurt of temperament.

As for the concluding Tracer pages, I can only conclude that this refers to one instrument following the other’s path. From the opening, Raineri sets the pace while Jennings punctuates with decorative interpolations that distract from the somewhat steady keyboard progress. Then the roles are reversed and the movement soldiers on, like a hard-worked sample of kammermusik. Eventually, the moto perpetuo aspect dies off for a terse viola cadenza, before we return to the same patterns as the opening and the sonata ends on a question mark, like Petrushka.

Mind you, I could have this all wrong and Millward could be following a quasi-military inspiration; the contact-connect-tracer sequence might have something to do with warfare. But I doubt it; whatever the tracer suggestion, I don’t think it refers to bullets. Without a score, it’s impossible to discern the parallel contours (if there are any) of both instrumental lines and, while there is plenty of mimesis, it’s hard to see a continuous layering of timbres and melodies. Still, the performance is assured and clean, Jennings’ pitch invariably true and Raineri giving his part a welcome clarity, especially in the outer movements.

The cello sonata’s two movements are called, rather obviously, Sad and Mad. In the first, both performers seem to be goading each other into depression, Dean’s cello leading the way into an emphatically dour emotional landscape. Indeed, it’s a rare moment when the string voice isn’t clearly in the ascendant. A brief outburst of staccato high notes for Raineri is one of the few points of piano exposure, even if the instrument’s timbre is used deftly at either end of this movement to reinforce the cello’s low moans.

Another attacca launches us into new territory, the piano rumbling in its lowest register against a striving cello circling on itself. And suddenly we emerge into the relative light of a partnership that follows a coherent path for a few measures, only to lapse into a downward cello solo. The music takes a turn for the manic, the piano producing a chain of hand-muffled notes; followed eventually by eruptions, a high tinkling/near-harmonic that suggests mental disarrangement, if not an absence of mental control. But this is followed by a quietly balanced cello lyric, sensitively carried forward by piano chords, before the final ascent to a high sustained note that wavers (intentionally, you’d hope) into something like those woodwind multiphonics that were so popular in the 1960s.

Is this all intended to depict a crazed state with occasional facets of crisis and release? I suppose so and it’s effective in its chameleonic shifts from one phase to another and back. Certainly, it’s a fine demonstration of performance involvement from both executants who appear to be comfortable with Millward’s language and technical demands. The cello and violin sonatas share common ground, in particular a mobile dissonance that impresses for its clear sense of purpose, as opposed to the relative sweetness of the work for viola and piano. Nevertheless, the composer’s triple offering here is challenging and he is content to offer a fairly abstract set of observations to explain his field of operations; hence the diffidence of the observations above . Not a new voice, then, given the composer’s substantial academic and professional career, but one well worth knowing.

CONTRA

Contra Guitar Duo

Move Records MCD 644

IMPULSES

Hamish Strathdee

Move Records MCD 645

No sooner does Move put out one guitar duo recording than another comes hot on its heels. The Contra ensemble comprises Hamish Strathdee and Emma-Shay Gallenti-Guilfoyle, musicians who met as students 12 years ago. In this brief collaboration, they perform four works: Segovia’s slight Divertimento, an arrangement by Angelo Gilardino (the recently-deceased Italian guitarist/musicologist) of Puccini’s bagatelle for strings Crisantemi of 1890, three pieces by Australian Phillip Houghton (the first from 1976, the latter two from 1990), and Alexandre Tansman’s Variations on a Theme of Scriabin, originally a solo work written in 1972 for Segovia and here arranged for two by German guitarist Tilman Hoppstock.

Simultaneously, Strathdee has produced an EP of his own, on which he performs some works that inspired and ‘accompanied’ him across his student and professional years. These meaningful Impulses include two movements from Bach’s Keyboard Partita No. 1: the Saraband and Gigue as arranged by Hoppstock. As well, the disc contains Leo Brouwer’s 1996 Hika, In memoriam Toru Takemitsu, and a flamboyant piece of virtuosity in Napoleon Coste’s Le Depart, fantaisie dramatique Op 31 of 1856 which, like Beethoven’s sonata, also features a return.

