"It is perhaps surprising, in view of quite a long career as a pianist, that it took me some time to find myself comfortable writing for my own instrument - writing for orchestra was never a problem, but the piano was much more difficult, for some reason. Perhaps I was too close to it. It wasn't until 1963, with a set of Variations, that I began to feel at ease with writing for the instrument. Since then, it has gradually assumed an important part of my compositional activity, and the works I have written reflect not only the inspiration I have received from visual impressions (such as landscapes, works of art, or buildings) but also the stimulus afforded by other musics, both non-Western and very specifically Western - the series of homages to composers whose music fascinates me (particularly the Studies from No.7 onwards) typify this last aspect of my output. I have been extremely fortunate in that other pianists, instead of ignoring my work, on the grounds of "Well, he can play that himself if he wants to", have been generous enough to play some of the music, and to play it brilliantly - Joseph Tong and Waka Hasegawa perfectly exemplify this musical friendship." John McCabe, 2011 Upon entering a painting, written in 2008/09, was commissioned, with funding from the Britten-Pears Foundation and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, by Piano 4 Hands (Joseph Tong and Waka Hasegawa), to whom it is dedicated. The inspiration of the piece was the kind of painting which, as you gaze at it, seems to draw the onlooker into the frame, indeed into the very paint itself. The specific trigger for the idea of the piece was the Rothko Exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008 - Rothko has long been a favourite painter of mine, even though his creative world is very different from my own. However, there were one or two paintings in the exhibition in which I felt strongly this sense of being drawn into the inner life of the painting, especially when I was able to incur the wrath of the curators and step close to the paintings and examine the surface in detail. The opening and closing sections of the piece, with their gradual thickening of the harmonies and (at the end) equally gradual thinning, reflect this sense of stepping forward into and backward out of the works.

Brahms: Complete Trios

BENNETT Dzama Stories 1,3,4. I Need This 2,4 • 1 Paul Dunmall (sax); 2 Suzanne Purkis (voc); 3 Decibel; 4 electronics • QUARTZ 2082 (59:43)


Dzama Stories (2009) is described as “Music for amplified ensemble, electronics, and improviser” which immediately raises the questions: What is the improviser playing? Could the music be for any melody instrument? Why is the soloist last in the list—is he the least important? How is the improvisation determined—is it completely free-form, does it relate to anything anyone else is playing? Turns out this is the result of a collaboration very much tailored by the Irish composer Ed Bennett for Paul Dunmall, the saxophone soloist. It sounds as if most of it is mapped out in advance, so the improvised nature of the performance is really highly conventional for all that it is presented as a radical work. Cast in four parts, loud and heavy, then slow and sparse, both times two, there are also a slow, quiet introduction and an interlude after part II. The whole thing runs three quarters of an hour. Part I (titled Vagabonds and Blood from the Earth ) is just relentlessly loud while part III ( You Gotta Make Room for the New Ones ), which is reminiscent of the Steve Martland of Drill , has more variety and more rhythmic interest, with a contrasting middle section in the slow and sparse style. Parts II and IV verge on the etiolated.


Part IV ( Fades Away ) includes the pre-recorded voice of a hypnotist, which made me wonder about the possibility of CDs having embedded subconscious suggestions designed to make reviewers like the recording. Didn’t work in this case. I did not warm to this when I first heard it. A few playings on and I am not warming to it slightly less, partly because I am a sucker for the saxophone and Dunmall’s style, but the thinness of the material, at whatever the dynamic level it is played, cannot be gainsaid. Decibel, a 10-strong ensemble founded by Ed Bennett, most of the time appears only to provide a texture from which the saxophone can elaborate. The electronics provide a further layer of texture. And one shouldn’t blame the composer for the notes that appear in the CD booklet. They take tendentiousness to a new level (or layer): “like all great music it exists on many layers.” The recording is immediate and in your face, as you would expect (hope) for music of this nature and of an amplified ensemble.


