Of Travel Sensations

Sensations of Travel Hebrides Ensemble Chamber music by NIGEL OSBORNE of The Piano Tuner Sensations Travel Three preludes and five fugues for piano trio – version with soundscapes 1 Prelude I ‘Tuning’ [2:43] Chamber music by NIGEL OSBORNE (b. 1948) 2 Fugue I ‘Tetrachord, Hexachord’ [1:28] 3 Prelude II ‘Sensations of Travel’ [1:31] 4 Fugue II ‘Sea Bird’ [0:55] Hebrides Ensemble 5 Fugue III ‘Dragonfly’ [1:05] 6 Fugue IV ‘Tiger’ [2:02] (tracks 1–12, 17, 19–20) Zoë Beyers violin 7 Prelude III ‘Song of Loss’ [3:06] Catherine Marwood viola (tracks 12, 17, 19–20) 8 Fugue V ‘Fractal Counterpoint’ [3:17] William Conway cello (tracks 1–8, 12, 17–20) / director Espionage: three miniature sonatas Rachael Clegg oboe (tracks 12, 17) Studies in Poussin and happenstance Maximiliano Martín clarinet (tracks 17, 19–20) 9 Et in arcadia ego [4:05] Philip Moore piano (tracks 1–8, 12–16, 19–20) Broken memories / digital surveillance 10 The triumph of the poet [1:30] Shakespeare in the Kremlin To Nigel, with respect and gratitude for many years of inspiring collaboration 11 A dance to the music of time [4:35] The art historian and the spy / a sentimental tune 12 Balkan Dances and Laments [15:08] Ecological Studies 13 White Bird [1:07] 14 Kuda Kepang – Mudskipper Macaque [1:13] This recording was made possible with generous support from Creative Scotland, Kimie Trust, McGlashan Charitable Trust and the Binks Trust. 15 Osbornia – Makyung [0:53] 16 Egret Kingfisher Sandpiper [3:54] Kimie Trust was established through a bequest by Kimie Okada (1929– 2008), who loved music all her life, moved from Tokyo to Edinburgh in 1993 17 Zone [9:21] and was always keen to support music in the country that she had made her home. She regularly attended concerts by Hebrides Ensemble. 18 My beloved, where are you going / Adagio for Vedran Smailovic [4:52] Preludio y canción Recorded on 6-8 February & 7 May 2018 Cover image: Man in Edirne (b/w photo, at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh 1965) / © SZ Photo / Gert Mähler / 19 Preludio [2:50] Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter Bridgeman Images 20 Canción [4:42] 24-bit digital editing: Matthew Swan Design: Drew Padrutt 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Booklet editor: John Fallas Total playing time [70:28] Piano: Steinway model D, 2016, Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK serial no 600443 www.delphianrecords.co.uk premiere recordings Piano technician: Norman W. Motion Notes on the music fugue [from French fugue, an adaptation of the Italian It is January 1993. Nigel Osborne is playing Like Drake, Osborne had made a journey in the Kremlin’, ‘The art historian and the spy / a fuga, literally ‘flight’; from the Latinfuga , related to violin beside his friend Vedran Smailović, predicated on music’s ability to heal. Following sentimental tune’. fugure ‘to flee’] cellist of the Sarajevo Opera, in the Skendirija experiences in cultural resistance activities in Stadium. This is the venue where, only nine Poland in the early 1970s and Czechoslovakia in The complex balance of viewpoints, itself 1. A polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized years previously, Torvill and Dean stunned the the early 1980s, in 1992 he began taking action reminiscent of a Poussin painting, is captured according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced world with their figure-skating performance to against the war unfolding in Bosnia-Herzegovina. in Osborne’s ‘Et in arcadia ego’. A three-note from time to time with various contrapuntal devices. Ravel’s Bolero at the 1984 Winter Olympics. This is how, first of all, he found himself playing descending motif – a lament? – slowly emerges. But Sarajevo is a city at war now, and the in the Sarajevo snow. On subsequent visits to It births other ideas: a harp-like plucking, a 2. Psychiatry. A flight from one’s own identity … stadium is a ruin. Osborne and Smailović’s the city he began to develop a practice of music meandering ornament played on harmonics. Yet concert outfits of white tie and tails are set therapy for traumatised children, first in Sarajevo none take on a full form, and the music soon The quotation is from Daniel Mason’s 2002 off by strong, practical boots, planted ankle- and then more extensively in Mostar. What he collapses entirely into a scratching, crackling novel The Piano Tuner, which itself is quoting deep in the snow. Among the pieces they learnt there he has subsequently offered to other sound (produced by moving the fingers hard the Oxford English Dictionary. In 2004, Nigel play – before they are spotted by snipers and children in warzones in Israel/Palestine, Sierra against the violin’s fingerboard). ‘The triumph Osborne completed an opera based on Mason’s have to cut short their impromptu concert – Leone, Uganda and elsewhere. of the