A number of diverse influences have helped shape the musical language of Malcolm Dedman (born in London in 1948 but resident in provincial South Africa...

A number of diverse influences have helped shape the musical language of Malcolm Dedman (born in London in 1948 but resident in provincial South Africa since 2007), among them Bartók and Messiaen, his Bahá’í Faith and, more recently, his new South African homeland. Points of contact with other composers can be heard, too, not least Debussy, Ravel, Barber and Ginastera. These piano works embody a wide range of moods, from gentle introspection to energetic, dissonant vigor. They are brilliantly performed on this recording by Nancy Lee Harper.

REVIEW

Here, in what promises to be a multi-volume ‘shelf’, is a complete Dedman recital and it’s of some substance. He cites his debt to Messiaen and Bartók but acknowledges the impact of ‘post-modernists’ and of his beleaguered but gritty determination to speak directly to audiences. In addition to much piano solo music, he has written a Danses Concertantes for strings and a Piano Duet Concerto.

There’s a princely crock of gold on this disc which proffers four significant works from the period 1984-2021. His Reformation is rockily defiant and takes in aspects of boogie-woogie, jazz and the dynamism and poetry of Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin. The earliest piece here is the second sonata In Search. Its two outer movements again remonstrate with the listener as if confronted by a disputant. There’s a degree of repetition of phrases but it never becomes tedious; more tender and mesmeric. The central Lamentoso pays out a slowly insinuating and engaging melody as if there were all the time in the world.

The 2008 Four Kinds of Love owes its expressive to the Bahá’í faith. The movements, ingeniously and with religious severity, ring the changes on love with four tracks: 1. ‘Love of Man for Man – Unity of Spirits’; 2. ‘Love of Man for God – Divine Faith’; 3. ‘Love of God for Man – Inexhaustible Graces’; 4. ‘Love of God towards the Self – God is Love’. The music is chaste or head-bowed and tender, of bell-like clarity and what feels like moral fibre. It is touched with a measure of Messiaen or Szymanowski but without either composer’s magnetic draw towards dense complexity. The most recent work presented is the Third Sonata To the Memory of an Angel [in] which...textures adhere as usual to a brave clarity.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)