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British Music Society

This is unquestionably a tour de force and a highly significant issue. Finnissy is one of our most prolific composers, and Ian Pace is a leading authority on his music. Although this handsomely-presented set of four discs cannot possibly encompass all his output for the piano, it is a happy celebration for the composer’s 80th year. 

Pace is superbly equipped to tackle Finnissy’s exhilarating demands, which took nineteen days to record. Some sessions were evidently graced by an audience of sorts, as a number of coughs and other extraneous noises may occasionally be discerned, although they do not intrude overmuch. 

Those unfamiliar with Finnissy should start with the fourth disc. The earliest work here is the atmospheric and moving Romeo and Juliet are Drowning (1967), based on passages from Berlioz’s Dramatic Symphony. William Billings takes fragments of four hymns by the titular American composer, and reshapes them into a quiet Ives-like meditation, almost as if we are hearing snatches of a larger work from a distance. However, the collection as a whole is built around the substantial Verdi Transcriptions, and the seminal English Country-Tunes. The latter, often fearsome in its gestural turbulence, is a breathtaking sequence of fabulous and otherworldly portals.

Try the opening of Midsummer Morn, where the half-heard tune shimmers through a heat-haze, just out of reach; or the gorgeously sensuous love-song My bonny boy, distilled to a single line throughout; or the nightmarish Come beat the drums and sound the fifes. This work is receiving only its second recording after Finnissy’s own, over thirty years ago. 

Unlike the composer’s Gershwin arrangements (not included here, but also strongly recommended for newcomers) where the tune and its allusion to unsung words may generally be said to be paramount, the importance of these two sets derives from the transformative qualities that Finnissy conjures from his themes. Their manipulations are often impelled not only by musical considerations from Bach to Busoni, but informed by political and social matters; and if, by the end, the sources are less discernible, that may be a moot issue; but it is certainly not the most important one. The journeys followed here are hugely exciting, with the material sometimes emerging at the end, or simply absorbed into the textures. 

While the idea of 19th century virtuoso transcriptions often provided a springboard for Finnissy’s investigations, his puckish delight in frequently treating his resources in quite unexpected ways results in a series of moving and absorbing soundscapes. As Pace himself comments in the principal study of Finnissy’s music (Uncommon Ground, Ashgate, 1997), they are much more than a mere ordering of disjunct movements. They are frequently assembled according to melodic archetypes and patterns, and it is from these that the stimuli for Finnissy’s technical investigations arose. 

Beethoven’s Robin Adair is a cycle of seven fantasias on the conventional arrangement in question, in which the simple and outwardly unremarkable original is utterly transformed over a longer span of time. The five brief Yvaroperas comprise a more personal group, written in memory of (and in homage to) the dazzling American composer-pianist Yvar Mikhashoff. 

Once again, they spring from varied operatic extracts, transmuted and developed with the deliberate purpose of acknowledging the dedicatee’s own subtle and delicious paraphrases. Similarly occasional is What the meadow-flowers tell me, a Valentine’s Day gift for Finnissy’s partner: it superimposes fragments selected from the familiar second movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony to create a brief but iridescent offering. 

All the CDs are well-filled, and the fascinating booklet repays serious study, making this set indispensable for those wishing to explore the outer reaches of transcendent virtuosity and imagination.