MacMillan / MacRae: Piano works - CD Booklet

DELPHIAN

James MacMillan 1 in angustiis... I 2 Birthday Present 3 Barncleupédie 4 Lumen Christi

[4.41] [2.46] [1.54] [2.17]

Piano Sonata 5 I. Adagio 6 II. Grandioso ed affretando 7 III. Adagio

[2.43] [8.28] [2.19]

8 For Ian 9 A Cecilian Variation for JFK 10 Angel

[6.33] [2.59] [3.42]

Stuart MacRae Piano Sonata 11 I. Variation 12 II. Erosion/Glacial

[7.44] [9.45]

Total playing time

macmillan macrae simon smith

[55.53]

DCD34009

James MacMillan’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd 295 Regent Street London W1B 2JH http://www.boosey.com/composers

James MacMillan 1 in angustiis... I 2 Birthday Present 3 Barncleupédie 4 Lumen Christi

[4.41] [2.46] [1.54] [2.17]

Piano Sonata 5 I. Adagio 6 II. Grandioso ed affretando 7 III. Adagio

[2.43] [8.28] [2.19]

8 For Ian 9 A Cecilian Variation for JFK 10 Angel

[6.33] [2.59] [3.42]

Stuart MacRae’s music is published by Chester Music Ltd. & Novello Publishing Ltd. 8-9 Frith Street London W1D 3JB Telephone +44 (0)20 7434 0066 http://www.chesternovello.com

More contemporary music from Delphian Records Songs from the Exotic Polly May, mezzo-soprano; Lucy Walker, piano DCD 34002

This debut from rising star Polly May includes premiere recordings of the original versions of Judith Weir’s Songs from the Exotic and Luciano Berio’s Quattro canzoni popolari. "[M]uch to enjoy in this fresh and courageous venture." - BBC Music Magazine

Stuart MacRae Piano Sonata 11 I. Variation 12 II. Erosion/Glacial

[7.44] [9.45] Total playing time

Simon Smith piano

[55.53]

A’e Gowden Lyric Susan Hamilton, soprano; John Cameron, piano DCD34006 Few works of music capture the beauty of Scots poetry as thoroughly as the songs of Ronald Stevenson. Scottish soprano Susan Hamilton and pianist John Cameron join forces in settings of Hugh MacDiarmid, William Soutar, Sorley Maclean, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden ofVerses.

order online at www.delphianrecords.co.uk 1

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Simon Smith was born in Northumberland in 1983. A self-taught pianist, he had his first piano lessons at the age of 10, with June Laird. From 1996 to 2002 he studied piano with Richard Beauchamp at St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh, where he also took up composition, studying with Tom David Wilson, and later John Maxwell Geddes and James MacMillan. He is currently reading Music at Clare College, Cambridge.

acclaimed as "beautifully paced, finely structured, Passion music for today... a direct and emotional work" [The Herald]. His current projects are Attis, a concerto for tuba and large orchestra, and Stabat Mater, for solo viola and chamber orchestra.

Simon has great interest in computer music engraving, and the study of music notation. He has produced and engraved a piano reduction of MacMillan's The World's Ransoming which was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2002, and he is currently completing a reduction of MacMillan's clarinet concerto Ninian.

Simon has always had a particular interest in contemporary music, and in recent years he has enjoyed an ever-deepening relationship with the music of James MacMillan. He first played to the composer on one of his visits to St Mary's Music School in 2000, and this prompted a recital of the complete piano music in September of that year, which was repeated in the 2001 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. MacMillan has dedicated the piano piece in angustiis... I to Simon, who gave the first performance of the work in Glasgow in February 2002. Simon has also frequently performed the works of Rachmaninov and Alfred Schnittke, both in solo recitals and in concert with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and others.

Recorded 9 & 10 March, 2002 in the Reid Concert Hall, Edinburgh 24-bit stereo technology Producer: Kevin Findlan Engineer: Paul Baxter This recording was made possible with a grant from the Scottish Arts Council.

Special thanks to Norman Motion.

Design and Photography: © Delphian Records Ltd Photograph of James MacMillan courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes.

Photograph of Stuart MacRae courtesy of Novello & Company.

2002 Delphian Records Ltd © 2002 Delphian Records Ltd Delphian Records Ltd PO Box 17179 Edinburgh EH12 5YD www.delphianrecords.co.uk Tel: 0709 215 7149

As a composer, Simon prefers large-scale forms.

His orchestral piece Paragon was premiered by the Meadows Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh in May 2000. His next and most recent large-scale composition, Crucifixus, which premiered in St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, in March 2002, was 9

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Simon Smith

Birthday Present was written in 1997 for the birthday of Hazel Sheppard, the administrator of the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust (ECAT), and it too has its roots in Symphony 'Vigil', employing a chord sequence used in the third movement of that work as an underlay to a rather idiosyncratic (but characteristic) harmonisation of the well-known melody. This piece takes material and develops it in new directions; by contrast Angel, written in 1993 as a gift for the composer's daughter Catherine, strips things down to the barest essentials: twenty-six notes or chords, with no fixed duration (each is between six and ten seconds at the discretion of the performer), played at a very soft dynamic.

