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This impressive debut recording from Australian pianist and composer Rob Hao places music by Schubert and Chopin alongside works by contemporary composers Alison Kay and Michael Finnissy to create a compelling album which demonstrates how music evolves and how works from different times and styles can interact and inspire new ideas. Thus, the notion of a musical palimsest is amply illustrated

At the heart of the album lies the title track, ‘Palimpsest 571’, Hao’s completion of Schubert’s fragmentary Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor, D. 571. Others have attempted to complete this sonata fragment, notably Paul Badura Skoda, Malcolm Bilsom and Martino Tirimo, drawing inspiration from other published pieces by Schubert.

We hear the Schubert fragment first. Hao opens his album with it and brings a tender simplicity to Schubert’s writing. There’s ample opportunity in this music – and with the attendant “psychobabble” around the composer’s mental and physical health – to linger too long over certain motifs or harmonies, but Hao eschews false sentiment, instead shining a light on Schubert’s ambivalent harmonies and desolate poignancy.

Segueing straight into his own work, we enter Hao’s own soundworld, yet Schubert is still a constant presence. Gestures, structures and motifs from the original are still evident, overlaid with new material which reiterates the desolation and unsettled harmonies of Schubert’s sonata. It’s a miniature hommage (the piece lasts a mere three-and-a-half minutes), rich in texture and emotion.

‘By embracing the distance between Schubert’s world and our own, rather than attempting to conceal it, we can arrive at a deeper understanding of his music – not as a relic from the past, but as a living canvas for contemporary performers and composers to interact with.’ – Rob Hao

The two Nocturnes from Chopin’s Opus 62 follow, each given the same sensitivity and elegance as the opening Schubert sonata, and then we hear two Piano Etudes by British composer Alison Kay (b.1970). The first, the atmospheric minimalist ‘Orison II’, contrasts with Chopin’s florid, ornamented writing, offering a kind of ‘musical palette cleanser’, before ‘Lullaby for Isabelle’. Written for the composer’s daughter, this delicate, fleeting miniature ‘plays with ideas of perceived simultaneous temporalities to emulate stages between consciousness and sleep’ (Alison Kay).

More Schubert in the second Impromptu from the D935 set. From a stately, sarabande-like opening section the music moves into a flowing, dramatic middle section, with lyrical quaver figures redolent of the D571.

Liszt created many ‘palimpsests’, if you will, in his transcriptions of Schubert’s song for solo piano, and here we have Der Müller und der Bach (‘the Miller and the Brook’), the penultimate song from Schubert’s cycle Die Schöne Müllerin. Liszt cleverly retains the melodic line – the “story” of the music –  highlighted beautifully here by Hao’s glowing cantabile.

The album closes with three pieces by Michael Finnissy (b.1946), a composer for whom transcription plays an important part across his oeuvre. The first, ‘Midsummer Morn’, opens with a minimalist tranquillity, expressed in two voices, before moving into far more disturbed territory, in which the original theme is dismantled and then shockingly transformed. ‘My Bonny Boy’, No. 7 from English country-tunes, is a study in monody: a single modal, melodic line, reminiscent of the opening of the previous piece, modulates gradually though never really settling – an echo of both Schubert and Chopin’s writing. Here, individual notes, timbre and resonance create a Feldman-like sense of distance, almost as if the original folksong has been slowed right down as to become unrecognisable.

The album closes with Finnissy’s ‘Come beat the drums and sound the fifes’, a clanging, stomping virtuosic Totentanz inwhich the traditional English march, with pipe and drums, is transformed into something more sinister, almost paramilitary. Hao plays this, and the other pieces by Finnissy, with a mixture of bravura and intensity of expression, bringing this fascinating and absorbing debut recording to a dramatic close.