I Need This (2001) for amplified female voice and electronics is “a theatrical work in which the main character is obsessed with something.” The composer asks that the soloist should “enter into their chosen obsessive state for the duration of the piece.” It isn’t revealed what Suzanne Purkis is obsessed with, so we may only guess. My guess is that it is with singing the same interval of a third over and over, and rather tedious it becomes. The electronic track is, however, endlessly imaginative and engaging and, had the “live” vocal part been more integrated with it, or more varied, we might have an interesting piece along the lines of Berio’s Visage . As in that work, the solo voice is eventually multitracked and presumably prerecorded in performance, so one wonders how performable I Need This , like Dzama Stories , is without the protagonists who appear on this disc. A disc to explore, nevertheless, and the cautious can sample a YouTube video of excerpts from this music.


FANFARE: Jeremy Marchant

MALCYS Clarinet Concerto 1. Cleaved Silence. In Perpetuam Memoriam. 2 Milky Way. Vox Clamantis in Deserto 3 • 1 Roger Arne Vigulf (cl); 2 Hartmut Rohde (va); 3 Camila Hoitenga (fl); Lithuanian CO • QUARTZ 2085 (78:12)

Lithuanian composer Arvydas Malcys (b.1957) is, on the present evidence, an exciting voice in contemporary music. He has graduated twice from the Lithuanian Academy of Music (1980 in cello and 1989 in composition). His uncompromising Clarinet Concerto (2007) reveals his interests in the timbral possibilities of the instruments he writes for. The bustling Allegro vivo is a virtuoso flurry, hard-edged; the central 10-minute “Meditation” fully lives up to its title. The Norwegian clarinetist Roger Arne Vigulf is a truly special player. His lyricism in the slow movement is remarkable, while the grinding dissonances just under four minutes into this movement and the soloist’s responses to these make for profound effect. The idea of a Scherzo as finale is a fine one, and there are certainly playful elements here, albeit of an angular kind. Fascinating music.


The booklet notes (written by three authors) wax lyrical about the ideas behind Cleaved Silence (2004). The composer is quoted as saying, “We are drowning in an endless sea of sounds not being to identify many of them in our lifetime. We perceive just a fraction of them.” It seems also as if the violence implicit in the verb “to cleave” is part of the generating idea here, as there seems to be an undercurrent of violence just waiting to explode (as it does on occasion before retreating back into silence). The even earlier In Perpetuam Memoriam (1997) is subtitled “Concerto for Viola and Small Orchestra.” Again, there is a pronounced meditative element. Hartmut Rohde is a superb player. The piece is the composer’s homage to performers who die early. Low pedal points underscore the tragic mood here. A most touching piece. There is some challenging writing, too, for the soloist, and Rohde takes it all in his stride.


Milky Way (2004) opens in a most approachable fashion. Apparently the piece invokes the ideas of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker (in the sense of music as a biological organism). The composer also refers to this piece as “a post-scriptum to Mozart,” and perhaps unsurprisingly it is Malcys’ most popular composition, existing in no fewer than 11 versions. There is a palpable sense of fun in this performance.


Finally, Malcys’s Flute Concerto No. 1, or Vox Clamantis in Deserto, written in 1995. The subtitle means “The Shouting Voice in the Desert.” The flute is the voice of the individual pitted against a silent but mighty collective (the desert). Here, dancing rhythms predominate in a way not experienced elsewhere on the disc. The piece climaxes with a flute cadenza. Again the soloist is of the highest caliber. Recording standards throughout are fine indeed. Recommended—a thrilling, thought-provoking listen.


FANFARE: Colin Clarke

BRAHMS Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Book 2. Piano Sonata No. 1 in C. LISZT Funérailles. Ave Maria. Sonetto 104 del Petrarca. Tarantella • Grace Francis (pn) • QUARTZ 2071 (76:22)


From her booklet photograph, Grace Francis appears to be a slight-framed, self-effacing, rather bookish young lady, an image completely out of character with who she turns into when she sits down at the piano. She has chosen a program of works for this, her debut album, that would strike fear into the heart of a David facing Goliath. These are big works, requiring a pianist not just of great digital dexterity but of real muscle, and Francis arm-wrestles the giant to at least a draw if not an outright win.


