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BAGATELLES Piano Music by Bernard Hughes

Matthew Mills piano

Release date: 9th June 2023 | Divine Art Recordings (Divine Art DDX 21107)

This album presents the complete works of Bernard Hughes for solo piano, an eclectic collection covering a period of over 30 years. The oldest piece dates back to his teenage years and the most recent is a brand new suite, Partita Contrafacta, a quirky take on traditional Baroque dance forms. The rest of the music ranges from the large-scale Strettos and Striations to little occasional pieces written for the composer’s children. With such a varied range of music, there is something for everyone on this disc.

What makes this album truly special is the culmination of many years of collaboration between Hughes and Mills, who commissioned and premieres Partita Contrafacta on the disc. The two musicians have been working together for years, resulting in a deep understanding of each other’s artistic vision and an unparalleled ability to bring Hughes’ compositions to life on the piano.

Works

Song of the Walnut
Partita Contrafacta (suite in 7 movements)
Song of the Button
Bagatelles (12 movements)
Miniatures (11 movements)
Three Studies
O du Liebe meiner Liebe
Strettos and Striations
Cradle Song

Sample track:

Bernard Hughes says: “This album brings together pretty much all my music for solo piano written over the course of more than 30 years, the earliest from when I was still at school and the latest written just weeks before being recorded, in October 2022. The inspiration was my pianist and friend, Matthew Mills, who suggested the project and who has put untold hours into learning and animating the music, some of which is very straightforward, and lots of which is very much not.

And this variety is very much the point for me. As in all aspects of my compositional work, I don’t have a single piano ‘style’, but cut my cloth according to the occasion. Although there are several of techniques, textures and devices I return to over and again – as will be obvious to anyone listening straight through – there is also a huge range of approach, from music written for piano beginners up to the most virtuosic I could imagine, and from simple blink-and-you-miss-them melodies to ferocious, post-minimalist studies. In some cases, I don’t know what possessed me.”

Pianist Matthew Mills says: “I am very pleased to have done Bernard’s piano album. It’s a substantial milestone in a musical relationship that now goes back probably twenty years or so…. It really captures all facets of Bernard’s kaleidoscopic musical personality, and, having a close knowledge of the composer as well as the music, I think gives it a special resonance.

Pre-order BAGATELLES here

Bernard Hughes
Matthew Mills
Bernard Hughes’ music has been performed by ensembles including the BBC Singers and the London Mozart Players at major British venues including the Royal Albert Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. His music has won a number of awards both in the UK and internationally and is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in the UK. Bernard Hughes’s BBC commission Birdchant was premiered at the Proms festival in August 2021. This was the culmination of Bernard’s long relationship with the BBC Singers, which also included a major portrait concert in January 2020, leading to I Sing of Love being nominated for an Ivor Novello Composer Award. An album of Bernard Hughes’s choral music, I am the Song, performed by the BBC Singers, was released in 2016. His orchestral works for family concerts, Bernard & Isabel and The Knight Who Took All Day are frequently performed around Britain and were recorded by the Orchestra of the Swan on a release from February 2020. In 2015 he provided music for the comedy film Bill, a fantastical account of Shakespeare’s early years. A second album of choral music, Precious Things, sung by the Epiphoni Consort, was released in May 2022 and was described by Judith Weir as ‘choral music as we rarely hear it – generous, light-footed, surprising.’ Bernard lives in London where he is Composer-in-Residence at St Paul’s Girls’ School, a position he has held since 2015. He is a keen cricket fan, both as a watcher, a player and as chairman of Chiswick Cricket Club in London.

For almost three decades, Matthew Mills has enjoyed a busy and diverse freelance career as a pianist, composer, and conductor. With a repertoire encompassing music from five centuries, he has performed across the UK as a soloist, chamber musician, and accompanist, in addition to establishing a reputation as a sympathetic and creative dance accompanist.

A committed supporter of young composers and contemporary music, Matthew founded and directed a contemporary music ensemble at Royal Holloway, University of London, with whom, assisted by his own conducting students, he led workshops and performed works by student composers, as well as established twentieth-century names. He has enjoyed a long collaboration with the British composer Bernard Hughes, having given the first performance of his Bagatelles for piano and participated in the first performances of his chamber opera Dumbfounded! at the Riverside Studios, London.

Matthew studied at the Universities of Oxford and London, and at Trinity College of Music, London. His teachers have included Christopher Elton (piano), Daryl Runswick, Andrew Lovett, and Simon Holt (composition), and Gregory Rose (conducting). An award from Oxford University enabled a period of specialist study of contemporary piano repertoire with Rolf Hind, and he has appeared in masterclasses in composition with Michael Finnissy and George Benjamin, and in piano with John Lill and Rosalyn Tureck.

 

For further press information, interviews and review copies, please contact Frances Wilson

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Piano music by John Dante Previdini

This piece above all else summarizes my quarantine experience as a composer/pianist during COVID-19. It has been a time to reflect on the potentials of my own chosen medium, test what it is holistically capable of expressing, and explore new ways of putting oneself into the music, both figuratively and quite literally.

Best wishes from the USA, and here’s to another wonderful decade of the blog.