This material originally appeared in the ethereal closing minutes of MacMillan's piano concerto The Berserking, played in free time by the piano, harp and celesta, itself a distillation of the hazy harmonies which underpin the concerto's middle movement.

The Piano Music of James MacMillan The works on this disc comprise all of James MacMillan's music for solo piano to date. For such a prolific composer, this is a curiously small portion of his total output. However, these works are wonderfully individual and offer some fascinating contrasts.

MacMillan has never been afraid of reusing material, and a number of the piano pieces are what the composer calls 'satellite pieces' - works either taken directly from or based on a small idea from a much larger work. Lumen Christi began life as a sketch for MacMillan's Symphony 'Vigil' (1997) and indeed appears there, note for note, at the end of the second movement, played on the celesta. It is testament to the strong character of the musical material that it works as well as an isolated miniature as it does as a tiny part of a fifty-minute orchestral canvas. The piece is based on the first four notes of the 'Lumen Christi' chant, which are repeated over and over again at the top of the texture while the harmony slowly and subtly changes in the background. Though beginning simply enough, an unsettling polytonal opposition is reached in the middle of the piece, and the end is not entirely conclusive.The soundworld of the piece is suggestive of a music box, or a 'child's clockwork musical toy', symbolic of innocence - an effect of which MacMillan is fond, and which can be found in a number of his other works.

MacMillan is equally at home writing around the music of other composers. Barncleupédie is Satie with a Scottish twist, and was composed in 1990 for a couple of the composer's friends upon a visit to their farm in Barncleugh, Dumfriesshire. It humorously sumperimposes a Burns song ("Will ye no come back again?") over a familar, simple accompaniment alluding to Satie's Trois Gymnopédies. A Cecilian Variation for JFK could not be more different in character. It was composed as one of a composite set of piano variations on 3

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©Novello & Co./Andrew Palmer

on hearing early performances of the piece of watching an endless and impossibly slow helicopter-shot receding upwards from a summit so that other views gradually come into the frame without losing focus on the summit itself…but these are my impressions, and I hope each listener will have his or her own, personal interpretation of the music. ©2002 Stuart MacRae Performer's note: Stuart MacRae's Piano Sonata presents the performer with intimidating technical challenges, and I consider it the most difficult work I have tackled hitherto. Most particularly, the first few minutes of the first movement, which rapidly hurtle forward into a dizzy whirlwind of a climax, require the most absolute alertness from the performer and are extremely exciting to play and to hear. Perhaps even more difficult is striking the first chord of the second movement after nearly eight minutes of some of the most energetic and violent piano playing possible - in performance, the small pause between the movements can be terrifying for the player.

Stuart Macrae struggle, so often symbolised as the climbing of a mountain. And indeed it was in my mind to find a musical expression of the sensation of climbing among the complex topography of my favourite hills in the Cuillin of Skye. So certain ideas come into view, are obscured and reappear in a different form, until finally they appear in their very closest and most imposing guise.

In spite of these challenges, this piece, as with MacMillan's Sonata, is clearly the work of a composer who completely understands the possibilities and capabilities of instrument and performer, and it is an extraordinarily rewarding piece to perform. I sincerely hope that in the future I shall have many opportunities to do so. -SS

The more reflective second movement is to some extent an expression of the calm and serenity I feel on having gained the summit. I had the impression 7

the overture to Henry Purcell's St Cecilia ode Welcome to all the pleasures of 1683 (the other variations are by William Matthias, Michael Berkeley and Gerald Victory - the four composers represent the four countries of the British Isles). However, only the tiniest fragments of what might be Purcell are heard, repeatedly shattered by a series of violent explosions; MacMillan's transformation of the original material is heard here at a more sophisticated level.

a guess as to what the title - "in time of war", alluding to Haydn among others - relates. (in angustiis... II is composed for any of solo oboe, cello or soprano, and can be performed alone or simultaneously with the piano piece).

None of these small works pretends to be more than it is: they are all successful and satisfying in their own ways, and are vivid but succinct characterisations of mood through simple ideas.