She was born in East London and attended the Yehudi Menuhin School before studying with Irina Zaritskaya at the Royal College of Music. There she was awarded the Chappell Gold Medal, the highest award for a pianist. Subsequently she won a Wingate scholarship to continue her studies with Martino Tirimo. Francis has made broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 of works including Bartók’s Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12.


Brahms’s Paganini Variations were completed in 1863 when he was 30. They display his great mastery of variations, but they were also designed to pay tribute to their namesake’s legendary diabolical technique. Clara Schumann dubbed them Hexen Variationen , and either wouldn’t or wasn’t up to playing them in public herself. They are wickedly difficult; that Francis plays them accurately and with as much aplomb as she does is a remarkable achievement. What I do find just a bit lacking in her performance is the sheer muscle power brought to them by pianists like Arrau, Thibaudet, Lilya Zilberstein, and of course Earl Wild. A few more hours in the gym lifting weights and Francis will be able to join this illustrious company.


Compared to other earlier-developing musical prodigies, Brahms, at 20, was barely out of diapers when he published his op. 1 C-Major Piano Sonata in 1853. If anything, the sonata is even more taxing than the Paganini Variations for its length and emotional range. There have been fine recordings of it over the years by Julius Katchen, Sviatoslav Richter, and more recently a fine account by Hardy Rittner, which impressed me in Fanfare 32:5, but Francis holds her own against them and delivers the goods in a powerful and strongly focused reading.


Funérailles and the Ave Maria are numbers 7 and 2, respectively, from Liszt’s cycle of 10 piano pieces titled Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. Funérailles , which Liszt wrote in response to the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, is the most popular of the pieces. It was a favorite of Horowitz; and Rubinstein, Richter, and dozens of other heavy-hitter keyboard virtuosos performed and recorded it. Francis does well by it, but as in the Paganini Variations, I sense a bit of a loss of heft as the piece works up its head of steam. With the Ave Maria we finally get a respite from the thunder and drums.


Just as Funérailles and the Ave Maria come from a larger collection of pieces, the Sonetto 104 del Petrarca is the fifth number from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage II: Italie , composed between 1839 and 1846. Thirteen years later, in 1859, he supplemented the original seven numbers with three more under the heading of Venezi e Napoli . The Tarentella is the third of those added numbers. It’s one of those virtuoso display pieces designed to knock the audience dead, if it doesn’t knock the pianist dead first. No fatalities occur during Francis’s performance.


This is quite an extraordinary debut disc. As they say, you can’t tell a book by its cover, and from her photo, you would never guess what a dynamo Francis can be at the keyboard. Recommended to anyone who enjoys piano music in the grand romantic tradition played by an artist with grits and real flair.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

...Erik Esenvalds's rich arrangement for soloists and eight part choir works as a curtain-raiser to his hypnotic A Drop in the Ocean and other strongly crafted pieces by living Latvian composers. Peteris Vasks is responsible for the album's finest music, technically demanding and strikingly original in sound. His The Message of the Titmouse and substantial Plainscapes receive idiomatic performances, unflagging in intensity and conviction, from prize winning youth choir Kamer. Classic FM Magazine

British pianist Daniel Tong has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall has often been broadcast over the BBC. He has presented lecture-recitals on the Beethoven piano sonatas and is noted for performances of a wide variety of masterworks from Dvorak to Chopin to Schubert and Schumann.

Franz Schubert's solo piano music, stemming from the Viennese Classical school, shows the influences of Beethoven, Haydn and Viennese dance music while also foreshadowing at times the sparkle and lyrical facility of Chopin. Schubert's expansive later sonatas, posses an introverted, contemplative nature which author Herbert Russcol described as more suited to listening while laying on the floor of your room at 2 o'clock in the morning than in the concert hall. This fascinating variety in which moods of cheerfulness and sadness are often mixed, draws many listeners, who collect multiple performances and interpretations of the same Schubert works. - Greg La Traille, ArkivMusic

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SCHUBERT Piano Sonata No. 20 in A, D 959. Moments musicaux, D 780 • Daniel Tong (pn) • QUARTZ 28888 (75:56)

With its legacy of Curzon, Hess, and Gerald Moore, and the expatriate presence of Perahia and Brendel, England would seem to be fertile ground for Schubert piano playing of the highest order. So it is, with Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis, and another English pianist, Daniel Tong.