Both CDs are rather short: Contra lasts 26’24”, Impulses 19’0″. Quality in small doses, you’d expect. And that’s the way the duo disc begins. Not that Segovia’s small-scale Divertimento makes claims to depth but these executants give it a handsome outing with a freshness of delivery – dynamic variation, linear attack (or its absence), rubato at logical points – that demonstrates a flawless confidence in each other and an affection for this F Major bagatelle. You can best read the collegiality in bars 15 and 16 when the imitations and counterpoint stop for a moment and the pair play a series of chords together – a generous balance obtaining here as it does in the piece’s four final bars which serve as a crisp chaser to the exercise.

As far as an arrangement goes, Gilardino’s work on Puccini’s Chrysanthemums shows a staid mind at work, Guitar 1 generally getting the top violin lines, Guitar 2 taking on viola and cello, although that can vary e.g. Guitar 1 taking up the cello’s bass note (F sharp in the original) across bars 57 to 62, and taking the viola part at bar 92 and beyond. As you’d expect, the piece’s fabric is necessarily changed, these performers not having the luxury of drawing out melody lines or being able to muffle accompanying semiquavers which are a feature of the middle segment starting at bar 32. Still, their treatment is consistent in its elegiac nature and takes its time negotiating the structural cracks.

The Mantis and the Moon is the first of Houghton’s Three Duets and it falls into two unequal parts, even if there are hints of a combination at the end. The opening is a march with triplet underpinning: quite brash, aggressive, with clear suggestions of the insect’s stridulations (to my over-active sensibility). This Prokofiev-style abruptness suddenly changes to a new landscape of an angular melody lying over a muted regular quaver support which stands in for a placid moonscape, with some suggestive antenna-waving in the final measures.

Lament is an elegy for one of Houghton’s friends, the composer/pianist Andrew Uren who died in 1989. The piece works as a threnody above a slow, constant bass; its atmosphere is funereal, verging on dirge-like but leavened by a strong melodic line that reaches a fierce highpoint before sinking back into the sombre inevitability of the piece’s opening. Alchemy is all movement and flashes of colour, operating over a sort of continuous undercurrent of triplets. Its 6/8 motion transforms into hemiola-like 2 crotchets in the bar at the end – a striking passage with vehement chords from both players. Houghton imagined his performers sparking off each other, the music mutating throughout – and so it does, although you can’t avoid the suggestions of the old scientific search for gold formed from disparate elements.

Finally, we’re treated to Tansman’s set of six variations on Scriabin’s 12-bar Prelude Op. 16 No. 4, originally in the recherche key of E flat minor. The Polish composer begins by moving the key to B minor (which I think Hoppstock has followed) and dividing the original between the players. I can’t see much difference from the original in the first two variations beyond a doubling of the melodic line. As well as an added richness of chording (all in keeping with Tansman) that operates throughout the longer Variation 3, the work gains from a sense of ease where the original’s responsibilities are shared.

I can only see one point in Variation 4 where the arranger adds anything beyond some doublings and transpositions down an octave, and that’s an unexpected semi-harmonic appearing at the start of bar 6; the rest moves placidly along its lento path. Again, in the Variation 5 quasi Mazurka, you can enjoy the part-writing more readily because of the division of responsibility, particularly in a page that holds a fair share of accidentals. To end, Tansman goes fugato with some close writing that threatens to progress into something full-blown – but then the contrapunctus stops in its tracks and he rounds off the piece by re-stating Scriabin’s prelude with a subtler harmonic content and the addition of a cadence-reinforcing last bar.

This is excellent work from both Gallenti-Guilfoyle and Strathdee: a sensitively structured partnership, obvious from the shared level of responsiveness, not to mention the technical balance and simultaneity on display, Not just in this Tansman, either; I doubt if Houghton’s duets have been better served by the various artists who have performed them since Tim Kain and John Williams issued their version in 1995.

MOVING to the Strathdee solo disc, his Bach sarabande is rather languorous in approach, with a few delays in getting off this dance’s pivotal second beat. Speaking of which, the second-beat chord in bar 8 has lost some of its components in this arrangement and the upward transposition of the original’s left-hand demi-semiquavers in each half’s last bar strikes me as unsatisfying. And I, for one, would have welcomed repeats! The reading of the gigue showed the player’s clarity of output and the piece avoided becoming a study – just. Strathdee repeated the first half but not the (admittedly longer) second part. I don’t know whether it was intentional but I missed the two ornaments in bars 5 and 7. In his transcription of the entire partita, Hoppstock moved the original tonality from B flat Major to D Major; a much more congenial arrangement for this instrument’s aficionados, of course.

