PIANTHOLOGY Seven contemporary compositions for piano Nicky Losseff, piano David Lumsdaine: Six Postcard Pieces 4’57 1 Overture 0’56 2 March 0’38 3 Rhapsody 0’53 4 Nocturne 0’28 5 Sonata 1’32 6 Toccata 0’30 7 Jo Kondo: A Dance For Piano, ‘Europeans’ 8’22 Anthony Gilbert: Three Papillon Postcards 2’27 8 Gavarnie 0’44 9 Manto ringlet 0’54 10 Mountain small white 0’49 11 Thomas Simaku: Des pas chromatiques (hommage à Debussy) 9'44 Sadie Harrison: Impresa Amorosa 18’33 12 Falcon 1’58 13 Tortoise 0’28 14 Saltaire Cross 3’36 15 Porcupine 0’57 16 Lizard 4’29 17 Labyrinth 3’27 18 Candle 3’38 19 Hilda Parades: Caligrama 7’47 20 Ed Hughes: Orchid 3 9’11 Total timing: 61’01 David Lumsdaine Six Postcard Pieces David Lumsdaine writes: In the days before e-mail, we often sent postcards to our friends and relations. They carried a message as well as a picture. If we were on holidays, the picture might evoke something of the flavour of the place we were visiting; or the image might serve as a reflection of our humour. The message itself might express the briefest greeting or ramble endlessly, in tiny scribbles, all round the back of the card, barely leaving space for address and stamp. These particular postcards were written to my old friend, Anthony Gilbert. They are ruminations on gesture: musical gestures, gestures of movements by dancers, puppets, marionettes – evocations, responses, and, not least, the physical gestures of our hands on the keyboard as we play them 1: The first postcard is obviously a visit to a French overture. Most of it is very precise, but some of the beats are missing, some of the accents have become misplaced. There are several smudges, but that’s probably a signature in the last three bars. 2: The first bar of number 2 is missing; the metre wobbles in the third bar. Clearly, somebody or something is learning to march. Maybe it remembers a visit to some Czech puppets. 3: As well as meaning an epic poem, rhapsody can mean an ecstatic expression of feeling, or an exuberant composition. 4: Nocturne – this opening suggests quite a long piece, but, I’m sure everyone will feel the mystery of the hour and sense the space opening out. 5: The Sonata is more problematic: it is, in the original sense of the word, ‘sounded’ as distinct from ‘sung’. Is it possible the title makes any reference to classical sonata style? There’s that funny skipping music that comes from nowhere. Paul Klee? 6: Fortunately, the last postcard in the bundle is brief, legible and records a happy visit to Ravel. Gesture is everything, right up to the signature. These are the thoughts of the composer coming across a bundle of postcards held together with a rubber band in a shoe box at the back of an old-fashioned second-hand book shop. He thinks, ‘Why, those cards were once mine; I wrote them many years ago. What was I thinking of?’ Jo Kondo A Dance For Piano, ‘Europeans’ Jo Kondo’s A Dance for Piano: ‘Europeans’ is wonderfully nuanced. Jo has called it ‘purely abstract music’, which suggests that its narrative will tend to be one of form and process, rather than one of gesture or topic. Kondo also says that the piece should have a touch of the caprice about it, ‘a touch of dance flavour’. It’s an extremely subtle dance, however; I sense the dance connection as periods of positive energy (a feeling of things winding up); negative energy (a feeling of things winding down); and periods of stasis, as if one were standing waiting to see what happens next. Jo Kondo writes: A Dance for Piano, ‘Europeans’ was composed very quickly on Christmas Day 1990, almost in an extemporaneous fashion, improvising not on the keyboard but directly on music paper. This is perhaps reflected in the rather capricious character of the music. The subtitle comes from the fact that I was reading Henry James’s Europeans at the time. This is all that relates this piece to the novel, with no further connection either in content or structure. The piece is purely abstract music, with a touch of dance flavour due to its rhythmic character. Anthony Gilbert Three Papillon Postcards Anthony Gilbert’s Papillon Postcards are over before you know it, and conjure up a tiny, sparse world in a few minuscule acts straight away. Anthony Gilbert writes: Gavarnie: Imagine wandering on grassy slopes and sighting a smallish, dark-brown butterfly, bronze-tinted, a gentle flyer, a little shy, with small, beady ringlet eyes on each wing. Manto ringlet: Imagine walking high up in the Pyrenees in the wind, and sighting a small, very dark brown butterfly with ginger flashes on its wings, blown hither and thither and finally coming to rest on a little bush. Mountain small white: This is a beautiful, delicately-shaped