Tong’s performances of Schubert’s penultimate sonata and the Moments musicaux, recorded with flattering sound by Quartz Music and accompanied by Richard Wigmore’s knowing booklet notes, achieve an unaffected feeling that results from interpretive decisions that are generally at one with the music’s natural flow and fluctuating moods. Unlike the gifted young pianist Inessa Sinkyevich, who recently issued an all-Schubert disc containing the D 959 Sonata—self-published, and more primitively recorded—Tong’s affinity for Schubert has a depth that puts these performances in the front rank.

He’s most persuasive in the most leisurely, songful music: the second and sixth of the Moments receive the finest performances here. Played straightforwardly with unwavering rhythm and flawless voicing, Tong well captures their stillness and tenderness. No. 6, the profoundest and slowest of the set is, interestingly, marked Allegretto, a cautionary communication to the pianist to maintain an underlying pulse, and Tong achieves this. Other movements, while undeniably well played, are less well characterized. No. 5 would benefit from more vehemence, a quality that doesn’t seem to be strong in Tong’s temperament, and No. 4’s careful, slow paced reading disappoints. The outer sections of the piece offer more than Bachian counterpoint, if allowed to move faster in a less literal fashion.

Like the sixth of the Moments musicaux, D 959’s long Finale is marked Allegretto. In this case, it’s an indication that the movement should feel more leisurely than an Allegro. Tong’s tempo for it is fine, but his performance comes across as careful rather than carefree. I wish that he had let the second subject move forward, rather than keeping things so metronomic. Schnabel, with his uniquely transparent-sounding accompaniments, manages to make this movement, and the whole Sonata, seem not at all long. He lets the Finale flow freely, unafraid to create a little controlled chaos and bluster along the way. No other pianist has brought Schnabel’s imaginative pacing and constant creation of changing colors to a recording of this work.

If not on Schnabel’s exalted level, Tong’s D 959 well captures the Sonata’s varied moods: the majesty and overall lyricism of the first movement, the second movement’s “ghostly barcarolle” (Schnabel’s description) with its shift to wild fantasy in its middle section, and charming lightness in the Scherzo, done, again, at a slightly relaxed tempo.

FANFARE: Paul Orgel

STRING QUARTETS 1-3

"...a beautifully poised performance" The Guardian "Her elegant playing... was a total joy" The Times Debut Quartz album for Reiko Fujisawa who studied under Martino Tirimo and Yonty Solomon. Reiko has since established herself as an exciting and formidable virtuoso performer with recital and concerto appearances at many prestigious venues and festivals throughout the UK and worldwide. Reiko Fujisawa studied at the Musashino University of Music in Tokyo and, following a period of concert-giving in Japan both as a soloist and a chamber musician, moved to London in order to study further with Martino Tirimo, Benjamin Kaplan and Yonty Solomon. She has since established herself as an exciting and formidable virtuoso performer with recital and concerto appearances at many prestigious venues and festivals throughout the UK and worldwide. These include the South Bank Centre, Wigmore Hall and Cadogan Hall as well as the Belfast and Brighton festivals. Reiko has given recital tours in Japan and South Africa and, as a featured artist of Japan 2001, has toured the UK extensively with her own unique Ensemble Tozai, combining traditional and contemporary music in collaboration with some of Japan's leading classical and traditional musicians. Performances were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Channel 4 television.

British pianist Jeremy Limb follows up his first CD release, "Essential Einaudi" with an album devoted to the piano music of American minimalist, Philip Glass.

