Gramophone
The music of Jim Aitchison has had little recorded exposure, but his five violin duos Syruw on a miscellany performed by Retorica (NMC, 4/13) might have alerted listeners to an individuality that is confirmed on this release of his piano quintets, completed in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Hence the First Quintet’s ‘Prelude and Chorale’, which emerges gradually and evocatively as might an image coming into focus before its elaboration into an edifice of real fervency. Something the ensuing ‘Magic Square’ seems intent in offsetting with its gestural trade-off between the five instruments, which still accrues its own fitful continuity. Much the longest movement, ‘Dance Fugue’ is less a cumulative finale than a channelling of earlier ideas into an entity as conscious of its musical antecedents as of making an artistic statement even if the enfolding sombreness at its close suggests any such endeavour may ultimately be futile.
The Second Quintet’s succinct ‘Prelude’ conjures up an enervation obliquely confronted by ‘Blind Tide’, its spatial emptiness being gradually filled out with the glowering tonal layers of piano and strings towards its would-be epiphany. The remaining movements open out the sonic (and no doubt visual) remit accordingly: thus the raptly inward eloquence of ‘Autumn’, a relatively static prelude to the dynamism of the fugue that is ‘Winter’. This latter subsides towards a fugitive activity that makes expressive contrast with ‘Spring’ the more marked, this finale evolving as a fantasia that gains in resolve before concluding in tenuous fulfilment.
The recordings from Roderick Chadwick and the Kreutzer Quartet are the outcome of lengthy exploration and they could hardly be bettered for commitment or insight.
Yet in music whose visual aspect is crucial, a DVD component with relevant artworks could have been beneficial.
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