"… invariably engaging and illuminating" — Paul Conway
This generously filled disc celebrates the longstanding and fruitful artistic partnership between composer Kenneth Hesketh and pianist Clare Hammond. Dating from 2006 to 2023, the contents includes several works written specifically for the performer. While the music offered here is searching and often technically demanding, the results are invariably engaging and illuminating.
Poetic Conceits (2006) is a set of six, unbroken movements in which the protean material is constantly being viewed in a different light, either through development or by varied restatement. Clare Hammond is poised and persuasive in this challenging piece, whether in the fiery opening Epigram, the impish Epigraph and the volatile Mad Pursuits, or in the vast stillness of the contemplative second movement and eloquent wistfulness of the opening of the fourth. By turns virtuosic, exploratory and visionary, this substantial piece, consummately played, makes a powerful opening statement.
The other two extended works presented in this conspectus are just as vivid and concentrated. Hände (2015), from which this album takes its title, is a wide-ranging, single-movement work that incorporates chiming desk bells and extended piano techniques. These diverse expressive means are employed solely to further a musical narrative that is far-reaching and, in the hands of Clare Hammond, deeply compelling. Written in 2023, Auszüge aus einem kleinen Totebuch ('Excerpts from a little book of the dead') is an elegiac tribute to the composer Joseph Horovitz, a friend and colleague of Kenneth Hesketh. Material from what is arguably Horovitz's greatest work, his fifth string quartet, is included in a musical argument that involves the occasional use of a Tibetan prayer bowel, a hand-held electronic bow, and plucked strings to enhance the music's rapt, devotional character. Clare Hammond's dedicated, poetic and finely realised interpretation touches the heart and always serves the music.
Of the four shorter pieces, two are memorial tributes: Pour Henri (2011) is a gentle, affecting homage to Dutilleux and Lullaby of the Land Beyond, written in 2018 in memory of Oliver Knussen, is mystically evocative. Heu, heu heu (2012) and Chorales and Kolam (2019) are birthday gifts, the first boisterous and the second thoughtful and intricately wrought.
Clare Hammond is an ideal exponent of Kenneth Hesketh's questing and distinctive keyboard scores. Bravura passages are handled with notable assurance and invention and the quieter, more inward aspects of the music are treated with devoted care and profound understanding. Richly documented and effectively recorded, this is an extremely desirable release.