| THE OTHER SIDE OF TONY GOULD | | Jasmine Lai, Fabian Russell, Firebird Trio, Rosa Scaffidi, Tony Gould | | Move Records are floating this disc as giving us an alternative view of Tony Gould. It's true that most of the celebrated Australian musician's output for this company has fallen into the jazz and popular categories but Gould as a composer of serious music is not exactly an unknown quantity, partly due to his one-time position as Dean and associate professor at the School of Music, Victorian College of the Arts. Still, this compendium has some interesting tracks, as well as some light ephemera. | | Two of the pieces are performed by 19-year-old pianist Jasmine Lai: Empathy of 2013, and A Little Music for Jasmine of 2022 or thereabouts. Another intimate piece is Dreams of My Girl, also from 2013, and which was commissioned and performed by the Firebird Trio probably in that year; certainly from back in the days when Roger Jonsson was the ensemble's violinist; cellist Josephine Vains and pianist Benjamin Martin appear, veteran and current Firebirds, The largest in scale of Gould's works is a Homage to Mahler, premiered in 2014 by the Monash Academy Strings under Fabian Russell, who on this CD conducts a body called Symphonic Strings. | | Over half of the CD's length comprises the four-hand version of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring from 1913. Here Gould collaborates with Rosa Scaffidi, but I think this is a re-issue of a recording that the two pianists made for Move Records twenty years ago. If so, it has worn well, which is probably due to the machinations of the company's founder, studio manager and recording engineer Martin Wright who has shown time after time how intonationally pure and timbre-rich each musician can sound under his ultra-informed care. Still, I can't find any sign of this performance in the current Move catalogue, so perhaps a reminder of a considerable past achievement is in order. | | The shorter of the two piano solos, A Little Music for Jasmine, is a mixture of rambling lyric and jazz-inflected chords. The melody line is all right-hand and the music progresses in 'normal' fashion; a good dollop of calm sentiment amid the quiet meandering which Lai delivers with fine control. At the start, while Gould's intro wove its gentle patterns, I expected something along the lines of Grainger's arrangement of Love Walked In to emerge, but the flow that followed had its own voice and balance. | | Empathy has more substance to its material, although it follows a similar rambling path with the right hand dominant again. Here, Gould employs more rubato and his chords present more of a challenge in terms of their sequencing and content, which moves easily between the consonant and mildly dissonant. Once again, the phrase shapes remind you of Gershwin, if not as symmetrical or as calculated for a singer's range. Lai maintains the piece's even temperament, coasting gently over its mf ebbs and flows. | | In fact, Dreams of My Girl turns out to be a kind of rondo on the old tune sung by Perry Como, Girl of My Dreams, written by Sunny Clapp in 1927. The trio take their turns in outlining the sentimental waltz while Gould provides two episodes of a more exploratory nature than you'd expect, although he does offer several twists and turns on the song's original harmonic underpinning. A deft arrangement with some piquant moments, but I don't think this is taking us very far into the alternate reality of Gould's 'classical side', except for the matter of the piano trio performers who are very adept at entering the piece's relaxed character. | | You find much more gravity in the Mahler tribute which is based on the opening theme to the Austrian composer's Symphony No. 9 finale. Gould offers a reharmonization and a re-thinking of the movement which, of course, sent me back to the original and its slow reckoning with sorrow and resignation. Apart from two significant full orchestra (sort of) points, the Mahler Adagio is a long elegy for strings and Gould reminds you of the wide-spread textures in the symphony's spread. His modulations strike you as less comfort-inducing but you encounter passages that mirror the firmness and absolute inexorability of Mahler's relentless grind towards an evanescent resolution. | | First time round, I saw where Gould had interpolated the first line of The Last Rose of Summer but clearly wasn't concentrating enough to see how substantial was his use of Aisling an Oigfhear, although he doesn't explore the song's second half (well, the start of it) although most levels of his string body enjoy momentary encounters with the first strophe. Further, he signs off with a reminiscence of the air at his solid essay's conclusion. | | Of the four original Goulds we hear on this disc, this Homage offers the most sustained outline of the Australian composer's compositional depth. This is not to decry the piano pieces or the trio, but the gravity of its language and the intense focus on elaborating long paragraphs of string fabric make this a fine demonstration of Gould's gift for taking a strand of material and making it his own while preserving the original's character. | | I think I've heard the four-hand version of Stravinsky's epoch-signalling ballet only once – in the Collins. St. Uniting Church, played by a Russian husband-and-wife team who I believe lived and taught in Melbourne for a while. Of the performance, almost nothing remains in the memory except the faint feeling that both pianists operated from the one piano. This must have been horrifically difficult because, while you can negotiate most of the score at a single instrument, there are passages where the hands interweave to the point of reaching for the same note. | | Scaffidi and Gould recorded their performance on two Yamahas at the Move studio and the result is startlingly clear. Without its rich orchestral garb, the work becomes something unexpected; all those biting chords present now as explicable, able to be dissected and lacking their usual timbral gruffness. What you get is an exposition of the composition's bones, unadorned by flesh or cosmetics. As Gould points out in his leaflet notes, Stravinsky and Debussy played the work through in this four-hand format (but only Part 1) in June 1912. This event lives in my mind because of the generous reaction that the senior composer gave to his on-the-make junior, all the more memorable when you recall the various bitchinesses that Stravinsky came out with in his 1959 Conversations with Robert Craft. | | As far as I can see, the four-hand reduction is congruent with the orchestral score, even if you're always a little insecure, the composer having modified the work so many times throughout his life. Various editors have found thousands of errors or differences between original intentions and printed reality. Adding to this, Stravinsky took advice and suggestions from a good many people. So, while we're generally confident that the Boosey & Hawkes edition of 1948 comes as close to the original as probable, the piano(s) reduction proposes several unresolved questions. | | Gould and Scaffidi seem to follow the original Editions Russes de Musique of 1913, reprinted by Dover in 1989. They have a few scuffles with tempo placement on the first page but settle into congruence by bar 20. Whoever plays the Prima part avoids the ossia elaborations starting at bar 25 which follow the higher woodwind curvets above the general melange; mind you, how anybody would leave the main body for these finicky lines beats me. But the rest of Part 1 is handled cleanly; the Jeu de rapt an excellent instance of duo playing, specially when the Seconda (I think Gould takes this role but can't guarantee it) hits those resonant bass duplets. | | The further in you progress, the more you miss certain idiosyncratic timbres, like the brass braying in the Jeux des cites rivales and the percussion penetrating throughout the Danse de la terre. But the pianists produce their most effective work in the two rhythmically disjunct dances of Part 2: Glorification de l'elue and the massive Danse sacrale which comes close to realizing the unforgettable asymmetry of the orchestra in full spate. The players insert a few pauses between movements which makes me think they might have worked from a different edition – or they might have wanted to offer clear changes of pace/attack. | | Whatever questions you raise about the reading's oddities, the inclusion of this example of Gould exercising his talents on Stravinsky's early masterwork certainly justifies the CD's intention of showing another aspect of the pianist/academic's range of practice. I've known Gould for over fifty years and was never aware of his Mahler work or this recording with Scaffidi; both are enriching for long-time acquaintances and newcomers to this remarkably versatile musician's layers of creativity and performance. | | | | |