 

John Dante Prevedini (b. 1987) is a contemporary classical composer, educator, and public speaker based in New England. Drawing upon a variety of fields of knowledge, his overall work aims to examine unconventional facets of everyday life through a multidisciplinary lens. 

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Interesting things come from online connections – and this is one of the nicest projects I’ve been involved in recently, thanks to a Twitter/Facebook connection with composer Doug Thomas.

The Seasons is Doug’s hommage to Tchaikovsky’s suite of 12 piano miniatures which bears the same name, a year-long collaborative project with 12 pianists from around the world. Doug composed 12 short pieces, 1 for each pianist participating in the project. Each pianist recorded his/her piece and these recordings were released month by month via Doug’s SoundCloud and social media. Now all 12 pieces have been collated into an album, available via SoundCloud and Spotify (in a fully mixed/engineered version).

The music is generally minimalist in style, and each piece is different – like Tchaikovsky’s Season’s, Doug captures the character of each month, from the solemn frozen majesty of January to the reawakening of nature after winter (March – which Doug composed for me), the sunny playfulness of July and the melancholy nostalgia of December at the close of the year.

Other pianists participating in the project include Christina McMaster, Clio Monterey and Simeon Walker – all of whom have, coincidentally, appeared in my Meet the Artist series. This for me is a mark of the wonderful connectivity that social media affords us, and that those of us in the piano world have many overlapping networks and circles within circles.

It is very special to have a work composed especially for one and I felt a huge responsibility towards the composer and his music to interpret the work in a way which I hoped would fit with his original vision for the work, which conveys the excitement of nature bursting into life again after the winter chill.

Listen to the album on Spotify

In addition to the album, the sheet music for the complete project is also available here.

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0712396065227_600When I put ‘Return of the Nightingales’ (Prima Facie records) into my CD player, my cat Monty immediately dashed into my office and up onto my desk to find the birds that sing so sweetly at the start of the title track of this new disc of music by Sadie Harrison. The piano enters, delicately yet brightly, imitating the twittering birdsong before moving into a lively, rhythmic passage. Ian Pace, the pianist for this track, is very much at home in contemporary and new music for piano, and it shows in the ease with which he handles technical difficulties and his vivid, immediate sound.

The variety of writing in just a few minutes of this piece signals the theme for the entire disc: it’s a wonderful example of Sadie’s compositional breadth and rich imagination and a lovely introduction to her colourful and accessible music. Not only does the disc demonstrate the range of Sadie’s compositional palette but it also showcases the talents of four excellent pianists – Ian Pace, Renée Reznek, Duncan Honeybourne and Philippa Harrison, all of whom have considerable experience in this type of repertoire and who bring myriad colours, timbre and musical sensitivity and individuality to each work on the disc.

Composed between 2011 and 2017, the pieces on this disc reveal the many contrasting styles within one composer’s output, reflecting Sadie’s wide-ranging musical and cultural influences, including the music of Bartok, Berg, Chopin, and Debussy, jazz legends Bill Evans, Fats Waller and Thelonius Monk, Methodist hymns, vintage film music, her passion for the cultures of Persia and Afghanistan (Sadie is Composer-in-Association of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music), and the natural world. In ‘Return of the Nightingales’ (the title is drawn from the translation of a Persian poem), near-Eastern folk idioms are woven into the starkly modernist suite of pieces Par-feshani-ye ‘eshq (played by Renée Reznek), while in Lunae ‘Four Nocturnes’ Duncan Honeybourne sensitively and sensuously illuminates the tender, intimate lyricism and delicate traceries of these delightful and arresting miniatures (I purchased the sheet music on the strength of this performance in order to learn the pieces myself). Philippa Harrison brings the requisite vibe and swing to the Four Jazz Portraits, capturing the style of each jazz great to whom they are dedicated; while in Shadows ‘Six Portraits of William Baines’ Sadie takes small quotations from Baines’ piano works and reflections on his diary entries to create intriguing miniatures, masterfully presented by Duncan Honeybourne. The Souls of Flowers recalls Chopin in its long-spun melodic lines and shimmering trills, while Northern Lights uses harmonies and idioms redolent of folksong and hymns. The final work, Luna…..for Nicola, is a tiny yet meaningful hommage to Nicola le Fanu, with whom Sadie studied for three years, and was written in response to hearing the premiere of Nicola LeFanu’s orchestral work ‘The Crimson Bird’. in February 2017.

The song of the nightingale is the unifying thread on this disc – in the third of the four Lunae, the evocation of Alabiev–Liszt’s ‘Le Rossignol’ as played by William Baines, and in the fluttering wings of Par-feshani-ye ‘eshq, but also less obviously in the use of trills, sparkling runs, chirruping note clusters and tremolandos.

This is wonderfully rewarding, varied and enjoyable disc, proof that contemporary piano music can be tuneful, attractive and entirely accessible. There is much to delight and challenge the pianist too: the pieces are generally within the capability of the intermediate to advanced player, and are available to purchase as scores (from University of York Music Press). I particularly like Sadie’s treatment of melodic fragments and her jazz-infused harmonies.

Highly recommended