CD review

It's almost Christmas again, and here's a suggestion for something to get for a pianist who wants to venture into the unknown a bit ...

Eric Craven: Pieces for Pianists volume 1 (performed by Mary Dullea, Métier msv 28601).

Eric Craven is a composer who knows his own mind but doesn’t impose his own will. These 25 short pieces for piano, published in ‘progressive’ order like an old-fashioned collection of classics designed to be an aid to learning, are notated in an unusual way.

There are no key signatures (though the score is entirely precise about which notes are to be played and their relative time values, and there are bar lines) and the performer can decide their own tempo, dynamics, phrasing, articulation and pedalling. Craven calls it ‘my Non-Prescriptive Low-order format’.

Mary Dullea is a distinguished musician and recording artist who appreciates the freedom this gives in executing them and the element of improvisation and potential continuing variation that’s essential to their realization in practice. Recording them inevitably archives one particular way on one particular day, and I was a bit surprised at first how little extra characterization she seeks to impose on the music in these versions – but I guess she’s keen to let the music ‘speak for itself’ even under Eric Craven’s conditions.

She rightly divines echoes of a variety of other composers’ styles to be found in them, and just occasionally you ask yourself why she took certain decisions (such as keeping the pedal down for a bar or bars when a seemingly sequential or parallel passage had different treatment) … but the point of the recordings, which vary in duration from 1 minute 20 seconds to 4 minutes 49 seconds, is really just to say ‘Here they are – make of them what you will’, and I can only repeat that invitation.

 

Review of the Hallé concert with Marc-André Hamelin and Ryan Wigglesworth, at the Bridgewater Hall

Marc-Andre Hamelin (credit Sim Cannety-Clarke) 

 

Ryan Wigglesworth is one of those musicians who are practically perfect in every way. The greatest thing to come out of Sheffield, musically, since Sterndale Bennett, he’s pianist, conductor, academic and composer.

So with him as Artist in Association the Hallé get lots of options. Last night we witnessed two of them: him as composer, and as conductor in charge of his own work as well as that of others. His Piano Concerto was premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 with the brilliant Marc-André Hamelin as soloist, and Hamelin was here in Manchester to play it again.

I can’t pretend that I’d expect it to become a popular favourite (the whole idea of concerto as solo showpiece with big tunes, originating in vocal aria forms and making great box office in the 19^th and pre-Second World War 20^th centuries, seems to have rather run out of steam more recently), but it gave both pianist and orchestra plenty to think about – and it rewards its audience with four varied movements which rarely lose concision in concept or expression.

The third of four movements (where the orchestra is reduced to strings and harp and the piano sings a Polish folk song, with decorative imitation of itself, both higher and fainter) is in many ways its centre of gravity – probably its longest section in terms of pure duration. Before it there’s a brief, prelude-like movement with long-breathed string phrases and then a Scherzo with almost helter-skelter perpetual motion from the piano; after it there’s a finale more in traditional piano-v-orchestra-battle style, which ends as the piano “wanders” (Wigglesworth’s own word) to a close on a single, very low, note – not really destined to produce any roar of applause.

Two of the concerto’s movements have the same names as two of the pieces of incidental music Mendelssohn wrote for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1843, which formed the opening of the concert (done in the order they would come in the play): both a Scherzo and a Nocturne, which were both played as the little jewels they are by the Hallé under Ryan Wigglesworth’s baton (and led by Paul Barritt). He has a calm and precise stick technique which on this occasion gave rise to delicate, lively, dynamically flexible and precisely articulated playing, full of charming touches in part-playing balance and first foot-tappingly joyful and then gloriously rich and romantic.

And finally there was Schumann’s Symphony no. 2: romanticism of a kind that followed very soon afterwards but with bigger architectural ambitions. British writers of Schumann’s own generation used the word “Schumannism” as a one-word cypher for over-wrought expression and neuroticism in music (as they considered it), but Ryan Wigglesworth knew how to handle its idiom: the waxing and waning emotional intensity of the first movement became a structure of slowly evolving optimism, despite shocks and surprises along the way, and its unorthodox finale seemed to keep slowing to a halt, as if unsure how to find the right frame of mind, before it suddenly got there.

But the third, Adagio espressivo, movement is what makes this symphony worth hearing, really: it’s a song without words to begin with and end, and there was, as in the Mendelssohn, lovely playing from the Hallé’s gifted wind principals.