"an ode to craft, expression, and nuance" — Bart Debbaut
While the newspapers are filled with discussions about AI-generated music in shops and supermarkets—intended to circumvent Sabam but usually sounding as if someone had put Chopin through a blender—fortunately, music is also emerging that centers on humans. Pianist Clare Hammond proves with her new CD that interpretation, feeling, and imagination are still unprogrammable.
Together with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by George Vass, she presents three gems by British composers: William Walton (1902–1983), Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), and Michael Tippett (1905–1998). Three contemporaries, three completely different voices, but all driven by the same quest: what does human expression sound like in a changing world?
Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante (1927, revised 1943) bursts with life. Originally written as ballet music for Diaghilev, it’s a sparkling piece of rhythmic quirks, humor, and English elegance. Hammond plays it with joy, audible in every note—lively, precisely, and without a trace of aloofness. Next comes Britten’s Diversions, a work with an almost believable story. Britten wrote it in 1940 for Paul Wittgenstein, the pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. Wittgenstein also commissioned such luminaries as Ravel, Prokofiev, Korngold, and Richard Strauss, and Britten joined that list with a composition for the left hand alone. Listening, you quickly forget this: Hammond makes the piano sound as if she’s playing with both hands. In the second movement, Recitative, she sweeps across the keyboard—from left to right—with a control that is at once powerful and tender. Britten names his variations Romance, March, Nocturne, and Toccata, as if he were walking through music history, saluting Bach, Schumann, and Chopin along the way. The final work, Tippett's Piano Concerto (1953–1955), is cinematic. Inspired by Walter Gieseking's performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, Tippett composed a dialogue between piano and orchestra, not a struggle. The third and final movement is exhilarating and leaves the listener with a smile that stretches across the room.
And then there's that striking CD cover. The background was clearly created by artificial intelligence—geometric, slightly distorted, almost surreal. But if you look closely, you'll notice that Hammond herself also seems a bit too smooth, as if her portrait were digitally generated. Perhaps that's a coincidence, perhaps not. But it fits wonderfully with the message of this CD: that in an age when images and sounds are increasingly artificial, human interpretation is indispensable. This recording is therefore an ode to craft, expression, and nuance—three things that no algorithm will ever be able to credibly imitate.
Review available in Dutch here.