"… an enchanting, challenging, engaging album, superbly played" — Guy Rickards
Clare Hammond, who made an earlier BIS album of Kenneth Hesketh’s music issued in 2016, is clearly this composer’s piano muse, with most of the works here written for her. An exception is Poetic Conceits (2006), an intricate suite taking Keats as its initial starting point, and as always with Hesketh, whatever the descriptive titles, the music proceeds for musical reasons primarily. Hammond navigates the webs of thematic, harmonic and rhythmic interconnections with considerable virtuosity, as she does Hände (‘Hands’, 2015), subtitled ‘the life and love of the fairer sex’, designed to accompany a 1928 silent film. It is a magical, at times romantic score for all its use of prepared techniques and six handbells. So, too, is Auszüge aus einem kleinen Totenbuch (‘Excerpts from a Small Book of the Dead’, a touching memorial to Joseph Horovitz who died in 2022), the handbells replaced with a Tibetan prayer bowl. The shorter pieces are conjured from the page with equal assurance by Hammond despite their varied origins, including two birthday celebrations from 2011 - Pour Henri (not inspired by Dutilleux’s death two years later as the booklet claims) and the riotous Heu, heu, heu… for his publisher’s 70th - the wistful Lullaby (in memory of Oliver Knussen) and Chorales and Kolam (2019), dedicated to Hammond’s second daughter, Emmie. An enchanting, challenging, engaging album, superbly played, with first-rate sound.