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50fb9b63faf24b079dabd5a6bbbcf0c2Piano Sonata No. 6 in A, Op. 82 (1940)
Piano Sonata No. 7 in B flat, Op. 83 (1942)
Piano Sonata No. 8 in B flat, Op. 84 (1944)

Peter Donohoe, piano

Peter Donohoe’s third volume of Piano Sonatas by Sergei Prokofiev completes the cycle with Nos. 6, 7 and 8. Peter has a long association with the piano music of Prokofiev – the Sonata No 6 was part of his silver medal-winning programme at the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition – and indeed the composer’s homeland, as a regular visitor to Russia throughout his career (his diary from his stay in then Soviet Moscow during the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition is a fascinating read).

Prokofiev composed piano sonatas throughout his life and the final three belong together in the same way as the final three piano sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert. Though the works were not intended to be performed consecutively, they do exhibit “familiar” attributes which connect them. For Peter Donohoe, these sonatas form one of the great cycles in piano literature, written by a composer who was also a magnificent pianist (surviving recordings of Prokofiev playing his own works are testament to this). This final instalment of Donohoe’s recording for Somm includes what are called the “war trilogy” piano sonatas, written during World War II, and reflecting on and reacting to the horrors of Soviet Russia’s titanic struggle against Hitler.

The sixth sonata opens with a clangorous motif which rings out before the music retreats into darker passage work and a second subject with folksong qualities. Donohoe’s pacing, acute rhythmic vitality and colourful dynamic palette combined with a glorious sound (evident throughout the recording) allows the music to build gradually to a climactic reprise of the open motif. Donohoe brings a wry humour to the second movement, a rather jaunty march, interrupted by a tense and sinuous middle section, but the ominous tread is never far away. The third movement is an elegant and rather poignant waltz, and like the preceding movement the middle section contains more unsettling material. There is a lovely clarity of line here which brings an expansive romantic sweep to the movement. The finale, all frenetic scurryings and mocking themes, is a fine example of Donohoe’s effortless fluency and technical control.

The Sonata No. 7 is the most popular of the three, and its menacing, militaristic tread is evident from the opening. Donohoe’s restraint in the quieter, middle section hints at impending drama as the frenetic energy builds. Although scored in a major key, there is nothing joyous about this music. The middle movement, marked Andante caloroso, contains a consoling cantabile melody as beautiful as any nineteenth-century salon piece, but once again the mood is disturbed by plangent bass chords and an overriding sense of melancholy. There is power here, in Donohoe’s rich fortes, but his sense of restraint creates an extraordinary tension despite the hushed conclusion. The perpetuum mobile finale crackles with energy, subtly phrased and crisply articulated, it is both triumphant and unsettling.

Like the previous sonata, No. 8 is also scored in B flat. Composed in 1944, it is the longest of Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas and is a work of great breadth and emotional tension. Again, it is Donohoe’s ability to hold back rather than push the dynamics which creates a greater sense of drama, tension and impending tragedy. The middle movement opens with a lyrical Schubertian melody over an accompaniment which grows more florid. This feels like the calm before the final tempest and Donohoe’s sensitive line and delicate touch creates passages of great charm and beauty. The finale begins with a hectic motif which is both playful and heroic.

There is a wonderful immediacy to Donohoe’s playing combined with vibrant pianistic colour, sprightly articulation, technical assuredness and musical authority which runs through every note. An impressive conclusion to the cycle.

Available on the Somm label

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hesketh_coverThe latest release from pianist Clare Hammond is a disc for BIS Records of solo piano music by British composer Kenneth Hesketh –  Horae (pro clara) (2011/12), Notte Oscura (2002), Through Magic Casements (2008) and Three Japanese Miniatures (2002).

Horae (pro clara) was written for Clare Hammond following Kenneth Hesketh’s meeting with Clare at her debut recital at the Southbank Centre in 2010. They have subsequently developed a close artistic collaboration.

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Clare Hammond (photo: Julie Kim)
Clare says of Ken’s music that “it can seem overwhelming at times, yet if one engages with its textural intricacy, the scope of his extra-musical allusions, and volatile virtuosity, rich rewards lie in store”. Clare seems ideally suited to this type of repertoire. Her debut album, Piano Polytych, containing works by Kenneth Hesketh, Julian Anderson, Piers Hellawell, Giles Swayne and Philip Grange, revealed her to be a fine advocate for contemporary piano repertoire, combining flawless technique with a sharp intellect and musical sensitivity to bring such works to life with colour, vibrancy and rhythmic precision, and totally without the self-consciousness or affectation that sometimes accompanies performances of this type of repertoire.

Kenneth Hesketh’s musical language is drawn from a broad range of stimuli, including classical architecture, medieval iconography, poetry, Bauhaus constructivism and existentialism, and these extra-musical references bring texture, structure and a wide range of moods, tempi, colour and piquancy to his music. The works presented on this disc are complex, both technically and musically, with dense textures and abrupt voltes faces between the macabre and grotesque and the delicate and poignant. What Clare Hammond does so well is to bring a sparkling clarity to the tightly-packed textures without comprising her sensitive musicality and her ability to shift seamlessly between the myriad moods and styles of the pieces.

The first work on this disc, Through Magic Casements, takes its title from Keats’ Ode To A Nightingale and much of its soundworld seems to echo the imagery of the poem with its urgent febrile passages which fade to nothing at the end.

