Shop Now

International PIano

It is always wonderful when you hear unfamiliar music of originality and merit performed with total confidence, evangelical fervour, and pianistic precision. Such is the case here in a 43 minute selection of vibrant, accessible, surprising, and always colourful bravura piano works.  Camden Reeves, (b 1974) is head of music at Manchester University and a composer who has always deeply understood the piano and its limitless possibilities.  In ‘Tangle-Beat Blues’ (2013) he triumphantly puts into practice what he has stated as a personal ambition/aim: ‘I aim to write music that is optimistic, positive, direct and life affirming’.  The work is full of extremes- massive contrasts in dynamics, gestures, colours, and pianistic effects. There are bravura quasi tarantella sections, rapid glissandi, crunchingly dissonant note clusters, and infectiously vibrant rhythms…but there are moments of great stillness too, with a quietistic coda in which Debussy’s ‘Homage a Rameau’ (from Images book one) seems to hover.  The music is of our time but never inaccessible.

Reeves admits to having long been a fan of the blues, and there is no question that influences of 1960s/70s British Rock hovers over this most immediate 13 minute work as much as the shades of Gershwin, Ravel and Copland do.  In contrast Blue Sounds (2019) is apparently written with a sense of connection with Chagall’s ‘America Windows’- which takes Blue as the colour for intense study. Reeves’ eleven minute work is a meditation on the colour. He writes ‘Perhaps it is not literally possible to hear a colour. Sound as experience, on the other hand, is psychological. Just as blue reflects beyond what we can see, it likewise resonates beyond what we can hear. This is my kind of blue’.

The short but action-packed issue concludes with Nine Preludes written in 2015-16: Brief but vividly charged miniatures directly inspired by Chopin but with a whole myriad of influences, characterisation and pianistic effects that are, like every else in this impressive release, realised with regal authority by the magnificent Tom Hicks.  Strongly recommended.