VILLA-LOBOS Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4. A Lenda do Caboclo. Saudades das Selvas Braileiras. Chôros No. 5, “Alma Brasileira.” Ciclo Brasileiro • Marcelo Bratke (pn) • QUARTZ 2092 (60: 13)


This is Volume 2 in Marcelo Bratke’s project to record the complete solo piano works of Heitor Villa-Lobos. If Sonia Rubinsky’s eight-disc set on Naxos is a guide, Bratke has a ways to go. Volume 1 received two separate reviews in these pages, one by William Zagorski and one by me, both in Fanfare 35:3 and both positive, and Bratke was interviewed in that same issue by Robert Schulslaper. So we can pass over the biographical details of both composer and pianist and skip right to the music.


At the time I reviewed Volume 1, I did not have at my disposal the highly regarded Rubinsky set; now I do, so some comparisons are in order. Of Villa-Lobos’s nine suites titled Bachianas Brasileiras , No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos is the best known and most popular, but every one of them, each having a different scoring, demonstrates the composer’s unique adaptation of Baroque techniques to Brazilian folk and popular idioms. The suites were written over a 15-year period, between 1930 and 1945. No. 4, heard on the present disc, was originally scored for solo piano and then orchestrated in 1942. Its four movements are Preludio (Introdução), Coral (Canto do sertão), Aria (Cantiga), and Danza (Mindinho).


Another of Villa-Lobos’s highly popular pieces is the ballad A Lenda do Caboclo (The Legend of the Native). A short piece written in 1920, it features a syncopated tango-flavored bass line and vacillates between the major and minor modes.


Villa-Lobos was in Paris in 1927 when he composed Saudades das Selvas Braileiras (Longing for the Brazilian Forests). The first of its two short movements is a strongly accented, rhythmic toccata; the second, a lyrical song expressing nostalgia or homesickness for the composer’s native Brazil.


Another short piece dating from 1925 is the Chôros No. 5, subtitled “Alma Brasileira” (Brazilian Soul). The series of 15 Chôros (the last without number), composed between 1920 and 1929, represents an earlier parallel collection to the Bachianas Brasileiras . Like that later cycle, each of the Chôros is also scored for a different ensemble of instruments, some quite large and exotic. No. 6, for example, includes celesta, two harps, tam-tam, xylophone, bells, and saxophone among an extensive array of wind, brass, and strings. The No. 5 for solo piano, heard here, is only one of two numbers scored for a single instrument, the other, No. 1, being for solo guitar. The Portuguese word chôro means “weeping” or “crying,” and it came to apply to Brazilian street musicians extemporizing on European and African instruments in a free and often dissonant counterpoint called contracanto.


Back home in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, Villa-Lobos wrote the four-movement Ciclo Brasileiro . It’s a nationalistic, brilliant, highly virtuosic work that note author Irineu Franco Perpetuo describes as “sometimes sounding like Rachmaninoff had visited the tropics.”


Having promised comparisons with Rubinsky at the beginning, here they are. In Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4, timing-wise, Bratke and Rubinsky are so close, I’d call it a draw. Only in the Preludio does Bratke take a more relaxed tempo—7:02 to Rubinsky’s 6: 16—reading the movement as a quiet, contemplative reverie I find very atmospheric and affecting. Other than that, only a second or two separate the players in each of the following three movements.


In Saudades das Selvas Braileiras , Bratke and Rubinsky’s readings are the reverse of each other. She takes the opening toccata-like movement marked Animato considerably faster than Brake, while he takes the second movement, marked Un poco animato , a good deal faster than Rubinsky. As a result, only eight seconds separate them overall, so which you prefer will depend on which contrast between movements you find more satisfying—a faster toccata and a slower Un poco animato vs. the opposite. In this particular work, I think I prefer Rubinsky; her faster tempo for the first movement is more effective at bringing out the music’s accented rhythms.


Again, with the very short A Lenda do Caboclo , which doesn’t leave much time or space for a great deal of interpretive flexibility, only four seconds separate the two pianists’ performances.


