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Textura

Métier describes Ian Pace’s collection of piano works by Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) as a “landmark” recording, and for once the term’s justified. Pace has achieved something remarkable in presenting four CDs of material by the British composer, the pianist’s commanding performances weighing in at almost five hours and complemented by a fifty-two-page booklet featuring in-depth commentaries by Finnissy (a programme note from 2005) and Pace (texts from 2025 based on notes written in 2016). Dominating the collection is Finnissy’s second epic cycle for piano, the four-book Verdi Transcriptions, with the second complete recording of English Country-Tunes (after the composer’s own version) and works inspired by music of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rounding out the release. Issued in anticipation of Finnissy’s upcoming eightieth birthday and recorded during 2022 and 2023 at the University of London, Piano Works qualifies as a triumphant account of these works.

No one is better equipped to take on the monumental challenges of the project than Pace (b. 1968). His first performance of English Country-Tunes occurred in the ‘90s, and he’s played Finnissy’s complete piano music twice, in 1996 and then again in 2016-17. His acclaimed recording of Finnissy’s other epic piano cycle, the five-and-a-half-hour The History of Photography in Sound, was released by Métier in 2013. The London-based Pace, whose main piano teacher was Bartók’s student György Sándor, has delivered world premieres of over 350 piano works, presented some of the most difficult pieces in the repertoire, and recorded somewhere in the vicinity of forty CDs. An educator, author, and composer, Pace demonstrates deep Finnissy scholarship in both his performances and writing.

Finnissy’s text is illuminating in how openly he describes his transcriptive approach. Displaced from its originating context, his prototypical Verdi treatment is not a pianistic imitation of the originating vocal and orchestral material; instead, transformation is effected in such a way that the original undergoes severe refraction and thus becomes more Finnissy than Verdi. Given the resultant complexity of the material, it’s striking to see Finnissy characterizing the transformations as “quite rudimentary.” Adding two or three notes, he explains, to “the constituent notes of a Verdi line” can generate a very different compositional form; a single figure might be extrapolated and used as a structural guidepost, or various kinds of transpositions might be applied.

In his notes, Pace begins by providing general historical and musicological context for Verdi’s operas before addressing the thirty-six transcriptions, which draw from all of the twenty-eight operas in chronological order (plus, to conclude the cycle, the String Quartet and the Messa da Requiem). He argues that the chronological ordering reveals Finnissy’s evolving perspective on Verdi and the very nature of transcription over the course of an extended period of composition. In some instances, the Verdi original is audible, though clothed in extreme chromatic garb; in others, the original is altered so completely that little trace remains. Of the four books, the first is the most radical in its abstracted character and as such could be mistaken by a listener otherwise uninformed for an original work by Finnissy. Pace’s breadth of scholarship is reflected in the texts he wrote for the works, with information about the specific opera plot scenario and its characters allowing the Finnissy treatment to be better appreciated. The transcriptions vary in duration, with many lasting one to three minutes at a time; a small number are substantially longer, a duo from Don Carlos more than eleven minutes, a piece from Messa de Requiem ten, and an aria from Don Carlo, “Tu che la vanità conoscesti,” weighing in at no less than twenty-two-plus.

Pace’s set begins, of course, with the first book of Verdi Transcriptions and an aria from Verdi’s first opera Oberto (“Sciagurata! a questo lido ricercai l’amante infido!”). Bass register rumblings and spidery tendrils offer a portentous portal into the work, after which the scene shifts to an aggressively refracted trio from Un giorno di regno, Verdi’s first comedy (of only two), that captures the thornier side of Finnissy’s music. Things move fast as one transcription gives way to the next, with staccato lines entangling polyrhythmically in a chorus from I Lombardi and atonal entwining emerging during a piece from Ernani, complexity growing in the pairing of a two-part canon in the right and, in Pace’s description, an Ivesian in the left. A choral barcarolle from Due Foscari erupts violently with hammered chords and splashes, the treatment mirroring stormy events within the opera. After that eruption, an aria from Giovanna d’Arco provides welcome shelter from the storm, while a duet from Alzira, one of Verdi’s least-known operas, includes lyrical moments without sacrificing its identity as a Finnissy creation.

He initiates the second book with a sweeping whirlwind of dissonant flourishes but also runs that verge on jazzy and moments of hushed quietude and regal declarations. A subsequent duet from I masnadieri alternates between mystical ruminations and jittery flickerings before segueing into a duo from Jérusalem of surprisingly romantic, even tender character. That tone’s exchanged for the crushing density of the “Inno di Vittoria” from La Battaglia di Legnano and then, in a quick change-up, the lyrical delicacy of a short setting from Luisa Miller and a rollicking miniature from Rigoletto. Book three advances rapidly through pieces from Rigoletto and Il Travatore before settling into an act-three duetto that, as other transcriptions have done before it, segues between thorny chromatic eruptions and delicate lyricism. The boléro from Les vêpres siciliennes convulses when not emoting yearningly, with Pace describing it as “grotesquely over-ornate parody, with perfumed harmonies in block chords.” Verdi’s voice is more audible in the “Tradimento!” (Simon Boccanegra), even if the melodies are wrapped in trademark Finnissy patterns, and resonates romantically through “Me pellegrina ed orfano” (La forza del destino). With eight minutes at its disposal, “Allora che gl’anni” from Aroldo breathes less frenetically than others and unspools with enhanced clarity as a result, though it has more than its fair share of painterly splashes.

