Surely this is a self-recommending issue! – though I'm hardly going to leave it at that and deny myself the pleasure of describing some of the delights awaiting the purchaser of this disc. Of course, for the composers of some of this music, having a pianist of the stature and calibre of Michael Houstoun commissioning and performing works would have in itself been a powerful incentive component. But then to have these and other compositions gathered together and performed AND recorded at a major arts festival recital must have indeed seemed, for all who attended and enjoyed the concert, like an elusive dream come true.
Not that the concept of a recording featuring nothing else but local piano music is a new and unheard-of one, thanks to other landmark issues such as Ode/BMG Manu's Lilburn recital played by Margaret Nielsen (CDMANU 1511), and Dan Poynton's award-winning "You Hit Him He Cry Out" disc for Rattle (RAT-D006). And if only Kiwi Pacific would release its promised recital featuring a wonderful recording made by Tessa Birnie (Kiwi-Pacific LP - SLD-19) we would have as representative a survey of New Zealand piano music as we had a right to expect at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
As recordings of New Zealand music come on the scene (perhaps "proliferate" isn't the appropriate word as yet) one finds oneself in the luxurious position of being able to compare different recordings of some pieces. Houstoun's new recording provides that opportunity in a few instances here, the first being John Psathas's "Waiting for the Aeroplane", a work inspired by the composer's frequent trips to Greece to see his family. On the Rattle disc mentioned above, Dan Poynton's playing is dreamier, the opening slower, and with detail appearing to "drift" more randomly. Another difference is that Rattle's more up-front recording allows greater contrast throughout different sections of the piano – the bass arpeggio-like downward figure during the music's opening paragraph has a resonance and depth not attempted by the Trust recording. Altogether Poynton's underlining of the contrast between the "dreamlike" and "action" sections of the score is startlingly dramatic, if not as "organic" as Houstoun's more throughline approach. Houstoun is on record as saying that what he admires about Psathas' music above all is its sense of pulse – a statement borne out by his playing here, which keeps the heartbeat of the piece going throughout. With Poynton one seems to be exploring time's deceptive stillness and the vastness of the spaces, as well as the music's more dynamic elements. Both pianists achieve a kind of "silence surging softly backwards" effect at the end – if the journey into the distance seems more evocative in Poynton's hands, it's largely because of the immediacy and full-frontedness of what's gone before.
Christopher Blake's set of three pieces, "Ancient Journeys", were commissioned by Michael Houstoun, and premiered by him at the 1992 New Zealand Festival of the Arts. The music explores the theme of deja vu, that sense of having previously experienced something without being able to recall when or where. The first piece, "Two Score and Two" is described by the composer as reflecting on "the way in which the sensation of past lives seem to increase as one grows older". The second piece, "The Cathedral at Otanenui" describes a natural phenomenon consisting of a vaulted canyon in bush on Waiheke Island, while the third, "Ritornello", is a reflection on how these experiences can return again and again. The set's been recorded previously by Australian pianist John Luxton, on a disc called "Ribbonwood is Home" (Ribbonwood RCD 110).
In "Two Score and Two" Houstoun's playing is positively orchestral in effect, each of the piece's two climaxes the result of an inexorable build-up of sound and momentum, perfectly judged. The opening section, with its plainchant-like melody, reminds one of some of Liszt's pieces involving mystical or spiritual contemplation, having some of the same rapt inwardness and melodic invocation. By comparison with Houstoun, Luxton's progress towards those huge, oscillating chords from which grow the contrapuntal lines of the second part of the piece isn't as consciously "terraced", with incident and detail sounded more spontaneously, though the overall effect is no less powerful. Both pianists move and shape the melodic tendrils that grow from the bedrock of that first climax towards the sun-drenched power of the piece's conclusion with unerring and thrilling purpose.
The second piece, "The Cathedral at Otanenui", has a vivid pictorial quality – a Debussy-like archway of rising sound suggests the dimensions of the natural vault of the canyon, torrents of toccata-like fugurations depict rushing water carving ages-old pathways through rocks, and a hymn-like melody, first heard at the piece's beginning (strangely suggested by some figurations in the first piece as well), conjures up a sense of mystic awe in the presence of nature's handiwork. Houstoun's enviable dynamic range is much in evidence here, able within a few bars to set the elemental power of natural forces against the withdrawn tones of a meditative pilgrim praying at a shrine. The Trust recording scores in this piece, too, its clear sonorities avoiding any hint of the slight cloudiness which hangs about Luxton's piano sound, both in the rapid sections and places where the melodic line needs a bell-like purity.
The "Ritornello" movement which concludes the set has a restless, almost obsessive quality, the composer remarking on the cyclical nature of familiar feelings and sensations not able to be explained, and expressing this repeated awareness in music whose agitations seem to describe circles rather than forward progressions. Different episodes bring marked contrasts of color and rhythm, but every renewed burst of energy exhausts itself to the point where the music can do nothing except collapse under its own weight. Whereas Luxton's playing reinforces this sense of maze-like confinement throughout, Houstoun's performance achieves small miracles of colour and texture with each succeeding section, managing almost to lead the music out of its self-imposed confinement, only to have the last few agitated bars reinforce the sensation of "closed" circuitry. Interestingly, each pianist performs a different ending to the piece, Houstoun playing a somewhat truncated version of what Luxton gives us, and ending on a single (and somewhat inconclusively prepared) held note, contrasting sharply with the extended upward flourish and final, definite chord heard on the Ribbonwood CD. The composer's since told me that he's actually rewritten the movement's ending again, so another recording and/or performance of the work will be awaited with interest! At least the somewhat tentatively-emerging final note that's played by Houstoun could in effect be said to be in accord with the music's overall intentions. With Lilburn's "Sonata 1956", one can't help but set Houstoun's playing of the work alongside that of Margaret Nielsen (CD MANU 1511), an interpreter greatly admired by the composer, who described her performances as ones which "intuitively realised the sounds my manuscript notes were trying to formulate". One's opinion of this challenging work may well depend upon which performance one first encounters. Lilburn himself described the sonata as having both "a harsh rhetoric and sombre inscape", adding that the first movement would seem "rather grim". Houstoun's sharply-focused playing to my ears underlines that "harsh rhetoric", imparting a relentless quality to those repeated staccato chords that punctuate the first movement's somewhat craggy progress. By comparison, Nielsen brings out the sombre quality of the harmonies – her playing brought to my mind some of the same mood and colour found in Vaughan Williams' Sixth and Ninth Symphonies – taking more time than Houstoun (her 8'06" in the first movement opposed to his 7'24") to let the darkness of inscape register.
