Clare Hammond piano
PALADINO MUSIC PMR0137
This release celebrates the artistic collaboration between the performer, Clare Hammond and the composer Kenneth Hesketh. Hammond provides a very full and detailed set of notes on the various pieces included in the album. She states that ‘This album gathers together works written for me over the past eight years, two miniatures from 2011, and his six-movement Poetic Conceits, which predates our friendship. Four include memorial pieces, two are birthday gifts, while another celebrates new life. As a group, they illuminate the different strands that make Hesketh’s work so rich, compelling, and endlessly fascinating.’
The opening group of pieces, Poetic Conceits, has six movements, three of which have titles taken from Keats’ poem Ode on a Grecian Urn. The idea of a ‘conceit’, normally encountered in literature, is a metaphor which is extended, and that can permeate a passage, or in some cases the whole of a work, such as a poem.
In musical terms Hesketh has tried to express this through the use of motifs which are ‘stated, recalled and elaborated’. This is not necessarily obvious to the listener, certainly not at a first hearing. This is not music which readily explains itself. The idiom is quite demanding for the listener, being largely atonal and of great virtuosity. There were moments which seemed to recall Ligeti’s keyboard writing in his Etudes.
The most substantial piece and the one which gives the album its title is Hände. The full title is Hände: Das Leben und die Liebe eines zärtlichen Geschlechts (Hands: the life and love of the fairer sex). The performer explains that, when the work is performed live, she plays ‘in exact synchronicity with a black and white film of the same name by Stella F. Simon and Miklos Blandy from 1928.
Characters are represented by human hands in an avant-garde, dance-inspired narrative, described by The New York Times as ‘some sort of cosmic drama that may mean everything or nothing’ (1929). The techniques employed include preparations inside the piano – striking the strings with knitting needles and the use of six desk bells placed to one side, rather liike John Cage. The composer’s object was to create an ‘ethereal sound-world (sic) (which) mirrors the bizarre and eerie atmosphere of the film.’
Without sight of the film, it is impossible to judge how successful the composer has been in achieving his aim. While the Poetic Conceits are intelligible in purely musical terms (despite the uncompromising idiom employed) the same cannot be said of Hände, which seems less self-subsisting without the visual images. Intriguing nevertheless, this entire album makes stimulating listening. Clare Hammond’s command of the keyboard writing and her artistic conviction is evident throughout. A notable achievement.
Review by Martyn Strachan