O'Connell the Music

EVENINGS WITH THE FRENCH HORN

Mark Papworth & Rosa Scaffidi

Move Records MCD 640

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUN FUN AND OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS

Michael Easton

Move Records MCD 657

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NORDIC MOODS & BAROQUE ECHOES

The Marais Project & Duo Langborn/Wendel

Move Records MCD 656

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PERTH CONCERT HALL RONALD SHARP ORGAN

Jangoo Chapkhana

Move Records MD 3464

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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