This is a "mood album", one that recycles
the Black box catalogue but does so in an incoherent and unhelpful way.
I’ve decided to ignore the booklet notes, all seventeen lines of them,
and the premise of the disc – "a transfixing collection of music
by contemporary composers" (Erik Satie? Messiaen?) – and concentrate
instead on the conjunction of musics.
Paul Honey is represented by two pieces from his film
music for Two Days, Nine Lives. I’ve not seen the film
but the first piece shamelessly robs the tomb of Barber’s Adagio and
the second is romantic slush. Joseph Curiale also indulges big band
romanticism in his second movement from Awakenings (Songs of the
Earth) – in his case Copland is the model. James Macmillan is represented
by a solo piano work, Angel, spare and evasive and unlikable
whilst John Adams gives us his innocuously noodling fluff - a saxophone
and piano piece called Alone. Arvo Pärt is here with his
celebrated Spiegel im Spiegel and in this company it sounds like
the work of a genius. Thank God for Erik Satie - though what the poor
man is doing here I can’t imagine unless it’s to act as a wraith-like
reproach to the mediocrity surrounding him. His Gnossiennes and
Le Fils des étoiles are played by John Lenehan and that’s
good news. These performances are derived, I think, from a collection
previously on Earthsounds from the early 1990s. I was strongly impressed
by Lenehan’s way with Satie and he brings a wide-ranging subtlety that
is undeniable. He demonstrates an acute sensitivity in the First of
the Gnossiennes and in the Fourth, for example, his sense of
fluidity and fluency is notably impressive. He avoids metrical pitfalls
as adeptly as he avoids a monochrome response. In the Sixth and final
piece he conjures up just the right sort of humour – his deadpan drollery
is convincingly done. The Fils des Étoiles are equally
adept – he is a Satie player of significance. He also accompanies Caroline
Dearnley and Rebecca Hirsch in their movements from Messiaen – where
he is good at the brittle profile of the cello piece. Hirsch turns on
the opulent, almost Hebraic tonal resources in her performance and if
she suffers a little playing stratospherically high it’s of small account.
Such pleasure as I got from this disc derives almost
entirely from the consonance between piece and performer – that means
Lenehan in Satie and Messiaen and maybe Hirsch in Pärt. Significantly
perhaps only one composer is our contemporary in a temporal sense.
Jonathan Woolf
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted by Joseph Curiale (Curiale)