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British Music Society

Bernard Hughes (b. 1974) has a wide-ranging knowledge of music, married to an insightful and idiosyncratic sense of humour (as this CD of his piano music spanning over 30 years confirms). I was amused by some of the quirky titles of his pieces. There are 38 of these on the CD, many of them quite short. They are grouped under four general titles. The first, Partita Contrafacta (Counterfeit Partita) takes seven baroque dance movements (let’s also call the first, a Prelude by Louis Couperin, a dance). It becomes the basis of a Boogie-woogie. After a fiery opening, Hughes deconstructs the boogie-woogie, slowing it way down and then speeding it up again. 

You can hear the spirit of J. S. Bach in an Allemande which Hughes transforms crazily into a Tango! The modernised, at least not Baroque, dances are powerfully distinctive in their styles. Hughes composes a Ländler, not all that modern, out of a Courante by Henry Purcell. Yet the originals are definitely there too, preserved, like ghosts. 

I was particularly amused when a Gavotte by Jean-Philippe Rameau was reimagined as a Halling, an extravagantly acrobatic male Norwegian dance, or again by François Couperin’s Gigue transformed cheekily into a Tarantella. These seven pieces are flanked by two very attractive short pieces dedicated to Hughes’s son and daughter. Before they were born, Hughes named them The Walnut and The Button. I was reminded of the gentle romantic spirit of Fauré in both of these attractive pieces.

Hughes and his virtuoso pianist Matthew Mills have been friends for years. The Bagatelles were composed for him. They are twelve piano studies, some of them fiendishly difficult demanding our full attention like the musical equivalent of plate spinning or complex juggling. 

Some unusual titles are there too, like Bog-Face, named after a poem by Stevie Smith. Mills plays these with joyful élan then in the following eleven Miniatures he makes these sometimes simple pieces (some of them composed when Hughes was still at school) sound important. 

The final section contains two of Hughes’s longer works, O du Liebe meiner Liebe based on a Fauré Prelude, and Strettos and Striations a dizzyingly exciting post-minimalist piece. The recorded recital ends with a short Cradle Song. It lives up charmingly to its title.