Reviews

Ms. Dullea shows that she is an excellent exponent of new music performance in this sparkling anthology of seven works by some of Ireland’s finest. The music tends to be dramatic, gestural, filled with light and shadow, sound and silence. This is serious piano music and it is played with a touch of the magic that Mary Dullea has no shortage of….She is transcendent, powerful and tender all at once. Very highly recommended.

Seven young talents, all under 40 … each and every one writing original music that explores the technical and musical possibilities of the piano. Ms. Dullea excels. All in all this is a very fine sampler of new music from Ireland, all of it excellently played by Mary Dullea. The sound is excellent and intimate.

This has been a real pleasure … it’s melodic and thoughtful. Despite (or because of) the extensive use of quiet, it’s a dramatic and atmospheric album.

Belonging to a generation that owes as much to inherited traditions as to the possibilities of the present, [the composers] are clearly beholden to neither in equal measure. The disc finds composers revelling in the intricate warp and weft of music in which defining threads are intentionally ravelled, deliberately obfuscated or omitted altogether. They suggest a developing shift away from the boundaries of a composer’s imagination to the limits of a performer’s technical abilities, offering up the alluring prospect that what ‘seems impossible… or really is so’ on an instrument as venerable and venerated as the piano might actually become possible.

Dynamically, harmonically, rhythmically gripping.

Gorton makes no concessions to his performers — not that those heard here require any ‘easy options’ when it comes to realising such intricate and exacting pieces. Excellent sound and detailed notes also complement the interpretative conviction needed for this unequivocal music.

[Austerity Measures] is not an easy listen but a fascinating and, at times, revealing one… some unbelievably fine virtuosic oboe passages, brilliantly played. This is a fine disc that shows David Gorton to be a composer of subtlety who brings fine detail and lovely textures and sonorities.

[In Orfordness] the careful sculpting of sound and space creates effective musical drama.. The nature of the score [of Austerity Measures II] leaves a large amount of creative decision-making up to the performer, not only in terms of expressive choices, but also in regard to harmony and timbre, due to the nature of multiphonic formation. Redgate takes full advantage in a fierce and driving performance. [Fosdyke Wash] is an abstractly evocative work, which stands in compelling contrast to the disc’s other pieces. Of all the pieces on this disc, the [cello] sonata most shows us that, as Gorton says, ‘even pre­recorded and electronic music is gesturally and visually meaningful.

Craven designs his music to incorporate chance, optional phrasing, improvisation and open interpretation. While the music is experimental, this game between composer and performer gives it a very human quality, which makes it more approachable than all this sounds. It’s tuneful enough that people who like more conventional music will appreciate it, while its changes in time and discordance mean that it should appeal to lovers of the more avant garde, too. We like interesting music, so it’s gone down well.

For those new to Eric Craven’s music, as many will be, I would recommend listening to his very fine Sonata No.9 first. There are moments in [sonata no. 7] that some listeners might find challenging, but overall this is an enormously interesting work, full of fine moments, played brilliantly by Mary Dullea realising Craven’s ideas to remarkable effect. The recording is excellent. Scott McLaughlin’s booklet notes are an essential addition to this release giving, as they do, detailed information concerning the music and its construction, interspersed with comments by the composer. All of these performances are a very fine achievement by Mary Dullea, realising these fascinating and often captivating works that have moments of real beauty.

In [its] exploration of pianistic sound [the album] points to the abiding centrality of the piano to contemporary composition while also illustrating the instrument’s capacity for accommodating both full-frontal assaults and guerrilla-like incursions. Eric Craven’s three un-dated sonatas (Nos. 7–9) pointedly employ both stratagems. There’s something here of jazz music’s surrendering of the primacy of the composer to the immediacy of the performer, a conceit that rubs shoulders with improvisational licence while maintaining discernible control from a distance. Dullea fills in the blanks to telling effect, adding sinew and flesh to bare bone, finding flex and flux in the motivic crux of music that moves osmotically from loose-limbed jazzy inflections to taut, knotty modernity.

[Craven’s] kind of wide-ranging technique allows for considerable diversity in the music itself. Much of the material is quite sparse, although it is not Minimalist in the motoric, repetitive style of pioneering American practitioners such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Elsewhere the music is dense, even lush, especially in the Sonata No. 9, a three-movement work that has the most traditional profile of the three here. He is a very interesting musical thinker, and there are intriguing ideas here.

Craven’s collaborator for these first-rate performances is pianist Mary Dullea. The overall result of all three sonatas is an engaging listening experience that repays revisiting. There is nothing at all off-putting about Craven’s material, and while at times the forms are elusive on a first hearing of such large-scale music, subsequent listens begin to reveal further connections. Significantly more so than in most recordings of contemporary music, the performer’s creative contribution to the result is enor­mous; Mary Dullea inhabits and conveys Craven’s musical landscape with both sensitivity and vir­tuosity.

The sound is totally clear on this recording and the piano sounds as though it was in a small concert hall for a recital. This is not music for casual listening, but it is fascinating for the serious music lover.

Eric Craven is a composer who has imagination, a principled compositional technique and last but not least, a sense of continual development. I enjoyed listening to these three sonatas. They are full of interest and certainly do not sound forbidding. I cannot fault the sound quality of the recording: it is clear, balanced and dynamic … this CD presents detailed, nuanced playing/realisation from Mary Dullea who explores a wide range of dynamics, invention and pianistic technique. This is a worthy recording that is not quite as formidable as it may first appear.

Though I’m only beginning to get a handle on [Craven’s] music,  and perhaps never will, I’m glad to have made his acquaintance, and hope to hear more. You might describe the sonatas as – and I mean this as a compliment – modernism-lite.  Yes, they’re abstract, angular and dissonant.  But unlike in more severe modernism (e.g., Carter, Boulez), you can actually hear what the hell is going on.  There’s no way to predict what will happen next, but when it happens, you understand why it did. [Sonata no. 7] is a cogent, concise and worthy addition to the latter-day piano sonatas of Prokofiev, Copland, Tippett and Carter. I recommend you give Eric Craven’s Sonatas a try, starting with No. 7.  Happy discovery!

[Mary Dullea’s] is just one realisation of Craven’s ideas. The result is intriguing.

Dullea has obviously commit­ted a lot of time to this project, and it shows in the quality of her performances.

Michael Finnissy’s Mississippi Hornpipes has remarkable variety. Finnissy’s style is typified by a slipperiness of phrase, melody, and shape that makes one listen closely. His play with timbres is also very effective. I’m glad to add this Finnissy record to my collection.

In the first of this album’s radically inventive transformations of older material, Michael Finnissy shoots dissonance and violence into the veins of folk tunes from America’s Deep South. Molly House is a private little orgy of denatured Baroque gestures for violin, prepared keyboards and domestic appliances, which like other pieces here comes to an informal stop. With the composer’s useful booklet note to hand, it’s easy to hear how a generously Brahmsian dialectic lies behind the Violin Sonata (2007). Recorded up close, the performances by Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea want for nothing in technical address, commitment and exhilaration. Best of all, they find the fun in Finnissy.