David
Stanhope - composer, conductor, arranger, trombonist, pianist
- has been known to collectors best as a conductor, frequently
on Australian Broadcasting Company anthology recordings. He
is best known in his native Australia as the former conductor of the Australian National Opera and as a
frequent guest with the Sydney Alpha Ensemble. But he also
conducts for new films and has made a number of recordings
of new music for the Tall Poppies label. He started in Melbourne
as a pianist, later switching to brass instruments, but periodically
returns to the keyboard, as in this new release from Tall
Poppies containing several works he has long wanted to record,
when he could get away from conducting and composing.
From
the description above we might expect this to be a disc of
modern Australian piano music, but the pianist is the only
Australian here and the most recent composer is Sibelius.
Though the great Finn is the last composer on the disc we
can begin with him because the work is a transcription of
the well-known song The Tryst; the transcription by
David Stanhope. Stanhope demonstrates yet another aspect of
his talent - the song is arranged so well that one almost
forgets that it wasn’t created in this form. Stanhope plays
The Tryst as idiomatically as he arranged it, though
once or twice it traveled south-eastward to Rachmaninov territory.
To
go back to the beginning of the disc, we have another of Stanhope’s
favorites: Schumann’s Toccata. Here my reaction was very different.
I felt Stanhope saw the piece as an exercise in the original
meaning of the term toccare and not as a thought-out
piece of music. When I found in the accompanying notes (by
David Stanhope) that the Toccata is the piece he regularly
warms up with before recitals, I was not surprised. Fauré,
the next composer on the disc seemed much more to Stanhope’s
taste with the ever-present Ballade Op. 19. I believe that
this is the fourth version of this piece that I have listened
to this month, but this did not stop me from finding this
the best performance on the CD. The phrasing is very good
and the overall structure of the performance is admirably
thought out, with one section developing effortlessly from
the one before; not a characteristic of all of the other three
performances I’ve recently heard. The Mendelssohn/Liszt extracts
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are well played, but the performance
drags and is almost two minutes longer than another version
I reviewed a couple of months ago.
Since
Rachmaninov’s Op. 32 Preludes occupy more than half of this
CD it is most likely for their performance that one would
purchase this disc. The Preludes as a complete entity have
been recorded a number of times, going back to Moura Lympany.
In the more recent past we’ve had sets from Peter Katin, Howard
Shelley, Vladimir Askenazy, Alexis Weissenberg, Dmitri Alexeev,
Idil Biret, to name only a few. Stanhope’s approach here is
less athletic than the other items on this disc would suggest,
but also avoids what the Russians call doska (pervasive
gloom and world weariness) which some performers regard as
essential for Rachmaninov. He gets off to a slow start but
responds well to the folksiness of No. 3 and demonstrates
great control of dynamics in No. 4. Numbers 5 to 8 show that
he can bend his pianist style to meet the needs of the composer,
unlike in the Schumann, evincing a fresh response to the familiar
Rachmaninov idiom. No. 9 is less exciting, but Stanhope’s
playing is very evocative in No. 10, which Rachmaninov told
Benno Moisewitch was inspired by the painting The Return
Home. Stanhope brings out the tolling bells inherent in
the score. Number 11 is handled playfully, but No. 12 could
be more exciting. Number 13 (in Db) completes the tonal scheme
of the set (No. 1 is in C#) and Stanhope brings this out very
strongly, as well as reminding us that the Preludes were written
a short time after the Concerto No. 3, whose third movement
theme is lightly heard in the last Prelude. Thus ends Stanhope’s
fine traversal of the Op. 32 Preludes, one in which takes
a middle road between virtuosity and emotional depiction.
William Kreindler
see also Review
by Robert Hugill
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David Stanhope, piano
