Fine artistry exposed at last

cliveoconnell

Jul 30

IN FLIGHT

This musician is a new name to me but not to guitar aficionados in Canberra or the Riverina Conservatorium in Wagga Wagga. This CD, recorded in early 2019 at the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Weston, UK, has been delayed by the universal plague that reduced serious music-making to a dribble for at least two years. Its content is, to put it mildly, eclectic with some classics like Sor's Introduction, Theme and Variations on 'O cara armonia' (that distracting little number from Mozart's The Magic Flute), and a quartet of Latin-inflected favourites in Morel's Danza Brasilera, Lauro's La Negra, Estrellita by Ponce, and - just to show the performer's 1990 credentials - Piazzolla's La Muerte del Angel.

Adding to the regular repertoire security blanket, Gretton performs Mertz's Fantaisie Hongroise and tucks in three pieces by Weiss. For a bit of contemporary relief, he outlines The Prince's Toys suite by Moscow-born Nikita Koshkin. Just as interesting is his own five-part collection from 2013, Flock, which gives us Gretton's musings on Australian birds. And he concludes the CD with another of his compositions: Inarticulate Music, composed after Gretton's move to Wagga as Deputy Director and Head of Guitar.

Earliest in time is the Weiss trilogy: a Fuga, Passacaille, and the well-thumbed Capriccio. Gretton gives excellent interpretations of them, certainly superior to anything I heard from other guitarists when scrabbling around for comparisons on the internet. The D/B minor fugue version allows for plenty of liberties in placing the bass line in the instrument's lowest octave or using an upward transposition, e.g. in the middle of bar 10, or across bars 32 and 33. Also, the ornamentation is very discreet, like the small semiquaver run interpolated in bar 40.

He sets up the passacaglia by playing the initial seven bars twice before launching into the 11 variations, which are accounted for with touching sensibility, nowhere better than in the 8th variant in 3rds and 6ths, and the following two semiquaver-rich strophes before a moving reversion to the original: a Goldberg in miniature. What strikes you particularly about the Capriccio is its rapidity, yet all lines remain clear and unfudged, with some finely resonant bass work (viz. bars 4 to 6) and a restrained outline of when the fugato stops from bars 50 to 53 and the splayed chords emerge as an unexpected, final jeu d'esprit.

Sor's variations on Papageno's Das klinget so herrlich features among the composer's most popular works. The portentous preliminary bars, all 24 of them, serve as a kind of tongue-in-cheek prelude to the infectious, superbly balanced melody that Sor elaborates. Gretton observes all the repeats in this, the CD's longest track, with an expert eye for second-time-around changes and an effective use of vibrato and that muted effect achieved by plucking above the fingerboard rather than directly above the sound hole. Of course, the player uses that time-honoured trope of setting loud against soft in identical repeated passages but it isn't over-worked. Still, this is a reputable sequence, coming fairly close to the opera's premiere and before the advent of the thunder-and-lightning virtuoso.

Speaking of which, Mertz's fantaisie, the first of 3 Morceaux from an 1857 posthumous publication, is a splendid display piece with as many separate sections as a Liszt rhapsody, like a 15-bar lassan marked Lugubre, followed by an Allegro vivace that stands in for a friska. As with the Sor, Gretton includes or ignores bass notes as he pleases, omitting several low fundamentals for reasons (I assume) of articulation clarity. But he follows the wilful Romantic attitude to metre - taking his time over the Adagio maestoso con entusiasmo, and the two volante brief cadenzas.

Then, when he comes to the final 1 and a 1/2 pages, he is an exhibitionist's delight, playing nearly all the notes I find in an old Haslinger edition and elevating the tension in a dazzling series of semiquaver patterns for the jubilant A Major of the maestoso. No, it's not profound, but it's not trying to be anything but exuberant and nationalistically coloured in the Liszt vein; the first 15 of the Hungarian Rhapsodies were available for general consumption by 1853.

Ponce's Estrellita of 1912 remains the Mexican composer's most well-known melody, having been subjected to many transformations, but it's rarely heard in its original form - as a song, a cancion mexicana . But then, how many contemporary vocalists have the required range of a 13th? The arrangement used by Gretton, attributed to Scots guitar master David Russell, underlines the lyric's plaintive quality with plenty of space allowed for the vocal line to breathe. A pity that the song's second half was not repeated.

La Muerte del Angel was written as incidental music for a play in 1962 and, in its original shape, is a typical Piazzolla affirmation, packing an impressive punch in its outer sections which cradle a quite substantial central lyric. Gretton plays Leo Brouwer's arrangement which expands the Argentinean composer's horizon with an introduction that goes into improvisation-suggestive territory before settling into the biting, catchy main topic. To be honest, I think Gretton plays this piece better than its arranger, with a deft whimsicality colouring the introduction's more fragmentary elements and a powerful rasgueado attack at the work's dynamic highpoints. As well, unlike several other interpreters, he doesn't underplay the final chord's inbuilt ambivalence.

Another Argentinian, Jorge Morel, produced a samba in his Danza Brasilera of 1968, and Gretton plays it straight, without any irregularities of rhythm; it's as though he's accompanying dancers who don't look for any idiosyncrasies. You can hear a nice sense of urgency throughout this as the main theme's recurrences lead to a kind of return to a turbulent base after some more texturally transparent excursions, like the central 14-bar repeated bracket leading into a chain or two of quick single quavers before the catchy principal melody returns: excellent articulation throughout, especially the no-fuss negotiation of the harmonics patches.