Has Leo Brouwer incorporated any original Takemitsu strands into his elegy/eulogy? It’s hard to tell. He begins with a set of epigraphs, detached on the page and articulated as separate units by Strathdee. But, as we move into the piece, each fragment enjoys a generous variety of treatments: arches expanding or contracting by a short interpolation or its absence; flourishes of accidental chains that end in a suspended harmonic; two bursts of brief velocissimo; a central vivace providing for an abrupt volte face in personality before the initial calm resumes. Strathdee gives a vigorous account of this last but takes his time over the meditative stretches; importantly, he makes sense of this abschied‘s emotional permutations, setting up the initial framework with obvious empathy.

One authority has linked Coste’s Le depart to the Crimean War and the piece certainly has an emphatic martial quality. It’s not hard to read what you like into the piece’s progress so that, by the time you get to the concluding Le retour: marche triomphale, it’s clear that the military have been involved. Added to which, the first edition has a date for this concluding section – December 29, 1855 – by which point the war was almost over and it’s conceivable that Coste was indulging in a bit of chauvinistic self-congratulation; if the French troops (those that survived) weren’t already home, they were on their way.

Strathdee follows the piece’s narrative with an enthusiastic embrace of its emotional switches. A fulsome Andante Largo could accompany a soldier’s farewell coloured by patriotic aspirations; it’s certainly a personal, possibly sentimental statement, and framed in a positive E Major. The interpreter gives the soprano line a wealth of expressiveness, enriched by some brief inter-note glissandi/slides. Then the fireworks begin with some martial trumpet calls at an Allegro assai of 28 bars that suggests action, if rather well-organized. A brief three-quaver chord progression leads to an Andantino in B Major and an Agitato of 10 bars (the wounded followed by a final flurry before the peace is signed?), and we’re into the somewhat overlong E minor march, which continues the piece’s inspiration of serving as a brilliant display-piece for its creator – and later guitarists (a lot of them) – to display dexterity and responsiveness across this fine flower of mid-19th century Romanticism.

Le depart works well as a finale to Strathdee’s mini-recital which moves across a vast period of history with success. One of the finer factors of both CDs is that neither hits the all-too-familiar Spanish/Latin American repertoire that has been flogged mercilessly by guitarists for decades. You are spared the transcriptions of Granados, Albeniz or Falla; there’s not even a Piazzolla mundanity bringing up the rear. In fact, the only Spanish piece offered is an actual guitar duo written by the dominant figure in guitar across the last century.

It’s also worth noting that the more arresting sequences on both discs are semi-contemporary: Brouwer’s salute to his dead friend, and Houghton’s triptych. Still, the duo has (I hope) much more up their communal sleeve and you’d have to be confident that their next recording will be a more sustained experience for us all.

SIDEKICK

Ziggy and Miles Johnston

Move Records MCD 648

This duo has been around the country – and overseas – for some time. At this point, both musicians are studying – as a guitar duo – at the Juilliard School in New York where their craft will continue to be honed to an even finer point. As is inevitable, these musicians have won prizes from operations like the Guitar Foundation of America, the Adelaide International Guitar Festival, and the Concert Artists Guild Competition. The brothers’ second CD, as far as I can tell, oscillates between Brazilian/Spanish voices and home-grown ones, with sideways glances at one of serious music’s best-known vignettes in Debussy’s Claire de lune, and Welsh composer Katie Jenkins‘ Sidekick, written specifically for these players by a co-student at the famous American academy.

Ziggy and Miles begin their excursions with Jongo, a rhythmically clever piece by Brazilian guitarist Paulo Bellinati; it alternates 6/8 with 3/4 in a time-honoured Latin tradition and bases its development on a catchy D Major tune that doesn’t venture outside its home key. We hear a cut version of this arrangement because the musicians omit about a minutes’ worth of ‘percussion work towards the piece’s ending where performers have the option of snapping strings at various points along the neck/fretboard or slapping the instrument’s side, outlining the same rhythmic interplay that has featured so far in the piece.

It all makes for a nice study in ensemble and this duo comes up trumps, even if the last bar’s arpeggiated chord is prepared by a carefully-considered chain of what you’d expect would be rapid acciaccature. Still, its determination leaves you in no doubt that we’ve reached the end of this frolic.

