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The Scotsman 5 January 2004
Chisholm Centenary
Recital
CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEW
Martin Anderson
Eric Chisholm
Centenary Recital
****
WIGMORE HALL, LONDON
MURRAY McLachlan’s thrilling London
recital last night to celebrate the centenary of Erik Chisholm
gave his 1939 Sonata in A, An Roibain Dearg (The Red Ribbon)
- thought incomplete until last year - its electrifying premiere.
Dark, powerful, almost 40 minutes in length and speaking an intense
stylistic language halfway between Bartók and Sorabji,
it takes a belated place as one of the most important Scottish
piano sonatas, owning its debt to pibroch and Gaelic melody from
the start.
The first movement develops into a proud and fierce
fantasy of craggy strength. The scherzo, a quicksilver toccata,
puts a splenetic dance over a boogie-woogie bass.
The deeply
felt Lament commemorates the loss of the submarine Thetis in
June 1939 with a fragmented right-hand threnody over aqueous
left-hand chords; and the energetic finale dances with a tough,
wha-daur-meddle-wi’-me optimism.
Ronald Stevenson, 75 last
March, and a colleague of Chisholm when they both worked in South
Africa in the 1960s, is another composer to whom Scotland has
paid insufficient honour.
As generous as he has been prolific,
Stevenson has produced over 200 creative reworkings of other
composers’ pieces. His Threepenny Sonatina (1987), the
evening’s other premiere, is one of these, a witty, six-minute
contrapuntal essay on themes from Weill’s opera.
The other
composers were all connected with Chisholm, whose "Active
Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music" brought
Bartók to Glasgow in the 1930s. That association was marked
with three movements from the Out of Doors Suite, played with
an energy that tested the Wigmore Steinway.
For all his monster
scores, Sorabji, a close friend of Chisholm, was also a master
of the miniature, and his Fantasiettina, a 70th-birthday tribute
to Hugh MacDiarmid from 1961, packs a world of emotion into three
minutes, a coruscating spate of angry notes surrounding one of
Sorabji’s sun-struck reveries, draped with lazy tendrils
of melody.
Janáek’s brittle Sonata 1.X.1905 (Chisholm
wrote a pioneering book on his operas) and a barnstorming account
of Busoni’s monumental Fantasia contrapuntistica brought
the programme to a close - but for two brief encores, the second
and last of Chisholm’s Eleven Scottish Airs, the one gently
beautiful, the other bright with biting humour.
The Scotsman 5 January 2004
Chisholm Centenary Recital
CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEW
Martin Anderson
Eric Chisholm Centenary Recital ****
WIGMORE HALL, LONDON
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