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Here comes another solo collection on the Move Records label from Michael Kieran Harvey, that endlessly fertile pianist-composer now resident in Hobart and still (happy 65th birthday for last month) one of the dominant forces in this country’s musical environment – playing with the same mastery while writing works that are thoroughly exciting to hear. On . . . the life in between . . . , he gives pride of place (and his CD’s title) to the last work by Martin Friedel: a 2022 compendium of ten short pieces (the longest lasts 4’01”, the shortest 1’21”) with little room for virtuosic flourishes and emotional outbursts, despite its being written for Harvey – our most technically brilliant and temperamentally flamboyant pianist. |
Harvey plays nothing of his own, exerting his talents on behalf of five other composers. The oldest piece presented here is Johanna Selleck‘s Homage to Liszt from 2013 when it was premiered by the writer’s colleague at the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium, Ian Holtham. Almost contemporaneous is Andrian Pertout‘s L’architecture du cosmos from 2013-2014, first performed a year later in Paris by its commissioner: Chilean musician and activist, Maria-Paz Santibanez. This construct from the Melbourne-based writer/academic strikes me as the most rigorously organized work on the disc. |
With the challenging title of Eine kleine Nachtmusik (after Dorothea Tanning), Colin Spiers produced four movements in 2021 that owe nothing to any Mozartian predecessors and everything (including their titles) to the 1943 painting by the then-Surrealist American artist and – to put it in sexist terms – Max Ernst’s fourth (and last) wife. This enjoyed its first performance, I believe, from Alexander Gadjiev in Hobart a year after he’d won the Sydney Piano Competition for 2021. Bruce Crossman‘s Not Fading Resonance presents as a 2023 exercise in friendship for its dedicatee (pianist Harvey, on his 60th birthday) and sustained sounds from the keyboard, held notes and chords emerging out of rapid flurries of activity in a large-scale rondo form. |
The most recent composition. Vaughan McAlley‘s Toccata, was composed last year for Harvey and is the most tradition-echoing work on this CD. It demonstrates McAlley’s long background in choral singing (the Ensemble Gombert, Ormond College and Scots’ Church Choirs) and his mastery of ye olde-fashioned techniques of counterpoint and harmonic sequence. To thine own self be true, false wise-old-man Polonius said, and his dictum is carried out faithfully by this writer who lashes his Renaissance/Baroque colours to the mast without any self-deprecation. |
Selleck’s Liszt tribute is packed with references to the Hungarian composer’s B minor Piano Sonata, completed in 1853. She opens with an upward leap on a larger scale than the original’s bar 8 move to Allegro energico and it isn’t long before she introduces a version of the single-note tattoo that emerges in bar 14. Harvey’s powers at overwhelming the listener through relentless virtuosity are allowed free rein at certain points and Selleck shows less interest in the languorous themes of Liszt’s large-scale construct, concentrating her (and Harvey’s) energies on that upward leap and the descending G minor scale articulated in the Sonata’s second bar. |
Where Liszt’s score ends in B Major placid shadows, Selleck concludes her rhapsody on an upward flourish that serves as an affirmation rather than a reminiscence and is a valid reinforcement of this Homage‘s intent – a reminder of Liszt’s reputation across the centuries as a keyboard master of brilliance rather than a soulful poet, although he could be that all too easily; witness the Consolations, if you must. Harvey enters fully into this 19th century tapestry with contemporary threads, making the most of its Romantic undercarriage with persuasive zest. |
Pertout’s score is substantial and differs from two other compositions by being all of a piece and the longest in simple length. It’s intended to be a homage to Stockhausen, for which purpose he employs the German composer’s Klavierstuck IX which is, like Pertout’s opus, partly based on the Fibonacci series; three familiar pieces by Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit, Jeux d’eau, and Une barque sur l’ocean; and three obscure compositions produced in the middle-to-late years of his life by Ukrainian-born/American composer Leo Ornstein – A Morning in the Woods, A Long Remembered Sorrow, and Metaphor No. 3. |
These Ornstein works have no resemblance to the works that the writer produced in his young, ultra-avant garde days, but are more tonal, impressionist (well, the first two are), and prone to repeating patterns, as well as indulging a passion for setting four against three in terms of rhythm. You don’t come across anything as outlandish as the opening bars to Klavierstuck IX with its relentless chord repetitions, and the construct turns from 20th century elliptical to a kind of grave musical recueillement quickly; even the high-tessitura pointillism in these early-to-middle pages sounds more soft-edged than anything out of Darmstadt. |
The rapid single-note tattoo with which the work opens recurs often, as do quick clusters and trills but at first in the context of sustained chords – some urgent, some placid. The work’s centre shows a restlessness that mirrors the opening pages and the repetition and fragmentation bring Ornstein to mind as Pertout’s language imitates the semi-improvisatory harmonic movement (or lack of it) that obtains in the first two of the above-mentioned pieces. Certainly, you come across some Scarbo-indebted explosive jerks and a long stretch of filigree work that occupies the limelight towards the piece’s luminous conclusion might suggest Ravel’s fountains. |
But L’architecture speaks in Pertout’s own voice, in the end and, thanks to Harvey’s free-wheeling hands, it’s an unexpectedly amiable one. As for Colin Spiers’ suite based on aspects of Tanning’s painting. the opening Hallway brings Une barque sur l’ocean to mind with its relentless 11:8 bass line at the outset under a chain of right-hand fourths that suggests foreboding and uncertainty. Eventually, the repeated pattern transfers to the right-hand which lightens the atmosphere, if not completely removing the sense of menace, but the final reversion to bass rumbling restores the piece’s unsettling atmosphere. |
