Last month I reviewed Canadian pianists Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier in a great recording of Rachmaninov – this time it’s
music by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963). Poulenc is one of those composers whose music
is so distinctive that it could be by nobody else. There is a certain combination of quirkiness
and wit, but combined with such imaginative use of harmony, and he often sneaks
in sudden moments of heartfelt beauty that creep up and surprise you. The Piano
Concerto from 1949 was composed as a showcase for a tour in America, with a
tongue in cheek reworking of ‘Way down upon the Swanee river’ in the finale,
and it is certainly great fun and somewhat light in spirit. Yet even here,
there is subtlety in the understated slow movement, to which Lortie and the BBC Philharmonic, under Edward Gardner, are certainly wise. In the Aubade,
a ‘Concerto choréographique’ the balance is perhaps the other way around –
there are lighter moments, and his spirited style makes appearances, yet the
music is altogether more dramatic, despite the sparse scoring for just the
piano and 18 instruments. The story of the huntress Diana and her doomed love
is told through sparse and often harsh orchestration, but the final dénouement
is highly sensitive and affecting. Here Lortie and the BBC Philharmonic players
perform with great ensemble and precision, perhaps focusing on the harsher side
of Poulenc’s writing. In the Concerto for Two Pianos, the
combination of Poulenc as slightly crazy joker with a more introverted,
emotional soul is perhaps at its most extreme.
In the first movement we go from madcap film chase music straight into a
heartfelt, highly romantic central section. Lortie and Mercier capture these
mood changes well, and support from Gardner and the orchestra is at all times
spot on. The Balinese gamelan effect
from the two pianists at the end of this movement is enchanting, the theme
anticipating the riot that is the finale. But before that comes a seemingly
simple Mozartian movement that gradually morphs into something darker and
slightly twisted. Lortie and Mercier
don’t overstate this and allow the music to flow towards its dramatic peak
before falling back to the Mozartian conclusion, now somehow underpinned with a
sadder atmosphere. The finale is action
packed, full of great tunes, and all concerned have great fun here,
particularly when the gamelan theme appears transformed for the climactic
conclusion. The disc is rounded off with
three works for just the pianists, firstly the Sonata for Piano Four Hands, and then two short pieces for two
pianos. Poulenc wrote the Sonata aged
19, although he revised it some twenty years later. Its pleasantly simple ‘Naïf’ central movement
is sandwiched between two energetic and spiky movements. The late Élégie
is altogether more romantic and lush, a memorial to a close friend,
Marie-Blanche de Polignac, who died the year before. Finally, L’Embarquement
pour Cythère, at just over two minutes is a jolly waltz and a perfect
encore piece, delicately and expertly performed by Lortie & Mercier here to
round off a great collection of performances of such individual music – if you
don’t know Poulenc, this is a great place to start.
Composer Kenneth Hesketh (b.1968) was born in Liverpool, and has a strong established
career, composing music in many genres, including opera, orchestral and vocal
music. He also trained as a pianist and
percussionist, and pianist Clare Hammond,
for whom he wrote the central work on her new disc of his music, points out
that this is apparent in his writing for the instrument. The disc opens with a literary inspired short
work, Through Magic Casements, and
draws on Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. It
has a dreamlike quality, with the nightingale singing from the upper reaches of
the keyboard with increasing feverishness. Horae
(Pro Clara) (‘Breviary for Clare’), the most substantial work here, is a
sequence of twelve short pieces, together forming a breviary, or book of hours.
Hesketh employs a startling array of sonic techniques, using the extremes of
the keyboard (notably in No. 8) and pushing the pianist to incredibly virtuosic
displays. He creates ghostly soundworlds
(such as in No. 1), and has the ability of shifting from evoking the ‘tiniest
humming bird’ (No. 2), to creating disturbing, anxious moods (No. 6). In No. 8 he explores ‘intertwining chime
clocks’ which gradually become out of sync, once again unsettling the
listener. This also includes moments
where the pianist has to pluck and brush the strings inside the piano. No. 10 has a darkly relentless sense of
movement, ‘like an evening full of the linnet’s wings’ (a reference to a Yeats
poem). Hammond seems fearless in achieving the requirements of these incredibly
challenging pieces. Despite also being somewhat
challenging for the listener, when taken as a whole, this set is highly
effective and offers a wide range of effects and moods. Notte
Oscura is a piano transcription of an interlude from Hesketh’s opera ‘The Overcoat’,
after Nikolai Gogol, and very effectively conjures up the vast icy landscape
and a sense of menace to come. The Three
Japanese Miniatures that complete the disc again push the bounds of
technical limits for the pianist. They
are in fact fragments from a larger puppet ballet in progress, and one can
immediately imagine the images of sprites and daemons conjured up here, bringing
the disc to an imaginative close. If you
want to hear fearless virtuosity from an expert pianist, in music that pushes
the boundaries of what you might expect from the instrument, then this is
highly recommended.
Hesketh, K. 2016. Horae (pro Clara), etc. Clare Hammond. Hybrid Super Audio Compact Disc. BIS Records, BIS-2193.
(Edited versions of these reviews first appeared in GScene, June 2016)
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