Martin Jones piano
LYRITA SRCD 436
The Australian composer Graham Hair has had a distinguished academic career which culminated in his holding the Gardiner Chair in Music at Glasgow University until his retirement in 2001. In his note on the music the composer says that he has completed more compositions between 2008 and the current year than in all the previous periods put together, although he admits that this has meant in some cases completing projects begun earlier.
Graham Hair perceives the last 75 years as ‘a time characterised by the decay, and in many cases the collapse, of the institutions which have dominated political, social, economic and cultural life and practice during the three post-war generations…’ His forthcoming book, The Scottish Voices Reader, he informs us, deals with these issues in more detail, both specifically musical and more general cultural influences.
In relation to his scores for solo piano, Hair lists the somewhat eclectic elements that go to comprise his solo keyboard style. The first set of pieces, the Transcendental Concert Studies, are clearly related to the 19th century school of virtuosic studies such as those by Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and Moszkowski, as well as ‘the modernist contributions to the atonal piano literature’ and he cites the Second Vienna School and works by American composers such as John Cage and Milton Babbitt. Listening to these pieces in sequence, one can detect some of these elements, yet Hair manages to create coherent structures which are intelligible without knowing in detail the various factors which he mentions, interesting though these are.
The Passacaglia on the chorale ‘Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist’ draws on the variation form and sounds more ‘traditional’, being based on a German chorale. One is reminded of Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, the more because none of the variations are longer than two and a half minutes. In terms of the demands on the player, this work seems more approachable than the Concert Studies, which is hardly surprising, given the avowed intention of the composer to create music in the ‘transcendental’ tradition.
The Rococo Fantasies is described being a set of bagatelles of which only Book 1 is included. The composer describes the aim of these pieces as being, ‘to create a variety of idiosyncratic rhetorical characters by swerving between multiple metrical, thematic and textural ideas rapidly in the course of a few measures in some of the pieces’. The effect of listening to these sets is to make one aware of the composer’s three distinctive styles of solo piano music; all engaging, stimulating and which will bear repeated listening.
Hair pays a marked tribute to the artistry of the pianist Martin Jones, whose performances of this demanding repertoire are superb.
Review by Martyn Strachan