What an excellent idea; and what fine execution. And not only
these two qualities, but a third one too – real listening pleasure.
All these elements mean that this latest Goldstone-Clemmow release
proves just as attractive as the preceding ones. It’s also very
much worth noting that we apparently have a raft of first recordings
of these particular piano duet performances; the Burlingame
Hill, Milhaud, Seiber, and Carmichael.
Gershwin’s own two-piano score of An American in Paris was
not published at the time – after his death a different version
was published – and only appeared in the 1980s. It included
some short sections that he cut from the orchestral score, and
this version was recorded at the time by the Labèque sisters.
For this recording G and C have used Gershwin’s final thoughts
on the matter, which therefore correspond with the published
full score, as it were. Sometimes the effect of listening to
a piece in this way is rather like trying to recognise an old
friend by his skeleton, but so practised are the duo, and so
enjoyable is the arrangement, and so jam-packed with colour
and incident, that one listens to its teeming narrative with
unvarnished pleasure. From Gershwin to Hill is something of
a leap. Hill, a fascinating figure and composer – teacher no
less – came to jazz, or its like, at the age of 48 with the
politesse of a Harvard grandee. The opening movement of the
four Jazz Studies is polite Ragtime, whilst there’s
a nicely sprung near-relative of The Black Bottom and
– the most interesting harmonically – a tight, fast vivace to
finish.
La création du monde is heard in the composer’s familiar
piano-duet version. One says ‘familiar’ but it appears actually
never to have been recorded before. What an oversight! If your
marker for this is the composer’s own recording (one of them,
anyway) or, say, Bernstein’s then there’s still no reason why
you shouldn’t want to hear Milhaud’s own piano-duet reduction,
given that it lays bare motivic strands in a way that you might
miss in the glistening animal passion of the clothed orchestrated
version. It’s a work of which I never tire, and not for nothing
did I queue in the rain to get Lenny to autograph his LP of
it for me.
A decade after the Milhaud, Alexander Moyzes wrote his Jazz
Sonata for two pianos. For most Czechoslovakians – Moyzes
was a Slovak – ‘jazz’ still meant hot dance bands, extrapolated
ragtime, or something of that kind. It certainly didn’t mean
King Oliver. Moyzes studied with Novák and is a crucial figure
in modern Slovak music. His suite is delightful, unpretentious
and not out to make points. There’s a charmer of a waltz and
an endearing foxtrot: great fun. Seiber’s Easy Dances for
piano duet, of which we hear a selection, were written when
the composer was living in Frankfurt. These dance aperçus almost
all last less than a minute. One, the Rumba, sounds like
Stan Kenton’s Peanut Vendor in basic miniature, whilst
the Slow-Fox makes me wonder how deeply his knowledge
of jazz went; it sounds deeper by far than Moyzes or Hill for
example. (Seiber co-wrote with Johnny Dankworth the Jazz-Improvisation
for orchestra and jazz band and this was recorded in 1962
with the Dankworth’s band and the LPO conducted by Hugo Rignold:
British Saga LP XIP700) Had he heard James P. Johnson’s records?
To finish we have two little encores; Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust
and Gershwin’s Embraceable You arranged successively
by Maurice Whitney and Percy Grainger. They make for a fitting
envoi.
This is a sparkling and vivacious disc, marvellously played,
and not just for jazzers only.
Jonathan Woolf
Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow (piano duo) 