Next, Duality possibly refers to the two female human figures in the painting but might mean something completely different to the composer. It begins with some brisk high chords, some of them arpeggiated, that frame the piece’s pages. In between comes much hard-driving action which at times recalls those Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm that conclude Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, at others the Shrovetide Fair mobile stasis; a set of pages to keep you guessing. Next, Sunflower refers to the unnervingly large centrepiece of the painting, here represented by some slow-moving bass chords, followed by cadenza-type scintillations, both coming close to dialogue but having to contend with other matter before an ending which brings back that 11 demi-and-semiquaver gruppetti sequence from the work’s first pages: a kind of macabre poem in irrational menace, thanks to Harvey’s relentless delivery. |
Last is Doorway. There are four of these in Tanning’s painting, the furthest away slightly ajar. This opens in a kind of oppposition to Hallway with a regular 10 demi-semiquaver pattern in the right hand against which the left hand offers a melody of sorts. Before long, both hands are in the rapid tintinnabulation game and the melody becomes more stalwart before fragmenting and the 10-note pattern rises to the top of the keyboard while the left-hand returns to its original melody, now obscuring it with trills; which could be another version of that in-my-end-is-my-beginning scenario or it could mean we can escape into light through that half-opened door. |
Friedel’s ten-part collection opens with a series of solid and slow bass-heavy chords whose dissonance is muted by their low register until an accelerando about three-fifths of the way through, leading to a final chord that is sustained for an awfully long time. Next, a determined melody in a single isolated line is punctuated by a soft treble chord and a grinding bass cluster. This is followed by a belle-et-bete dialogue, a treble melody of some angularity answered by a gruff bass response, one after the other, until both reconcile with soft chords at either end of the spectrum. |
The fourth segment operates with the same contrast between high (reasonably) and low but the chords launch into each other, so that the energy is not between the two layers but an integration of both. Like its predecssors, this also ends with a long sustained texture. Not so with the following gruelling essay which operates for most of its length at either end of the keyboard, the hands operating simultaneously and sustaining the prevailing grim emotional landscape through a firmly administered atonality. |
The contrast between upper and lower voices is more satisfactorily drawn in the next set of pages where both follow their own paths, one note at a time with a few exceptions, mainly in the left hand for some short chords/intervals. It’s something like a hitherto-undiscovered Webern study: angular, uncompromising, honest. What follows is a complement, being labelled ‘vi. b’ and maintaining the same disjointed motion but sounding as though it’s following a single thread; once again, with some stand-out chords or intervals but the main thrust that of a one-line melody (aren’t they all? Better expressed as a chain of notes) spread across the keyboard’s full range. |
Track 8 (piece vii) shows more volatility. An irregular pattern of notes is outlined in both hands, then acquires a harmonic framework that seems to be in fourths or fifths (augmented and diminished – no consonances here, as far as I can tell) which aggregate on top of each other until a general pause (long), with pianissimo chords to finish. The second-last work operates on three levels: in the middle, another single-note melody. with a downward-heading semi-arpeggio in the bass and isolated fifths (perfect, I think) in alt, all operating at different points in time, apart from a few doublings between the middle and top levels of action. |
Last of all comes a variation on a chord. I think it’s G Major/minor and the piece begins with an unexpectedly strident challenge in its octave statement and percussive bottom-of-the-keyboard response. As the segment moves forward, its core acquires some notes, some of them fundamental to the chord, others peripheral; but the drama gradually yields to quiescence and the final page of this Track 10 ends with the same elongated resonance as obtained in Track 1. Now what any of this has to do with the quote from which Friedel’s composition takes its title, I’ve no idea. ‘Regard as one, this life, the next life, and the life in between.’ Thus spake the Tibetan sage Milarepa close to eleven centuries ago and I suppose we’re all pretty happy to go along with that advice but how the composer’s aphorisms bear on this – well, you work at it, grasshopper. But the score intrigues in its spartan directness and its innate consistency. |
Crossman’s work is an exercise in generating resonances, most effectively through pressing down notes silently so that they sound after a percussive explosion around them. But the composer is pursuing all sorts of resonances by juxtaposing registers and simply allowing the sustaining pedal to do its work and carry various layers across each other. By its nature, Not Fading Resonance is spasmodic, packed with abrupt note-play and over the top in its dynamic directions: for example, a septuple piano in bar 2 and a nonet sforzando in bar 3 which give an ocular fascination to the score-reader but present an impossibility for any performer. Still, Harvey observes this piece’s fits and tremors with his usual aplomb in controlling a sterling example of sonorous theatre. |
Last is McAlley’s tribute to French masters like Widor and Boellmann, although its opening is distinctly Bach-like with the right-hand playing a two-line gigue while the bass sets up what could have been a chorale melody, if only it hadn’t held some pretty wide interval leaps. A little further on and that base melody operates on two levels with our running gigue triplet pattern in the middle. Eventually, the striding bass is leavened by middle register chords while the right hand is occupied with McAlley’s unending dance, and the work ends with an eloquently extended tierce. Written with organists in mind, it sounds thunderously satisfying in this reading, Harvey as happy in handling its semi-traditional harmonic language as he is with the several vocabularies of the other writers whose music graces this benign and rewardingly catholic CD. |
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