The fourth book, which takes up the entire third CD, begins arrestingly with high-register sprinkles in a recasting of the witches’ chorus from the first act of Macbeth. Following that, yes, bewitching treatment, two duos from Don Carlos are combined for the twenty-fourth transcription, followed by re-castings of material from Aida, the String Quartet, and Simon Boccanegra, all of which set the stage for the work’s greatest odyssey, the twenty-two-minute “Tu che la vanità conoscesti,” Elizabeth’s long aria in the fifth act of Don Carlo. Initially pitched at a whisper, the piece begins slowly with sparse, single-note gestures, Finnissy opting to let the music develop in slow motion until it springs abruptly to life with a dissonant splash; eventually the extended hushed section is supplanted by atonal gestures and rippling cascades more emblematic of Finnissy’s style. The three transcriptions that follow naturally feels a tad anticlimactic, though the ten-minute “Requiem Aeternam” from Messa de Requiem makes for a reverential and emotionally satisfying resolution. Of course space doesn’t permit discussion of every piece in the four books, but suffice it to say all thirty-six are provocative re-imaginings that are more transformation than transcription.

The remaining works are no less worthy of attention, starting with English Country-Tunes. Any listener coming to the notorious piece, written in 1977, with little familiarity with Finnissy’s style might come to it expecting eight pastoral treatments of English folk material; instead, the tunes undergo dramatic transformation when they too are stamped with the composer’s signature. Written in the year of the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the work is, in Pace’s words, “one of the most coruscating statements about ‘Englishness’ ever written.” It also emerged, as the pianist astutely notes, during the rise of English punk. The tone is instantly established by the claustrophobic sound world of “Green Meadows,” which less suggests a verdant countryside than an inescapable dungeon. Graced by an idyllic melody at its start, “Midsummer Morn” is gentler, though it gradually turns cryptic, chromatic, and eruptive. Rumbling into position is the spirits-channeling “I’ll give my love a garland,” whereas the penultimate movement, “My bonny boy,” is the very epitome of stasis and introspection. The crushing conclusion, “Come beat the drums and sound the fifes,” was intended by the composer as a scathing commentary on the hypocrisy of English culture, especially with regard to sexual repression.

Finnissy wrote Five Yvaroperas in memory of pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993 at only forty-two. As its title implies, traces of nineteenth-century operatic repertoire surface during the work, and an elegiac character at times infuses the seventeen-minute piece; as always, however, the heavily chromatic material carries with it Finnissy’s indelible signature. Whereas a ghostly incandescence shadows the texturally rich second part, the third’s boisterous and characteristically jagged. A hymnal tone permeates the fourth, while the fifth (written more than a year after the other four) exudes a translucent quality suggestive of time slipping away and memories growing hazy.

The set’s fourth disc offers a fascinating travelogue, with material by Berlioz, Beethoven, Rossini, Brahms, Mahler, Robert Schumann, Johann Strauss, and William Billings Finnissy’s creative spurs. The differences between the works notwithstanding, the disc’s tone is generally softer than the other three, with the turbulence that surfaces elsewhere less pronounced in this last quarter of the release—which is not to suggest that there isn’t many a spiky moment too. First up is Romeo and Juliet are Drowning, which was, in fact, the first of Finnissy’s adult works that could be called a transcription for being based on the “Scène d’amour” from Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette. Deceptively easy on the ears, the material sees chromaticism emerge from it slowly and the drowning music from Berg’s Wozzeck inverted. To create Beethoven’s Robin Adair, Finnissy radically catalyzed a melody by his German forerunner into seven fantasias of contrasting character, some pensive, mysterious, and ethereal and others animated but all branded with that indelible Finnissy quality. While it’s simply titled, Rossini is, as Pace notes, “pianistically treacherous” due to its barbed re-casting of Idreno’s aria “E se ancor libero” from Semiramide; in Preambule zu “Carnaval”, gefolgt von der ersten und zweiten symphonischen Etüde nach Schumann, the music of Robert Schumann acts as a splendid launchpad for an audacious three-part exploration. In the case of What the meadow-flowers tell me, the title’s the tip-off as Mahler acolytes will recognize the allusion to his third symphony; better yet, distant echoes of the original crystallize. Piano Works advances to its close with Brahms-Lieder, Finnissy using four folk-song arrangements from the Deutsche Volkslieder as raw material, and Strauss Walzer, in which the milieu of Strauss’s Vienna is dramatically refracted, like everything else on the disc, through a contemporary lens.

Needless to say, Piano Works is a tremendous accomplishment on Pace’s part and an indispensable and important document. Coupled with his earlier Métier release, The History of Photography in Sound, the new set is an obvious must-have for Finnissy aficionados and scholars. Pace deserves some sort of medal for successfully scaling the incredible heights that are Verdi Transcriptions and English Country-Tunes, not to mention the remaining pieces on this remarkable collection. Few pianists would attempt such a daunting feat, not to mention realize it so spectacularly.