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Graham Hair: Piano Music
£14.99
In stock
Catalogue Number
SRCD436
I met the great pianist Martin Jones as a consequence of writing the Concert Study Wild Cherries and Honeycomb as a test-piece for the Scottish International Piano Competition, circa 1998. Martin heard about this piece from the chairman of the competition jury, Bryce Morrison, and this eventually led to my writing more Concert Studies over the next fifteen years, as well as the other works on this album.
Twelve Transcendental Concert Studies on Themes from the Australian Poets, refers specifically to the post-Lisztian Tradition of virtuoso pianism (including such figures as Australian pianist Percy Grainger), which has always seemed to me a core component of Martin Jones’s pianism. The titles are all drawn either from specific poems or from specific passages within those poems.
Étude-variations: Under Aldebaran is also a Concert Study, based on the poem by Australian poet James McAuley, but is very different from the collection of the ‘Transcendental’ 12. It’s the only atonal piece in this album, and by far the most complicated in its detail, and was written many years earlier.
Rococo Fantasies is a set of 11 bagatelles. Each moves from one tone-centre to another: often via ‘chromatic mediant’ harmony (a major or minor third above or below the tone-centre). Book One contains 6 of them. They endeavour to create a variety of idiosyncratic rhetorical characters by swerving between multiple metrical, thematic and textural ideas rapidly in the course of a few measures in some of the pieces, but beavering away at just one or two (over rapidly modulating harmonic changes) in others.
Passacaglia on the chorale ‘Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist’ by J S Bach is based on a chorale melody derived from the famous plainsong hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. This is the ‘ground bass’ on which this Passacaglia is built. However, like many Passacaglias in the Canonic Repertoire, the theme often strays into the upper voices of the texture, and because of the relative length of the theme, it has something of the sense of a set of variations as much as of a Passacaglia. © Graham Hair
Manufacturer: Wyastone Estate Limited, Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, NP25 3SR
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Reviews:
"The record is a revelation of 21st-century pianism, both in Hair’s writing and in Jones’ playing."
"...The Passacaglia on the chorale ‘Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist’ draws on the variation form and sounds more ‘traditional’, being based on a German chorale. One is reminded of Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, the more because none of the variations are longer than two and a half minutes. In terms of the demands on the player, this work seems more approachable than the Concert Studies, which is hardly surprising, given the avowed intention of the composer to create music in the ‘transcendental’ tradition.
The Rococo Fantasies is described being a set of bagatelles of which only Book 1 is included. The composer describes the aim of these pieces as being, ‘to create a variety of idiosyncratic rhetorical characters by swerving between multiple metrical, thematic and textural ideas rapidly in the course of a few measures in some of the pieces’. The effect of listening to these sets is to make one aware of the composer’s three distinctive styles of solo piano music; all engaging, stimulating and which will bear repeated listening.
Hair pays a marked tribute to the artistry of the pianist Martin Jones, whose performances of this demanding repertoire are superb." Martyn Strachan, British Music Society