By contrast, the Piano Sonata - the largest, and also earliest work in MacMillan's piano output - is far more complex and involved. The composer describes its composition thus:

In a sense, the most 'original' of the small pieces are For Ian and in angustiis... I. These two pieces owe much to Scottish traditional music, the former more directly so. MacMillan likens For Ian to some of Peter Maxwell Davies' "reflective and unassuming piano works". The piece is structured, like folk music, in a simple ABA form, giving the impression of a traditional piece filtered through MacMillan's creative consciousness. in angustiis... I also follows this form; here the outer sections are comprised of a folk-like melody in clusters over an uneasy walking bass. The middle section is surreal and atmospheric, with single notes and chords spread over the full range of the keyboard, played in free time in much the same manner as in Angel, but with an unnerving rather than serene effect. The desolation of this music is characteristic of a number of MacMillan's works. Given that the work appeared in October 2001, one can hazard

I wrote my Piano Sonata during a bitter Ayrshire winter and recall the barren trees and hard frozen ground of a landscape that was empty and silent but for the harsh, hollow cry from the rookeries. This is reflected in the Sonata's tolling, mournful chords, with its bursts of violent, or delicate and icy, figuration.

Throughout the three movements the music conveys a mood of elegy, of despair and desolation.

Stylistically, the Piano Sonata is very different from MacMillan's other piano works. His oeuvre can be separated into two discrete periods of compositional style, punctuated by the first string quartet, Visions of a November Spring, written in 1988 and revised in 1991. MacMillan explained the quartet as being the closest thing to 4

©Boosey & Hawkes/Barry Marsden

The sonata's two short outer movements frame the large and complex central movement - a proportional arrangement MacMillan had already employed in Three Dawn Rituals (1983), an ensemble work for eight players. The short movements therefore come to be seen as prelude and afterthought. Although not immediately apparent, symmetry is central to the sonata's structure: the last movement is constructed as a retrograde of the first, transposed down a semitone (the strange opening to the third movement can thereby be explained by careful listening to the end of the first!) and there are more complex symmetrical relationships at work in the middle movement itself.

Any moments of relaxation in the work are shortlived and deceptive. The static first movement sets up an ominous undercurrent that runs through the work until the nervous and somewhat inconclusive chatterings of the sonata's final bars. The second movement breaks out at times into considerable violence in fluctuation with an uneasy stillness. In it,we find features such as the confinement of one hand to black notes and the other to white (often simultaneously, creating chromatic textures); rapid streams of notes grouped in quintuplets, fitting easily under the hand; a vast array of textures deployed, including the differentation of lines through subtle use of the soft pedal (indicated in the score). The pianist John York,

James MacMillan an autobiographical statement he had composed, at a time when his compositional style was changing significantly. The Piano Sonata antedates this quartet, the far more quintessentially modernist period of his output, whereas the smaller piano works all come after it. These two periods cannot be entirely disassociated from each other, however; they share a number of common features, most obviously a predilection for sustained, concentrated stillness, and violent contrasts, as well as the enduring influence of folk music.

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who has also recorded the Piano Sonata, has commented that he considers the work to be unidiomatic, and comparing the writing to that in MacMillan's two Cello Sonatas, describes it as "more abstruse, harder to grasp physically and mentally". I do not agree.

y the time I started writing the Piano Sonata in 1998 I had been thinking, for a while, about the possibilities of making works out of two separate parts that would balance one another. In order for this to be effective, I thought, the two parts would have to be more or less selfsufficient, and have their own internal balance: in fact, the first movement has been performed several times as a piece in its own right; the second movement has its own material until near the end when a sort of coda mixes the material from the two movements (albeit inconclusively).

Having established two distinct periods in MacMillan's output, it is interesting to see that his current compositional activity seems to be heading towards a fusion. The music remains less hard-edged and uncompromising, but his use of the piano, in chamber or orchestral contexts, is increasingly reminiscent of the pianistic style of the Piano Sonata. Good examples of this are the piano trio Fourteen Little Pictures (1997) and the two Cello Sonatas (1999 and 2001), all of which have prominent and challenging piano parts. The Cello Sonata No. 1, in particular, shows the composer exploring a new avenue, which had already been hinted at in the orchestral piano parts in works such as the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1996) and Quickening (1999) - namely the use of pure sonorism, through clusters, indeterminacy and extended use of the sustaining pedal to generate massive textures. In this aspect of his composition MacMillan may have been influenced by the Russian composers Galina Ustvolskaya and Alfred Schnittke, both of whom he greatly admires. One may only speculate on what, in solo piano terms, may come next.

People usually want to know about the movements' subtitles. What I had initially had in mind was that the first movement (Variation) was at the same time a set of fairly clearly delineated variations, and a progressive exploration, through variation, of the material of the opening.

The second movement (Erosion/Glacial) has two distinct ideas, one of which is made of rather dense but quiet chords, and is gradually “eroded” by the second idea, which has much clearer polyphonic lines spread out across the different registers of the piano (and is “glacial” in character).

As for the overall form of the work - two movements of approximately equal length and starkly contrasting character and colour - there is an underlying model for this shape in my main extra-musical passion: hill-walking. The somewhat violent first movement evokes

©2002 Simon Smith 6