poet’ – marked con fuoco throughout – book, which also provided the basic material for is Osborne’s Adagio, written especially for sounds hardly triumphant at all, but possessed his piano trio recorded here. Smailović, ‘a cellist with frostbitten fingers’. Often working in opposition to violent and by a Faustian will to self-destruction that only oppressive regimes, Osborne is therefore no abates at the last moment. Yet it recalls art’s This chain of works on a common theme – itself Smailović came to international fame as ‘the stranger to the interaction of art and surveillance. ability to soothe conflict, one of the recurring in a sense a fugue – begins with Mason’s story. cellist of Sarajevo’ when he began in May It is a juxtaposition of themes that recurs in themes of Osborne’s work. Its subtitle comes Edgar Drake is the piano tuner, working in 1992 to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor in one of his current projects, a film-opera on the from the title of a play by Ivo Štivičić that London in 1886. Out of nowhere, and in stark the ruins and graveyards of Sarajevo, as an subject of the Cambridge spies, for which the Osborne helped stage on the Brionian Islands off contrast to his regular round of gentleman’s clubs act of resistance to the destruction and a violin solo Espionage serves as a preliminary the coast of Croatia, where his Cambridge spies and the homes of the city’s upper classes, he memorial to those being killed around him. sketch. Subtitled ‘studies in Poussin and film is set; the play tells the story of Stalin’s dying receives a commission to tune a piano in Burma, ‘According to many,’ Osborne has written, happenstance’, its three short movements draw encounter with an actor. recently annexed by the British Empire. The ‘this marked the start of the civil resistance together many themes, yet connect them with instrument belongs to the military doctor Anthony movement … [He] became an icon for a city a lightness and efficiency that is characteristic of The last movement of the three, ‘A dance to Carroll, eccentric but with an unmatchable record that chose to see itself as dignified, cultured all the works on this recording. Drawing on the the music of time’, may be closest to its visual of maintaining the peace, who first demanded and European.’ The piece Osborne wrote fact that Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge inspiration. We can certainly hear elements of that the army bring an Erard grand for him into for him mixes echoes of the Albinoni – it is Five, wrote extensively on Nicolas Poussin Time’s lyre, depicted in the painting, in the open- the Burmese jungle. After some reservations, written in an abstracted G minor, and features (1594–1665), all three movements are named string pizzicatos, and the circling of the dancers Drake accepts the commission and travels deep a central flurry of quasi-Baroque semiquaver after paintings by him, two of them renowned in the semiquaver passages with which they into colonial south-east Asia. figuration – with allusions to the descending masterpieces. The movements each take darkly alternate. But for all the apparent lightness there melodies that signify lament in the traditional suggestive subtitles of their own: ‘Broken is a melancholy tone, which solidifies briefly as a * * * music of many Eastern European countries. memories / digital surveillance’, ‘Shakespeare tune in its own right and casts a shadow across Notes on the music the whole movement. The subtitle here is, of Tarkovsky, who died in 1986. Osborne was a one of those artefacts – in Osborne’s piece – makes Osborne’s work in music therapy course, a reference to Blunt himself, acting at great admirer; the director’s style influenced the being the music of Bach, whose contrapuntal so successful. (Something similar may be the intersection of aesthetics and realpolitik. opera he was writing at the time of Tarkovsky’s invention is submerged beneath a rapidly heard in the Ecological Studies’ snapshot death, The Electrification of the Soviet Union, flowing surface. juxtapositions of Asian and European dances, The combination of light and dark continues and he knew Tarkovsky’s composer, Eduard flora and fauna.) in Balkan Dances and Laments. It was Artemyev, through the journal Contemporary * * * composed in 2001, six years after the end of the Music Review, of which Osborne was a The principle is developed throughout The Bosnian war yet with its devastation and trauma founding editor. Zone is named after a strange As Drake travels, he is transformed. Encounters Piano Tuner: the two styles are contrasted continuing to resound among its survivors and territory in Tarkovsky’s 1979 sci-fi masterpiece both natural and personal draw him further from side by side in Fugues II and III, but in Fugue V in their cities.

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