The work which occupies most of the disc, Horae (pro clara), was premiered by Clare Hammond at the Cheltenham Festival in July 2013, and consists of twelve miniatures which as a whole form a ‘breviary’ or book of hours. The movements are not titled; instead they have evocative performance directions and some incorporate literary references. Thematic material, such as Hesketh’s fascination with machines and automata, is shared across the set, thus linking the pieces, though they can be performed in any order. Some contain dense thickets of notes and melodic lines, abrupt and plangent bass interruptions, and vibrant rhythms (VII: Capriccioso), while others comprise spare shards and delicate scurrying traceries (VI: Nervoso, ma dolce, for example).

The third work Notte Oscura (2002) is a piano transcription of the first interlude in Hesketh’s opera The Overcoat, after Nikolai Gogol, and in it Hesketh highlights Gogol’s description of St Petersburg’s powerful and all-pervasive cold. The opening bass chords are perfectly judged by Clare Hammond, lending a sense of foreboding before the music moves into a more melodic passage, though the mood of menace and anxiety is never far away. Repeated tremolo notes high in the register suggest shards of ice, while the bass sonorities conjure up the vastness of the Russian landscape.

The suite Three Japanese Miniatures concludes the disc. The works are drawn from fragments and paraphrases of a larger work by Hesketh inspired by Japanese folk tales and each movement portrays a story, from a nocturnal wanderer who finds himself amid the imposing grandeur of a ruined temple to a winter sprite who takes revenge on a broken promise by taking the lives of a man and his children and finally the story of Bumbuku, a daemon who takes the form of a badger and lives in a tea kettle. The works are expressive, haunting and humorous, and, as in the previous works on this disc, Clare highlights their distinctive narratives with precise articulation and a vivid palette of musical colour.

Horae (pro clara) is released on 27 May on the BIS label. Further information and sound clips here

An interview with composer Kenneth Hesketh will appear in the Meet the Artist series on 2 June

Clare Hammond is the recent recipient of a Royal Philharmonic Society young artist award 

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scriabin_ragtime_300x300The curious, often sensual and hypnotic soundworld of Alexander Scriabin is viewed through the lens of a three-piece jazz ensemble in the David Gordon Trio’s new album Alexander Scriabin’s Ragtime Band. Released at the close of the year marking the centenary of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s death, the album is a witty and imaginative take on Scriabin’s music, part reinterpretation, part hommage to the many elements and influences which make up this composer’s unusual oeuvre.

In an earlier article for this site, written on the anniversary of Scriabin’s death, David Gordon describes the many motifs and idioms from jazz which are also present in Scriabin’s music. He also highlights the other music which was being created over in America and Western Europe at the same time, from Irving Berlin to Claude Debussy. Thus the album contains tracks which reference these composers too, from the entertaining ‘Alexander Scriabin’s Ragtime Band’ (track 2) which directly references Berlin’s ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. In ‘Cakewalk’ there is a groovy hint of Debussy’s ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ from Children’s Corner, a reminder that Debussy fell under the spell of a new kind of music emerging from America. ‘Famous Etude’ turns Scriabin’s Op 8, No. 12 into a sensual tango which segues into a samba, David Gordon weaving a hypnotic piano improvisation over silky cymbal and drums.

In an way, the opening track is the most interesting. Scriabin’s original Prelude op. 74 no. 2  becomes Praeludium Mysterium, a trippy number with spooky, Schoenberg-like dissonance which tells us as much about the strange soundworld and musical personality of Alexander Scriabin as it does about the David Gordon Trio’s ability to create something striking and new out of what is normally defined as “classical” music. The result is a wonderfully weird fusion. The ensuing tracks are arrangements, mostly by the Trio’s pianist, David Gordon, and like the opening track, they are not just “jazzed up” classics. The music exploits Scriabin’s penchant for dissonance and innovation and hints at what Scriabin might have composed had he lived longer.

Throughout, David Gordon’s piano sound is bright, yet warm, with sparing, sensitive rubato, a clear sense of phrasing and rhythmic vitality in the upbeat numbers. He is complemented by bass player Jonty Fisher and drummer Paul Cavaciuti. The Trio are adept at switching seamlessly between styles, and the whole album works as one might experience a set or two in a jazz club, or enjoy individual tracks as the mood takes you.

Mister Sam Records SAMCD004

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The Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson died in March 2015. He was one of the most important composers of our time, a composer-pianist in the grand tradition of Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninov, probably best remembered for his monumental Passcaglia on DSCH. Pianist Christopher Guild’s first volume of Stevenson’s piano music was released on the Toccata Classics label in early March 2015, though I suspect Guild did not realise at the time that his recording would become a kind of memorial for Stevenson. The CD celebrates Stevenson’s shorter works for piano with a special focus on one of his major preoccupations: his love of Scottish and Celtic culture. The album contains three suites of pieces based on Scottish folk songs or songs for children, together with the more substantial A Scottish Triptych, three pieces each written some time apart, and A Rosary of Variations on Sean O’Riada’s Irish Folk Mass (1980).

The piano is the ideal instrument for miniatures, and Christopher Guild brings warmth, intimacy and wistfulness to the pieces based on Scottish folk tunes with his assured lightness of touch, sensitive voicing, clean articulation, rhythmic vitality and a keen sense of the fleeting moods and characters of each piece, and Stevenson’s penchant for complex harmonies and unexpectedly vivid dissonances. Meanwhile, A Scottish Triptych explores more plangent piano sonorities in its opening movement, and even utilises the piano’s interior (strummed and plucked strings) to produce unexpected colours and resonances in the final movement.

Christopher Guild is an enthusiastic advocate of Stevenson’s music, and the CD provides a poignant memorial to the composer. I look forward to Volume 2 with interest.

Recommended.

Meet the Artist……Christopher Guild

Toccata Classics