Again in the second movement, Houstoun brings out all the jaggedness of the writing in the opening paragraph, before relaxing the tension beautifully throughout the second episode to provide a real and atmospheric contrast. With the return of the opening figure, the music's angularity reasserts itself, creating tremendous momentum which carries the argument through to the sudden sotto voce of the last couple of bars. Once more, Nielsen's playing is far less driven (taking almost a minute longer in this movement), more quixotic and detailed. She also points the contrasts more markedly, giving the second episode a lyrical, winsome quality, and paying attention, I think, to the composer's description of the music's "wayward wave-spun rhythms". Both pianists play the opening measures of the Moderato finale beautifully. Houstoun doesn't shirk the dissonances into which the music strands wind themselves, making the hints of resolution which follow shine like threads of silver. Nielsen, at a slower tempo and with more obviously-pedalled, liquid-sounding textures, makes the clashes even more jagged in context, after which she lets the knots untangle themselves and trickle the dappled sunlight through the textures once more. Houstoun's final chords are proudly sounded, whereas Nielsen's have an almost regretful quality. (One would love to have the composer's verbatim reaction to these performances!)
As for the other items on the recording, Houstoun competes only with himself in Gareth Farr's "Sepuluh Jari", although on another, later studio recording (Trust MMT 2020) he plays a revised ending. A review of the original concert (reproduced in near-illegible type in the Trust booklet – bottle-green print on a burnished-bronze background!) testifies to the incredible excitement Houstoun's playing of Farr's piece generated, the writer remarking on the "rare and valuable" experience of watching "an audience immediately connecting with a new work". The two performances sound quite different, the concert recording more reverberant and warmer-sounding than the drier, "in-your-face" studio sound. There's extra excitement in the live account, too, in the way that Houstoun terraces wave upon wave of sound leading to those incredibly sonorous gamelan-flourishes which erupt with joyful energy not quite captured in the more tightly-conceived studio performance. And although in principle the revised ending's a good idea in that some repetitive passagework's removed, somehow part of the piece's ethos is that oft-quoted "crazed" quality with which Farr characterises some of his music, and which the original version certainly conveyed, with its nightmarish sequencing and explosive "mad scientist" cadences at the end.
Of the remaining two pieces, Jack Body's "Sarajevo (1996)" and Kenneth Young's eponymously-titled "Elusive Dreams", the latter quickly and surely enchants with its flowing diaphanous textures and constantly modulating harmonies. Houstoun's beautifully-spun playing instantaneously evokes the composer's "wistful and intangible glimpses of our subconscious" before the music dissolves into the air as capriciously as it began. To draw a parallel with the sound-world of the Debussy Etudes here is to deny nothing to Young as a composer for the keyboard – I'd already heard a very different manifestation of his abilities in this genre with his engagingly boisterious "Fantasy For Two Pianos" (available on CDMANU 1478), to which "Elusive Dreams" makes a sharply-drawn contrast.
Jack Body's "Sarajevo 1996" (wrongly dated "1966" in my copy of the booklet) reminds one that dreams can disturb, haunt and terrify, as well as delight, sustain and heal. In three tersely-worked movements Body reflects upon the ravages of war, taking as his focus the city of Sarajevo, standing in the midst of conflict as "a tragic symbol". The first movement, entitled "Remembering... Imperfectly", tosses fragments of brittle, sharp-edged utterances around a comfortless ambient wasteland, while the following "Totentanz" lives up to its name, a "triumph of death" in musical terms, expressed in ghoulish, top-of-the-keyboard dancing figurations answered by rumblings from the abyss which then take up the dance's horrid madness. Finally "Lachrymae" (a lament) expresses its desolation with a simple chant-like melody decorated by agitated grace-notes over the top of static, grief-bound chordal fifths whose substance gradually discolours and disintegrates, consigning what remains of the melody to the winds of pitiless oblivion. It's the kind of music whose realisation stuns one's response to silence, as here, rather than invites applause (mercifully omitted from the recording in the case of this piece).
A triumph, then, for the composers, for Michael Houstoun, and for Trust Records, my only complaint being something of an on-going one regarding the already-referred-to instances of misjudged type-and-background mix in the booklet. Hopefully, the disc will be snapped up by all of those people heard vigorously applauding at the end of Gareth Farr's "Sepuluh Jari", and more. As well, the recording might help give the lie to the idea (expressed in some quarters) that piano recitals, especially those featuring new music, no longer have a following sufficiently worthwhile to be promoted and encouraged. It would be good to think of Michael Houstoun's splendid recording as helping to spearhead a real renaissance.