The biggest difference in timings and interpretation comes in the four-movement Ciclo Brasileiro. As a general observation, one could say that here, as in most of the other pieces on the disc, Bratke takes a more measured approach to Villa-Lobos’s music. But that approach more often than not yields performances, especially in the slower pieces, that feel more expansive and more communicative. Listened to at some interval apart, Bratke and Rubinsky are both outstanding exponents of this repertoire, but listened to in immediate succession, Rubinsky comes across as slightly more edgy and attuned to the virtuosic elements of Villa-Lobos’s folk-inspired rhythmic impulses; in contrast, Bratke seems somewhat more focused on the composer’s lyrical and Impressionistic inclinations. Both are valid and attest to the wide range of expression in Villa-Lobos’s music.


Both pianists are recorded—Bratke by Quartz, Rubinsky by Naxos—in spacious, sumptuous sound. I’d hate to have to choose one over the other. This is wonderful music, wonderfully played by two artists who have obviously devoted their considerable talents to this important body of work; both merit space on your shelf.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

J.S. Bach and Alfred Schnittke may not immediately strike the listener as obvious musical companions. Yet there are numerous important parallels between the works on this disc. Alfred Schnittke was fascinated with musical heritage; he appropriated earlier styles and musical quotations to create his own unique brand of 'polystylism'. In the case of his celebrated Concerto Grosso No.1 it was, of course the music of the Baroque on which he relied most heavily. What better way to illuminate Baroque pastiche, than by recording it alongside a work from that era.

A disc of ground-breaking new works for oboe by the exciting, young oboist James Turnbull

BRAHMS Piano Quartets Nos. 1–3 • Pro Arte Pn Qrt • QUARTZ 2105 (2 CDs: 119:03)


The current incarnation of the Pro Arte Piano Quartet was founded in 1989 by three members of the St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble—Kenneth Sillito, violin, Robert Smissen, viola, and Stephen Orton, cello—and pianist Hamish Milne; the four play in this recording, made back in 2008 and now being released for the first time. Violinist Sillito is the one member in common with the old Pro Arte, whose 1971 recording of the C-Minor Third Quartet, along with the Piano Quartet of Schumann, I reviewed in Fanfare 35:6. To add to the possible confusion, there has already been a recording of the Brahms piano quartets by another ensemble of the same name, based in Bucharest, for the Arte Nova label. The original Pro Arte Quartet, and the most famous ensemble to bear the name, was a string quartet founded in Belgium in 1912; it recorded the Brahms G-Minor First Piano Quartet with Arthur Rubinstein in 1932, and has been in continuous existence ever since, serving since 1941 as artists-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Finally, there is another string quartet by the same name currently based in Salzburg!


So much for the name; what of the music-making? For the most part it’s thoroughly admirable. In the G-Minor Quartet the tempos are ideal, the musicians are consistently responsive to one another, and the balances are excellent. Pianist Milne is alternately expressive and energetic—never flamboyant—as required. This makes the G-Minor the strongest performance of the three. In the A-Major Second Quartet, which as has become customary stands alone on the second disc, the tempos are not so unerringly judged: The first movement seems to go on autopilot, while the second seems hurried and lacking in the sense of mystery that dominates its middle section. The finale is downright headlong.


The first movement of the C-Minor Quartet is rock-solid, but its introverted moments are less lyrical than those of Tamás Vásáry and colleagues on DG; similarly, the second movement scherzo is less hell-bent, the third movement cello song less meltingly beautiful. Violinist Sillito still plays awfully well, but perhaps not quite as sweetly as he once did. The recording is terrific. In short, these are very high-level performances, but ultimately do not supplant the versions by Vásáry et al., Domus (on Virgin), or the Fauré Quartet (in Nos. 1 and 3, also on DG). Call it an honorable mention.


FANFARE: Richard A. Kaplan

“'Gnomus' rings out with compelling authority. 'The Old Castle' comes over with a ringing tone and in a clean style without a trace of mannerism; the phrasing is fastidiously controlled...[in the Rachmaninov] Francis plays too carefully. But the corollary of that is that in her hands this work is very finely controlled.” - BBC Music Magazine