Richard Stoker
Complete Guitar Music
Martin Vishnick - guitar
London Guitar Duo
ASC CD15
Vocal Music & Piano Duos
Jacqueline Fox -mezzo soprano
Margaret Feaviour - soprano
Richard Stoker - piano
The Davies Piano Duo
ASC CS CD10
Vocal Music, Duos, Folk Song arrangements, Realisations
Jacqueline Fox
Margaret Feaviour
Richard Stoker
ASC CS CD17
(2CD)
ASC Records
A comparatively recent Priory recording of the piano music of the 62-year-old
Richard Stoker
review
is now followed by three collections (four discs in fact) of
his extensive corpus of guitar, piano duet, and vocal music.
A disc devoted entirely to guitar music, and that of a Boulanger-inspired
cast, can be difficult to take all in one go. But there are delightful moments,
heralded by the opening simple lullaby-like Pastoral, and the quasi-mediaevalism
of the Suite of Dances Serious listening to the extensive Diversions on a
theme of Theodorakis, the theme only given fully harmonised in the final
movement (here recalling the spare delicately beautiful harmonies of Mompou)
is best taken in isolation. The recording here is rather too dense to evoke
the cerulean blue of the Aegean.
Apart from a Suite of short pieces written for the guitarist Polita Estrellas,
and a guitar version of the Zodiac Variations (piano) there are three
larger-scale compositions - a solo Sonatina,
a broadly conceived Sonata Duo (whose scheme involves a 12 note set, divided
7 and 5 between first and second movements, uniting all 12 in the final
Jig/Fugue) and a less immediately approachable Concerto in which the two
guitars are backed by pre-recorded tape sounds -
a work difficult to assimilate at first hearing.
The remaining discs are devoted to a variety of vocal music and piano duets
where the spikey points of sound (his own words in one of his poems) give
way to 'legato lines of smooth melody'. The four settings of
Shakespeare are accompanied by curiously lute-like chordal piano writing,
with the piano on this disc sounding a little muffled. These settings, and
those of his opus 25, 'Music that brings sweet sleep' are easy to follow
and are beautifully sung by both soloists. Interspersed with the vocal items,
the Davies Piano Duo are at their best in the somewhat Gallic Quatre Morceaux
opus 77, of which the very lovely 'Romance' reawakens the lush sound of his
earlier little Jazz Preludes (on the Priory Disc) exposing in Slater a vein
of unalloyed sentimentality. The most important work on this disc is surely
the Diversions on a 12 note theme, the opening piano phrase from the first
movement of his teacher, Lennox Berkeley's Oboe Sonatina. Berkeley's influence
is apparent in the felicitous counterpoint of the scherzo movement. The remainder
of the disc - settings of Yeats and several
more experimental works for voice, including a dark-hued but deeply felt
Monody on his own poem 'Kristallnacht' -
is of much sterner stuff.
The third set, a double CD, is devoted entierly to vocal pieces where, in
'Songs of Love & Loss' (Dekker set at age 13 and DH Lawrence in 1957)
the soprano's beautiful singing serves the composer well. The mezzo, Jacqueline
Fox, is equally compelling - especially in the strangely
tame Folk Song settings - far removed from the lush days
of Scott and Quilter - where her fine singing is underpinned
by a dull, guitar-like and tentative piano sound. There are several pieces
of an operatic nature where the 'legato lines of smooth melody' give way
to those 'spikey points of sound' - in the cycle 'Aspects
of Flight' and in the duet pieces where the emphasis is on the dramatic element.
But in the end the lovely voice of Jacqueline Fox returns in two beautiful
and eminently satisfying realisations - of Byrd ('Lullaby
my sweet little baby') and Purcell, whose 'When I am laid in earth' makes
a fine conclusion. The main impression one gets from these discs is a personality
of enormous energy - not unexpected in one who studied
also with Harold Truscott. What is astonishing is that he manages to combine
the creative activities of composer, pianist, novelist, dramatist, poet and
artist - in this latter capacity decorating all the sleeves
of these discs with designs which exude the same frantic energy.