This is followed by the three-movement Tonadilla of Rodrigo. which you can find on YouTube, the Johnston brothers giving a most focused reading of this brightly textured suite. The initial Allegretto ma non troppo sets up the composer’s trademark 2nds, placing E in one instrument against E flat in the other, the bitonal suggestion a continuous spur as the players exchange material and unite for full-blooded rasgueado chords with sparkling clarity.

The second movement Minuetto pomposo doesn’t really get affected until a fair way in, beginning with a delectable alternation of material and spice added by ‘wrong-note’ chords like the opening D Major chord in Guitar 1 set against an F sharp minor triad on Guitar 2; this polarity persists but it’s not that remarkable – just a muted form of bitonality. The stately section starts well into the piece’s centre with a definite change of character, into the minor if anywhere, and a definite strut to the rhythmic motion. A series of concerted common chords (recalling bars 11 and 12 of the opening segment) follow a cadenza for Miles Johnston, and we return to the opening material and a curt conclusion.

Then the concluding Allegro vivace is an infectious rondo, notable for some stunning scale passages from both players. Here, the harmonic spikiness is underplayed although Rodrigo can’t bring himself to complete orthodoxy. But these pages exemplify the finer points of this duo’s abilities – from the carefully managed rubato and decelerandi to the fine timbral eloquence from Ziggy Johnston in a mid-movement minor mode bass-line solo, and the combined effervescence of the concluding bars’ semiquaver unison run.

Now we come to the CD’s longest track in Granados’ Ochos valses poeticos, written sometime between 1886 and 1894 for piano solo. All of them have been transcribed for two guitars, some of them by several arrangers, but the Johnstons have chosen the version assembled by the duo of Christian Gruber and Peter Maklar. In fact, the waltzes are preceded by a bright march-like introduction and the first of the dances recurs as a postlude to the whole collection. Right from the start, you’re aware of transpositions across bars 10-12 where the piano in alt can’t be handled by the guitar; as well, you hear a few supernumerary bass notes starting 13 bars from the introduction’s bridge/conclusion. But the players capture effectively the good-humoured charm of this preface.

Most of the waltzes are a page long in the original; repetitions abound, as they do in Chopin and Brahms, and the Johnstons give great pleasure in their ease of delivery and supple gradations of tempo and timbre. You can’t fault them for accuracy either with many striking passages of close duet. For all that, the waltzes are amiable salon matter, their phrases falling neatly into four-bar patterns with nothing needlingly sharp to their gentle progress. Certainly, the first Melodioso holds the most memorable melody, well worth revisiting at the conclusion to Waltz 8’s Presto in contrasting 6/8 and 3/4 (only an unadventurous two bars’ worth of this).

But the inner pieces have considerable charm under the Johnstons’ care: the gentle, ascending chromatic pattern of the second Tempo di valse noble; the slightly off-kilter shape of the following Valse lente with its groups of three four-bar phrases; an abrupt muffled pizzicato effect in the Allegro umoristico at bars 21 to 24, and later at bars 29 to 32 which are treated with precision by both players in turn; a telling Viennese-style hesitancy applied in Waltz 5, meltingly effective at bars 11 to 18 the first time round; followed by a carefully shaped Quasi ad libitum where the performers take their time but do so with a single mind; the impeccable realization of Gruber and Maklar’s division of labour in the Valse 7 Vivo, even if the piano’s full-blooded chords (e.g., bars 6 and 8) have been thinned out.

The set displays the brothers’ command of Granados’ none-too-complex emotional landscape in these unsophisticated bagatelles. Even the more introspective waltzes (Nos. 3 and 6) make no bones about the modesty of their forays into a (slightly) darker world. Still, the pieces meld successfully into each other, in this instance because of the interpreters’ uniform interpretative vision.

I’ve not much to say about the Johnstons’ transcription of Debussy’s famous piano extract from the Suite bergamasque. Their approach emphasizes the pages’ innate calm, even at the En animant change of key for six bars at the work’s climax. And the transcription manages to keep the melody line prominent – although that might be due to the players’ subtle treatment of the splayed chords/arpeggios at the un poco mosso from bar 27 on. An agreable 5 minutes’ worth.

Most senior of the three contemporary voices is Nigel Westlake‘s Songs from the forest in its original duo guitar form of 1994. I’ve heard the Grigoryan brothers play this work, possibly at Monash University – more a matter of history than actual reminiscence. It has a catchy opening gambit in the best Westlake style and the composer brings this back to round off his sonically effective score. Interpreters are kept busy with a wealth of effects and rhythmic slips and slides, demonstrating Westlake’s insights into his instruments’ capabilities. As expected, the Johnstons find the mellifluous melodic passages and the mildly aggressive interludes suit their partnership down to the ground and – if anything – the work accelerates in interest the further it advances.