butterfly, white with just a touch of gold if seen with its wings folded. Imagine elegant, airy flutterings on the mountainside, in bright warm sunshine. Thomas Simaku Des pas chromatiques (hommage à Debussy) Thomas Simaku writes: The starting point for Des pas chromatiques was Debussy’s piano piece Des pas sur la neige, especially its opening interval. My main compositional aim was to explore in details the idiosyncratic expression and the sonic palette offered by modality and, most importantly, their integration within the overall chromatic idiom of the piece – hence the title. Apart from the opening interval, there are no quotations from Des pas sur la neige or any other works. But the extensive use of the colouristic qualities of the instrument and the predominantly ‘static’ quality of the music could well be described as a ‘remote echo’ of Debussy’s sound-world. Like Jo Kondo’s work, Des pas chromatiques is more obviously an exploration of ideas that don’t refer to familiar musical ‘topics’. However, it does have a strong series of aural ‘images’ which repeat, in varied forms, to give us a narrative logic that we need to make sense of a musical work. Thomas calls our attention to the opening ‘interval’; it’s as much the characteristic rhythm of those 2 opening notes that form one of the main features of Des pas chromatiques. In Debussy’s piece, the feeling of a relentless journey of staggering steps is created by the unremitting repetition of that dotted rhythm. In Thomas’s piece, however, the characteristics of Debussy’s opening figure become transformed straight away. In fact, there are only really two compositional ideas in Des pas chromatiques: those that stem from the Debussy figure, and the chromatic flourishes that break out from the Debussy-derived material. The Debussy figure often seems to appear with the opposite rhythmic emphasis of the original – the accent on the second, long note, not the first, short note; but then again, if you think of the Debussy figure being drawn out, almost losing its dotted character, then that gives a clue to the relationship between many of the melodic lines. Sadie Harrison Impresa Amorosa 1 FALCON ‘Semper’ (Always): Piero de’Medici, 1414–1469 2 TORTOISE ‘Festina lente’ (Make haste slowly): Cosimo de’ Medici, 1389–1464 3 SALTIRE CROSS ‘In virido teneras exurit medulas’ (In youth love burns to the marrow): Piero de’Medici, 1471–1503) 4 PORCUPINE ‘Cominus et eminus’ (Hand to hand, but out of hand’s reach): Louis XII, 1462–1515 5 LIZARD ‘Quod huic deest me tourquet’ (That in which she is most wanting torments me): Frederick II of Gonzaga, 1500–540 6 LABYRINTH ‘Forse che si, forse che no’ (Maybe yes, maybe no!): Gonzagas, early 1500s 7 CANDLE ‘Sufficit lumen in tenebris’ (One light suffices in the dark): Isabella d’Este, 1525–1530 These pieces are exciting and moving by turns, and tap into an earlier 20th-century world of texture and narrative – more akin to Bartók and Britten than Boulez and Berio. Sadie Harrison writes: Impresa Amorosa is a set of seven short pieces for solo piano. The work takes its name from the 15th-century practice in which jousting knights and their ladies exchanged love tokens (impresa amorosa), the identity and significance of which were known only to each other. The 16th-century impresa consisted of an image and accompanying motto, each complementing the other so that neither alone could convey the full meaning. The picture was known as the corpo (body) and the words as the anima (spirit) without which the body has no life. Whilst retaining its more superficial function of the riddle, the impresa was also adopted by the neo-platonists as one of the symbols of the inadequacy of language to communicate effectively, and as such, for them it represented an escape from the limitations of discursive speech. It is at this point that the relationship between the aesthetic of the impresa and the musical Impresa Amorosa begins. The pieces are short, some less than a minute long, each characterized differently in response to the chosen impresa. Occasionally, the music attempts to paint a tone picture of the image, as in the flickering light of the Candle, but more often it seeks to illuminate the motto – the endless, unresolved cycle of the Falcon, the false-starts, dead-ends and repeated changes of direction in the Labyrinth, the schizophrenic movements of a speeding Tortoise, and the anguish expressed through the motto of the Cross. On a technical level, the pieces are unified by a repeating pattern of notes, on an expressive one, by the motto ‘Sufficit lumen in tenebris’ which, accompanied by the image of a single burning candle, formed the impresa of Isabella d’Este from 1525–1530.