THRENODY
Michael Kieran Harvey
Move Records MD 3475
Here is a re-issue by Move of a recording that was printed almost 30 years ago by the Astra Chamber Music Society. Re-mastered by the indispensable Martin Wright, this CD underlines with pretty heavy scoring the debt that Australian music owes to Harvey, whose dedication to the local product (both the significant and the not-so-remarkable) has remained unswerving across his long, seemingly tireless career. What you hear in this collection is evidence of his professionalism and insights, handling works by six composers (and a couple of his own) with skill and sympathy.
Harvey begins with his own stunning Toccata DNA pf 1993 and later gives us his lesser-known Addict from the following year. Between these two, he plays Carl Vine's Five Bagatelles of 1994, Stuart Campbell's Quaquaversal from the same year, Eight Preludes by John McCaughey coming from 1991-3, Andrew Byrne's Within Stanzas of 1993, Eight Bagatelles by Keith Humble written in 1992, and James Anderson's 1994 Reveria im Neuen Stil. He splits the Vine pieces by conserving the last - Threnody - for his final track. All these pieces occupy a compressed compositional time-span, testament to the performer's intense curatorship as well as demonstrating a sudden temporal rush to the Australian compositional head/brain from composers both well-known and obscure.
Still, there's not much new to say about this re-issue of a significant body of work that's been around for so long (that's assuming that the Astra CD has been available over the years). The portentous opening to Harvey's toccata with its slow-moving segments brings to mind the variety of Buxtehude before a launch into ostinato-heavy rapidity and that unstoppable headlong flight that seems to me inimitable, this composer-pianist's own voice speaking with absolute conviction and generating the sort of excitement that you will find only at odd moments in this disc's later tracks.
With Vine's Five Bagatelles, we encounter another master-pianist/composer at work in a brilliantly balanced sequence, opening with a rather benign Darkly that presents some material that looks complex on paper but sounds transparent; for example at its splayed chord agglomerations between bars 22 and 25. This is succeeded by the raid-fire syncopations and time-signature oscillations of Leggiero e legato which enjoys a crisp, sparkling run-through.
The control of meshed colour returns in Gentle which opens and closes with more of those splayed chords surrounding the statement of a quiet melody that could have strayed in from an unpublished set of Debussy preludes; shadowy and suggestive in its outer reaches, placid at the core. The untitled fourth bagatelle proposes a raunchy jazz-inflected stroll, like Gershwin's American brought forward 66 years, but the jauntiness interrupted by more sustained chords offering a brief hiatus, before a nifty note-cluster conclusion expertly accomplished by Harvey.
As many would know, Vine wrote his Threnody for the Australian National AIDS Trust fund-raising dinner, the other four pieces added later with the total work premiered by Harvey at the end of 1994, Its subtitle - for all the innocent victims - is reflected in its character which follows a simple stepping motion that suggests a hymn with an added high mixture stop at a 5th in alt. The result suggests resignation, calm acceptance of an inevitability, and the essential blamelessness of all those trapped in this once-fatal infection. It makes for a sobering conclusion to the CD, a respite from the complexities and abrasiveness of much that precedes it.
Coming round to Campbell's Quaquaversal, we face a virtuosic complex opening with some massive chords reminiscent of a cathedrale engloutie for our times before a fugal interplay that alters to a ort of ostinato bass supporting a wealth of coruscating darts and flashes. Then the composer's promise of fluency rather than development sort of takes over with several contrasting episodes (with a mid-level repeated chord featuring in the work's centre, surrounded by a wealthy of Harveyesque bursts of brilliance). But then, the work was written for the pianist by this one-time member of La Trobe University's Faculty of Music and it features some pages of dazzling pointillism as it approaches its toccata-like conclusion.
I'm sure a wealth of theoretical depth underpins this work which bursts with verve but you have to assume that the basic impetus comes from the title's middle six letters. Whatever the case, this is a splendid vehicle for the pianist's panoply of skills. From another one-time labourer in the La Trobe vineyard, McCaughey's collection moves us into a more refined landscape; four of his preludes lasting less than a minute, the other four averaging 80 seconds in length. The opening Fluent lives up to its name with some restrained ambles at reserved speed up and down the keyboard. You hesitate to typify the vocabulary but I'd probably light on a compulsive atonality. Presto segreto is not a whirlwind rush but a series of lurches from one pivot to the next, eventually working into its own secret by slowing to a concluding crawl.
With No. 3, Animated, hastening, McCaughey takes us into just that: an atmosphere of abrupt bursts of action punctuated by pivotal mini-pauses, as though the protagonist is faced with a series of dead-ends that set him/her/them doubling back for an alternative outlet. Quick presents as a monophonic sprint, for the most part - possessed by a neurotic elfin urgency. Next, the odd aspect to A sense of slow background tempo is that you're aware of a rhythmic reticence, as though the work's progress is being conducted on two levels or in twin layers, even if the overall impression is of a sturdy post-Webernianism.