Jenkins wrote Sidekick in 2021 during the COVID outbreak at the invitation of the Johnstons. It is intended to be a reflection of the brothers’ relationship, both fraternal and professional – which immediately presents interpretative problems. Which one is the sidekick – Miles or Ziggy? Or are they both each other’s offsider? I guess that Jenkins doesn’t have any narrative in mind; she’s not committing to a story like Macbeth, Don Juan or Till Eulenspiegel but potentially essaying a pair of thumbnails like Lavine or Pickwick. Yes, certain moments present intimations of sequential thoughts racing between the instruments, or even complementary ideas that find common expression, as well as times of divergence from each other.

All the same, the composer is at some pains to outline a kind of aesthetic compatibility where competing flurries of action lead to a common end, quietly fusing into a shared output. The experience is heightened by listening to the track through headphones where the two voices are spatially separate. But that’s the case for the whole CD, by which means you can detect the labour division – or better, the sharing of responsibility. Jenkins’ language is pleasantly catholic, moving into old-fashioned harmony near the piece’s conclusion but tracing a lightly acerbic path in its central pages.

Written last year, Ken Murray’s Trin Warren Tam-boree depicts wetlands in the north-west of Melbourne’s Royal Park; specifically, the bellbird waterhole that sits there, just behind those yellow and red slanted pillars that mark the Tullamarine Freeway’s starting point. Also written for the Johnston brothers, this presents as a meditation on the area’s restless placidity, the piece’s forward motion dominated for the greater part of its length by a minor 2nd oscillation: D-C sharp-D, for example. Over this underpinning, the players outline Murray’s wide-ranging melodic output, the whole complex packed with incident but not alarmingly so. This is an expertly pitched soundscape, created by one of the city’s leading guitarists and a solid contribution to the still-slim catalogue of serious Australian music for duo guitar.

Here is a welcome exposition of the Johnstons’ obvious talents, well placed in a field of musical practice that is not quite unknown or unrepresented but has rarely been graced with such expertise in execution. Admittedly, a substantial track (Granados) and a slight one (Debussy) are arrangements, but the execution of those and the original two-guitar works is exceptionally fine. This CD was recorded at the Skillman Studio in New York and the artists have been well-served by an operational team which captured every detail of their polished interpretations.

IN FLIGHT

Harold Gretton

Move Records MCD 627

This musician is a new name to me but not to guitar aficionados in Canberra or the Riverina Conservatorium in Wagga Wagga. This CD, recorded in early 2019 at the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Weston, UK, has been delayed by the universal plague that reduced serious music-making to a dribble for at least two years. Its content is, to put it mildly, eclectic with some classics like Sor’s Introduction, Theme and Variations on ‘O cara armonia‘ (that distracting little number from Mozart’s The Magic Flute), and a quartet of Latin-inflected favourites in Morel’s Danza Brasilera, Lauro’s La Negra, Estrellita by Ponce, and – just to show the performer’s 1990 credentials – Piazzolla’s La Muerte del Angel.

Adding to the regular repertoire security blanket, Gretton performs Mertz’s Fantaisie Hongroise and tucks in three pieces by Weiss. For a bit of contemporary relief, he outlines The Prince’s Toys suite by Moscow-born Nikita Koshkin. Just as interesting is his own five-part collection from 2013, Flock, which gives us Gretton’s musings on Australian birds. And he concludes the CD with another of his compositions: Inarticulate Music, composed after Gretton’s move to Wagga as Deputy Director and Head of Guitar.

Earliest in time is the Weiss trilogy: a Fuga, Passacaille, and the well-thumbed Capriccio. Gretton gives excellent interpretations of them, certainly superior to anything I heard from other guitarists when scrabbling around for comparisons on the internet. The D/B minor fugue version allows for plenty of liberties in placing the bass line in the instrument’s lowest octave or using an upward transposition, e.g. in the middle of bar 10, or across bars 32 and 33. Also, the ornamentation is very discreet, like the small semiquaver run interpolated in bar 40.