Last in this Latin bracket, Antonio Lauro's 1976 La Negra (third in his Triptico suite for Segovia, after Armida and Madrugada) is approached with a more supple rhythmic outline, including some fetching pauses as at the end of bar 16 each time it comes around, later in the work's central section at the end of bar 32, and - most lingeringly - at the return to bar 2 for the second-last time. This interpretation is a fine example of controlled sentiment with a graceful lilt illustrated by several carefully positioned portamenti.

Russian guitarist Nikita Koshkin achieved initial prominence with his suite The Prince's Toys of 1980, a variant on Ravel's L'enfant et les sortileges plot where the abused turn on the abuser; in this case, the toys take the prince to another world/dimension. Gretton plays five of the six elements in this collection, omitting the final Grand Toys' Parade. His opening, The mischievous prince, is a gratifying setting-up of the central character's psychopathology in which portamenti play a large part as well as some fiercely (potentially sadistic) hard-hitting single-notes and chords; the whole ending either in melancholy or menace, according to your taste.

Some of the effects achieved during The mechanical monkey are remarkable. A side-drum imitation is highly persuasive but no more so than the cymbal clashes that the toy produces with extraordinary fidelity. Added to which, the central pages in 6/8 (or a variant) pass along with sterling fluency and irreproachable security of left-hand work. Next, The doll with the blinking eyes becomes more intriguing the longer it lasts with Koshkin including in his piece two articulation problems that afflict all guitarists: the audible swipe when rapidly changing fingering positions, and the buzz that comes about when a string vibrates against frets. Both make for fine image suggestiveness, probably bettered by the final music-box harmonics that come in the piece's final pages.

The soldiers opens bravely enough with tuckets and trumpet imitations, the former achieved by a unique series of intervals rather like an organ's mixture stop. The movement sticks to a quick march tempo for about half its length when material starts disintegrating until, by the end, the martial sounds have been mutated, the toy soldiers shadows of their former glory, the prince's miniature army falling on hard times. Here again, Koshkin's technical skills are outlined with considerable craft by Gretton. As for The prince's coach, this begins bravely enough with plenty of assurance and forward progression that eventually accelerates until the inevitable crash when the unleashed horses gallop off into the distance.

The whole suite is written for a virtuoso performer with the ability to take on novel sound-production demands and remain unafraid to indulge in sound imitations with panache. Gretton fits the bill with a mastery of Koshkin's technical panoply and the composer's blend of vocabularies, mainly coming down on the side of neo-classicism best exemplified by the leading 20th century Russian composers, both resident and expatriate.

So we come to the guitarist's own compositions. Gretton's Flock includes the currawong, magpie, blue wren, galah and rainbow lorikeet. and his CD's booklet is illustrated with five water colours by Penny Deacon from which this ornithologically-challenged observer can identify three birds with some certainty. We are not in Messiaenland where the bird calls are notated and indicated, as in Oiseaux exotiques, Catalogue d'oiseaux, or even Le Merle noir. Gretton is more concerned with each bird's character - or, better, its characteristics. So his Currawong presents as jaunty, almost cakewalking: the C. J. Dennis of birds, staying firmly on the ground before a transfiguring ending rich in harmonics. Unlike a Collingwood supporter, the Magpie is a conversationalist - or he could be involved in a fluent soliloquy; this personality is amiable enough, apart from the occasional abrupt outburst.

With the Blue Wren, we come across a questing, inquisitive busybody who suddenly bursts into a flurry of activity; the following Galah is similar if more consistent in his activity before normal behaviour gives way to near-aggressively restive, then off-the-wall temperamental flights (the CD's shortest track). Finally, Gretton's Rainbow Lorikeet begins with a motif/melody like its predecessors but accretes more lines as it progresses. At its opening, this seems the most harmonically conservative member of the set but, as with some of the others, it moves out of an avian comfort zone into a dissonant and unpredictable landscape with powerful, confrontational chords. Finally, the piece returns to its opening melody, immediately more rich in its setting before a conclusion of heightened power.

Yes, the bird titles aren't necessarily attached to the music itself and one man's lorikeet is another woman's buzzard. Yet each of these five vignettes has a distinct flavour which might as well represent the animal of its title. Gretton writes that, when overseas, he missed Australia's bird sounds and so we have to approach his suite as a kind of memento sequence, even an exercise in patriotic nostalgia. It's not on the same intellectual level as the French master's imagery but it's certainly easier on the ear.

In the CD's last track, Gretton is responding to a conversation with a painter who decried the verbiage surrounding art, wondering why art cannot be allowed to speak for itself. Inarticulate Music attempts to create a music that requires no explanation, no exegesis, no apologia. It consists of an alternation between repeated common chords (Major mainly, with one minor excursion) and single notes and, in that, it resembles a simple man's The Unanswered Question. It's probably the most conservative piece on the CD in terms of form, vocabulary, melodic content and metrical variety. But it makes for a placid conclusion to Gretton's considerable efforts, a simple Amen to a string of finely-executed works from across a wide time-frame.