Mind you, Semplice carries on where its predecessor left off, typified by a forward mobility in which the motives or thematic cells meld into a well-woven fabric; more a handkerchief than a carpet. An overt contrast arrives with Leggiero, recitativo where the principal end is fitfulness, rapid squiggles providing the solid events in this brevity that you could call either whimsical or neurasthenic, depending on your currently predominant sense of aesthetic charity. McCaughey's concluding Serene seems to be more a journey towards the proposed state rather than a depiction of its prevalence as the piece moves with a confident angularity that occasionally amounts to aggression before a brief resolution.
Byrne recently became a co-director with McCaughey of the Astra organization and he also nurtured his own academic roots in the La Trobe Faculty of Music. After an initial hearing, I thought I discerned four separate sections to this composer's Within Stanzas; take a few more and you realize that there are a lot more of them. It's just that they bleed into each other with remarkable fluency so that a sound-production gesture or a timbral-interplay sequence becomes part of a new context or landscape. Mind you, Byrne is lavish with his material which overwhelms your desire for instant auditory analysis, notably in the opening pages' rhythmic and dynamic conundrums that dazzle with their effective unpredictability. Here again is anther composition tailored to Harvey's brilliance and premiered by him at an Astra concert, but it is noteworthy that Byrne has withdrawn this score from sale or public performance. He has apparently moved on, and so should we.
Closer to a minute shorter than McCaughey's preludes, Humble's brevities show the pianist-composer in assured mode, the score rich in awareness of the instrument's breadth of colours and most impressive in its rapid-fire virtuosity. You find an illustration of this in the opening Fast which exposes an assured forward thrust while ranging over the piano's compass before a contradictory slow conclusion. The following Slow is still an instance of forward motion, couched in a compositional style that brings to mind the 19th century more than the composer's dodecaphonic home ground, with a rich, sustained major chord to cap proceedings.
Easily the longest of these bagatelles is No. 3, For Tony P., very slow, molto rubato. This could be an elegy or just a quiet eulogy; it's the most placid and stress-less of the collection, opening woth a minor 3rd cell and expanding on this in the best Berg style with a prominent byway to a set of major 3rds articulated at dead-slow before a diabolus in musica finishing interrogation. Move it opens with a confrontational syncopated sequence, full of fast-flying bravura before a fade-to-black close to its 30 seconds length. With Agitato, we're in Harvey Land through a chain of rapid-fire oscillations across both ends of the keyboard in a fierce display of an unsettled musical state. The No. 6, EKE Bounce easily (and naturally) continues along the frenzy-in-short-bursts path with some brilliant percussive attacks from Harvey before the familiar wind-down final bars.
Slow impresses me as a valse sentimentale manquée, even if the pulse can work against it. But you sense a kind of regret, a nostalgia in this second-longest of the bagatelles, after the (in its context) substantial No. 3. To end, Humble gives us a burleske that is much shorter than the track listing. This is good-humoured and another opportunity to wonder at Harvey's assured command of what amounts to a study in exuberance. This work brings to a close (as far as I can tell) the CD's association with La Trobe University where Humble was the first Professor of Music from 1974 to 1984, that faculty eventually shutting down in 1999 to general dismay.
Anderson remains a shadowy figure in Melbourne's musical world but his Reveria was written for Harvey which speaks to his presence on the city's contemporary music scene in the early 1900s, at least. This reverie is pitched to the top half of the keyboard with a few low pedal notes to remind you how high is the piece's operating field. Anderson's projected state of detachment is packed with vivid flashes featuring frequent flurries of cascading gruppetti punctuated by solid blocks of notes and centre-register diversions. The composer's emphasis on upper-level flashes does become wearying but Harvey's account forefronts any inbuilt timbral and emotional variety.
The pianist's Addict involves a collaboration with sound engineer Michael Hewes who brings computer processing into the mix, complementing Harvey's playing. Here is the most advanced composition on the CD, chiefly because of its parallels and distortions of the live performance, if only in patches to begin with, but eventually the partnership becomes more challenging. Harvey begins with a rapidly repeated note like a tremolo and he finishes in the same way, but the work evolves soon enough into a rapid-fire moto perpetuo that flummoxes with its tiers of activity.
Hewses employs several electronic/computer techniques, none more prominent than that mirroring effect where Harvey's sound is duplicated by what sounds like a West Indies steel drum; this has the effect of both reinforcing your impression of Harvey's trademark agility and also distracts from its purity - which might be a comment on the title character's state of mind. Whatever the case, the collaboration makes for a wild ride, the emotional state on view very hyped-up and certainly not comatose; this is an addict in search of relief and, even by the end, the sufferer is undergoing nightmares in recollection.
As noted above, Vine's Threnody brings the CD to a close, an oasis after frenzy in more than one sense. Still, the recording is well worth obtaining (or re-obtaining) as a witness to Harvey's unfailing musicianship as well as a document of this country's (well, Melbourne's, mainly) aggressively active music scene and the wealth of talent at work in it across these few years.
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