He sets up the passacaglia by playing the initial seven bars twice before launching into the 11 variations, which are accounted for with touching sensibility, nowhere better than in the 8th variant in 3rds and 6ths, and the following two semiquaver-rich strophes before a moving reversion to the original: a Goldberg in miniature. What strikes you particularly about the Capriccio is its rapidity, yet all lines remain clear and unfudged, with some finely resonant bass work (viz. bars 4 to 6) and a restrained outline of when the fugato stops from bars 50 to 53 and the splayed chords emerge as an unexpected, final jeu d’esprit.

Sor’s variations on Papageno’s Das klinget so herrlich features among the composer’s most popular works. The portentous preliminary bars, all 24 of them, serve as a kind of tongue-in-cheek prelude to the infectious, superbly balanced melody that Sor elaborates. Gretton observes all the repeats in this, the CD’s longest track, with an expert eye for second-time-around changes and an effective use of vibrato and that muted effect achieved by plucking above the fingerboard rather than directly above the sound hole. Of course, the player uses that time-honoured trope of setting loud against soft in identical repeated passages but it isn’t over-worked. Still, this is a reputable sequence, coming fairly close to the opera’s premiere and before the advent of the thunder-and-lightning virtuoso.

Speaking of which, Mertz’s fantaisie, the first of 3 Morceaux from an 1857 posthumous publication, is a splendid display piece with as many separate sections as a Liszt rhapsody, like a 15-bar lassan marked Lugubre, followed by an Allegro vivace that stands in for a friska. As with the Sor, Gretton includes or ignores bass notes as he pleases, omitting several low fundamentals for reasons (I assume) of articulation clarity. But he follows the wilful Romantic attitude to metre – taking his time over the Adagio maestoso con entusiasmo, and the two volante brief cadenzas.

Then, when he comes to the final 1 and a 1/2 pages, he is an exhibitionist’s delight, playing nearly all the notes I find in an old Haslinger edition and elevating the tension in a dazzling series of semiquaver patterns for the jubilant A Major of the maestoso. No, it’s not profound, but it’s not trying to be anything but exuberant and nationalistically coloured in the Liszt vein; the first 15 of the Hungarian Rhapsodies were available for general consumption by 1853.

Ponce’s Estrellita of 1912 remains the Mexican composer’s most well-known melody, having been subjected to many transformations, but it’s rarely heard in its original form – as a song, a cancion mexicana . But then, how many contemporary vocalists have the required range of a 13th? The arrangement used by Gretton, attributed to Scots guitar master David Russell, underlines the lyric’s plaintive quality with plenty of space allowed for the vocal line to breathe. A pity that the song’s second half was not repeated.

La Muerte del Angel was written as incidental music for a play in 1962 and, in its original shape, is a typical Piazzolla affirmation, packing an impressive punch in its outer sections which cradle a quite substantial central lyric. Gretton plays Leo Brouwer’s arrangement which expands the Argentinean composer’s horizon with an introduction that goes into improvisation-suggestive territory before settling into the biting, catchy main topic. To be honest, I think Gretton plays this piece better than its arranger, with a deft whimsicality colouring the introduction’s more fragmentary elements and a powerful rasgueado attack at the work’s dynamic highpoints. As well, unlike several other interpreters, he doesn’t underplay the final chord’s inbuilt ambivalence.

Another Argentinian, Jorge Morel, produced a samba in his Danza Brasilera of 1968, and Gretton plays it straight, without any irregularities of rhythm; it’s as though he’s accompanying dancers who don’t look for any idiosyncrasies. You can hear a nice sense of urgency throughout this as the main theme’s recurrences lead to a kind of return to a turbulent base after some more texturally transparent excursions, like the central 14-bar repeated bracket leading into a chain or two of quick single quavers before the catchy principal melody returns: excellent articulation throughout, especially the no-fuss negotiation of the harmonics patches.

Last in this Latin bracket, Antonio Lauro’s 1976 La Negra (third in his Triptico suite for Segovia, after Armida and Madrugada) is approached with a more supple rhythmic outline, including some fetching pauses as at the end of bar 16 each time it comes around, later in the work’s central section at the end of bar 32, and – most lingeringly – at the return to bar 2 for the second-last time. This interpretation is a fine example of controlled sentiment with a graceful lilt illustrated by several carefully positioned portamenti.

