"… rediscover the possibilities of the piano on an album where music, life, poetry and visual art merge masterfully" — C Cornell Evers
The album design clearly refers to Michelangelo’s famous fresco ‘The Creation of Adam’, which can be found in the Sistine Chapel. This fresco shows two outstretched hands that almost touch: God’s right hand reaches out to Adam’s left hand. This near touch symbolises the moment when God gives life to Adam, the first man. The lack of direct contact emphasises the mystery and tension of this act of creation.
A similar dynamic is visible on the album cover of ‘Hände – Music for Piano’, where a right hand again reaches out invitingly to a left hand. ‘Hände – Music for Piano’ is a layered and varied document of the highly personal and creative collaboration between the acclaimed British pianist Clare Hammond and the contemporary composer Kenneth Hesketh (1968). In the liner notes, Clare Hammond reflects on her long and fruitful collaboration with Kenneth Hesketh, which began after her Purcell Room debut in 2010. She recorded his work Three Japanese Miniatures for her debut album and premiered his series of twelve pieces, Horae (pro clara), in 2013. Their collaboration has resulted in several notable works, including Hände for piano and film (2015), Uncoiling the River for piano and orchestra (2018), and Auszüge aus einem kleinen Totenbuch in 2023.
‘Hände – Music for Piano’ contains pieces specially composed for Clare Hammond as well as previously existing compositions. They all reflect Hesketh’s complex and imaginative style. This album explores themes such as life, death and memory, and is inspired by visual art and literature. The album opens with Poetic Conceits from 2006, a series of six colourful poetic paintings. Three titles are borrowed from John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. The dynamics vary from whisper-soft as the wingbeat of a hummingbird to splashing streams of sound and heavy thumps. This is followed by Pour Henri, a short homage (01:06) to the composer and music educator Henri Dutilleux, who died in 2013 at the age of 97. As a student during a summer course at Tanglewood, Hesketh took lessons from Dutilleux, who inspired him deeply.
The next miniature, Heu, heu, heu… Eine kleine ausschweifende Feier, was composed in 2011 to mark the 70th birthday of Dr. Peter Hanser-Strecker. At the time, director of Schott Music, he commissioned 70 solo piano pieces from composers worldwide as part of a ‘Petrushka Project’. The opening melody (Zum Geburtstag) is by Norbert und die Feiglinge, a German pop band from Hamburg that was active from 1988 to 1999. The 15-minute title piece Hände: Das Leben und die Liebe eines zärtlichen Geschlechts (‘Hands: The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex’) from 2015 was the first composition Hesketh wrote specifically for Hammond. During live performances, she performs the piece in sync with the 1928 black-and-white film of the same name by Stella F. Simon and Miklos Blandy. The film uses human hands as characters in a dance-inspired narrative that explores female experience and representation. By drawing on experimental traditions from the international art, film and photography movements of the 1920s, Simon transforms a simple melodramatic love story into an avant-garde feminist short film.
In Hesketh’s adaptation, the shape and physicality of the hands are crucial to the musical score and the role of the pianist. Hammond sometimes uses innovative techniques, such as striking the strings with knitting needles and, for their clear, tinkling sound, a set of handbells. Hesketh aimed to create a soundscape in this piece that would reflect the bizarre atmosphere of the film. Even without the source film, Hände develops a compelling musical narrative, thanks to Hammond’s focused playing and the harmonious fusion of dancing hands and piano – a brilliant pas de deux. Kenneth Hesketh again explored alternative sounds and techniques in Uncoiling the River, a work for piano and orchestra commissioned by the BBC and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. It premiered in 2019 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Hesketh later reworked material from this piece into Chorales and Kolam (derivata). Here, background chords from Uncoiling the River are presented as chorales. The kolam, a geometric pattern from India and Southeast Asia symbolising good fortune, inspired a passage of rapid, repeated notes. Uncoiling the River mimicked this pattern with diatonic handbells arranged in a kolam pattern. For Chorales and Kolam, Hesketh transcribed it as a piano coda.
From life to death with two wreath layings. Lullaby of the Land Beyond is a memorial to composer and conductor Oliver Knussen (1952-2018), known for his appreciation of Stravinsky and his love of lullabies. Hesketh’s Lullaby takes its title from Stravinsky’s neoclassical ballet Le baiser de la fée (‘The Fairy’s Kiss’), a work based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Ice Maiden. The piece alludes to works by Knussen, including his fantasy opera Higgelty Piggelty Pop. In it, the E flat sings: “The birds are gone, my leaves are dead, and soon I will have nothing left but the empty frozen night”. Hesketh wrote the lullaby “as a little floral greeting left on the path to Castle Yonder”, probably as a reference to the dreamlike and fairytale atmosphere of Stravinsky’s ballet. The closing track is Excerpts from a Little Book of Totenbuch – a 17-minute tribute to Hesketh’s colleague and friend, composer Joseph Horovitz, who died in 2022. Hesketh sees the work as a kind of ‘Yahrtzeit’ candle, which in Judaism is lit on the anniversary of a death in memory of the deceased. In addition to the keyboard, Hammond also plays a Tibetan prayer bowl, plucks the strings of the instrument and uses the EBow (Electronic Bow), popular with guitarists (U2’s The Edge), to sustain notes indefinitely.
The work quotes Horovitz’s fifth string quartet from 1969 in fragments. However, the fragments used are often stripped of their original context and are not intended to be immediately noticeable as a quotation. In the liner notes, Clare Hammond refers to Sappho, the famous poetess from ancient Greece who lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC: “Like Sappho’s poetic shards, only incomplete fragments of words or sentences remain. For Hesketh, these quotations resonate because of the sense of absence that surrounds them”. From Michelangelo to modern piano: a journey through time and sound. ‘Hände – Music for Piano’ lasts seventy minutes. During these seventy minutes, Clare Hammond’s hands may not reach for the divine, but together with Kenneth Hesketh’s they rediscover the possibilities of the piano on an album where music, life, poetry and visual art merge masterfully.