Russian guitarist Nikita Koshkin achieved initial prominence with his suite The Prince’s Toys of 1980, a variant on Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges plot where the abused turn on the abuser; in this case, the toys take the prince to another world/dimension. Gretton plays five of the six elements in this collection, omitting the final Grand Toys’ Parade. His opening, The mischievous prince, is a gratifying setting-up of the central character’s psychopathology in which portamenti play a large part as well as some fiercely (potentially sadistic) hard-hitting single-notes and chords; the whole ending either in melancholy or menace, according to your taste.

Some of the effects achieved during The mechanical monkey are remarkable. A side-drum imitation is highly persuasive but no more so than the cymbal clashes that the toy produces with extraordinary fidelity. Added to which, the central pages in 6/8 (or a variant) pass along with sterling fluency and irreproachable security of left-hand work. Next, The doll with the blinking eyes becomes more intriguing the longer it lasts with Koshkin including in his piece two articulation problems that afflict all guitarists: the audible swipe when rapidly changing fingering positions, and the buzz that comes about when a string vibrates against frets. Both make for fine image suggestiveness, probably bettered by the final music-box harmonics that come in the piece’s final pages.

The soldiers opens bravely enough with tuckets and trumpet imitations, the former achieved by a unique series of intervals rather like an organ’s mixture stop. The movement sticks to a quick march tempo for about half its length when material starts disintegrating until, by the end, the martial sounds have been mutated, the toy soldiers shadows of their former glory, the prince’s miniature army falling on hard times. Here again, Koshkin’s technical skills are outlined with considerable craft by Gretton. As for The prince’s coach, this begins bravely enough with plenty of assurance and forward progression that eventually accelerates until the inevitable crash when the unleashed horses gallop off into the distance.

The whole suite is written for a virtuoso performer with the ability to take on novel sound-production demands and remain unafraid to indulge in sound imitations with panache. Gretton fits the bill with a mastery of Koshkin’s technical panoply and the composer’s blend of vocabularies, mainly coming down on the side of neo-classicism best exemplified by the leading 20th century Russian composers, both resident and expatriate.

So we come to the guitarist’s own compositions. Gretton’s Flock includes the currawong, magpie, blue wren, galah and rainbow lorikeet. and his CD’s booklet is illustrated with five water colours by Penny Deacon from which this ornithologically-challenged observer can identify three birds with some certainty. We are not in Messiaenland where the bird calls are notated and indicated, as in Oiseaux exotiques, Catalogue d’oiseaux, or even Le Merle noir. Gretton is more concerned with each bird’s character – or, better, its characteristics. So his Currawong presents as jaunty, almost cakewalking: the C. J. Dennis of birds, staying firmly on the ground before a transfiguring ending rich in harmonics. Unlike a Collingwood supporter, the Magpie is a conversationalist – or he could be involved in a fluent soliloquy; this personality is amiable enough, apart from the occasional abrupt outburst.

With the Blue Wren, we come across a questing, inquisitive busybody who suddenly bursts into a flurry of activity; the following Galah is similar if more consistent in his activity before normal behaviour gives way to near-aggressively restive, then off-the-wall temperamental flights (the CD’s shortest track). Finally, Gretton’s Rainbow Lorikeet begins with a motif/melody like its predecessors but accretes more lines as it progresses. At its opening, this seems the most harmonically conservative member of the set but, as with some of the others, it moves out of an avian comfort zone into a dissonant and unpredictable landscape with powerful, confrontational chords. Finally, the piece returns to its opening melody, immediately more rich in its setting before a conclusion of heightened power.

Yes, the bird titles aren’t necessarily attached to the music itself and one man’s lorikeet is another woman’s buzzard. Yet each of these five vignettes has a distinct flavour which might as well represent the animal of its title. Gretton writes that, when overseas, he missed Australia’s bird sounds and so we have to approach his suite as a kind of memento sequence, even an exercise in patriotic nostalgia. It’s not on the same intellectual level as the French master’s imagery but it’s certainly easier on the ear.

In the CD’s last track, Gretton is responding to a conversation with a painter who decried the verbiage surrounding art, wondering why art cannot be allowed to speak for itself. Inarticulate Music attempts to create a music that requires no explanation, no exegesis, no apologia. It consists of an alternation between repeated common chords (Major mainly, with one minor excursion) and single notes and, in that, it resembles a simple man’s The Unanswered Question. It’s probably the most conservative piece on the CD in terms of form, vocabulary, melodic content and metrical variety. But it makes for a placid conclusion to Gretton’s considerable efforts, a simple Amen to a string of finely-executed works from across a wide time-frame.