"The collaboration between composer and pianist is an unusually fruitful one, and one hopes it will continue for many years to come." — Caroline Potter
Kenneth Hesketh (born 1968) is an established figure on the British contemporary music scene, and this album features solo piano pieces representing almost 20 years of his output. Many of the works are tributes to deceased mentors, from Joseph Horovitz to Oliver Knussen to Henri Dutilleux, and more generally, Hesketh’s taste for the macabre and mysterious is foregrounded. Only the short tributes to Knussen and Dutilleux have been previously recorded.
Clare Hammond has championed Hesketh’s piano music for a number of years: she had already recorded a substantial cycle dedicated to her, Horae (pro clara), and other works in 2016 (BIS-2193), and she premiered Hesketh’s 2019 piano concerto, Uncoiling the River. This is a close collaboration that works because, according to Hammond, their personalities are similar: she writes in her programme note that they ‘share a certain frenetic mental energy, which he expresses in his composition. In turn, my playing style has influenced the way he writes for the piano.’
Hesketh is himself a pianist, and his scores teem with detailed expression, performance and pedalling indications. The CD opens with the six-movement Poetic Conceits (2006), the only work on the album that predates the collaboration between pianist and composer. Lasting around 25 minutes, its movements are organised in three groups of two. It opens with ‘Epigram’, a typically voluble piece full of unpredictable dynamic changes and gestural shifts. The much longer ‘Of Silence and Slow Time’ follows without a break. Dedicated to Dutilleux on his ninetieth birthday, it is partly based on a soggetto cavato on the name ‘Henri Dutilleux’, each letter of his name being ‘translated’ into a note. In this movement, somewhat in the manner of the French composer, a mysterious melodic line overlays deep, resonant bass notes. Hammond perfectly controls the progressive increase in dynamics to an aggressive cluster-filled climax, from which the movement dissipates to nothing. The short ‘Epigraph’, in which a beautiful and evocative quiet chordal passage is succeeded by virtuosic brilliance, is paired with the longer, poignant and knotty ‘Cold Pastoral’, and the work ends with a crazy toccata, ‘Mad Pursuits’, with hammered bass clusters enhancing the dramatic mood, to which the brief ‘Epitaph’, with its extreme dynamic contrasts, acts as a coda.
Pour Henri (2011) is a minute-long piece celebrating Dutilleux’s ninety-fifth birthday, described by Hesketh as a ‘jeu d’esprit’, presumably because it evokes Dutilleux’s string quartet Ainsi la nuit, and (more obviously) towards the end, his piano prelude ‘Sur un même accord.’ Its artfully simple melodic line makes this piece a touching tribute to a beloved mentor.
Heu, heu, heu … Eine kleine ausschweifende Feier (Hey, hey, hey… A little riotous celebration) (2012) is dedicated to Dr Peter Hanser-Strecker, the former chairman of Schott Music, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday; it is one of seventy pieces written for this celebration. It starts with a very simple birthday tune, played as an incipit to a truly riotous explosion of notes from which the straightforward melody occasionally emerges. The marvellous performance direction ‘inebriated, like hiccups’ surely hints at the morning after the party.
Hände (2015) was written to accompany a silent film in which the characters are represented by hands. It is hard to believe that this abstract black-and-white film was made (by Stella F. Simon and Miklos Blandy) as long ago as 1928, though the film’s subtitle, ‘The life and loves of the fairer sex’ places it in a bygone era. Hesketh’s score, designed to play in exact synchronisation with the film, is nervy and effusive. The composer delights in the resonances of the piano, and there are interesting brief ‘prepared piano’ sections that sound like a malfunctioning gamelan, in which some strings are activated by magnets and different types of beaters. Towards the end of the piece, a quasi-ritualistic section where the piano strings are struck with a bass drum beater sounds like a ghostly echo. Hesketh is fond of desk bells, and six are used in this piece; they are given a precisely notated part with different pitches indicated, to be played over sustained piano resonances. This is a fascinating work in which, as in much of Hesketh’s music, the expressive and mechanical coexist. Hammond’s compelling performance ensures that the score stands on its own, having no need of the film to cast its spell.
Chorales and Kolam (derivata) (2019) is ‘inspired by patterns drawn by women in India and South-East Asia to attract good fortune’. Again, desk bells expand the sonority of the piano. This piece constantly returns to obsessive focal pitches or dyads, somewhat in the manner of Dutilleux, and while there’s a beautiful floating passage about halfway through, several build-ups to aggressive climaxes mean it is far from being twee and decorative. It is superbly written for the piano, and Hammond is always alive to the rhythmic ebb and flow and the quicksilver changes of mood.
Lullaby of the Land Beyond (2018) is a tribute to Oliver Knussen, another of Hesketh’s mentors. Hesketh notes that the title is derived from Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée and is inspired by Knussen’s fondness for lullabies. The three-minute-long piece is layered, slow, reflective, delicate and its spacious, bell-like sonorities perhaps connect the piece to Prayer Bell Sketch, Knussen’s piano piece composed in tribute to his great friend Toru Takemitsu.
Auszüge aus einem kleinen Totenbuch (2023) (Excerpts from a Little Book of the Dead) was composed in memory of Joseph Horovitz, who taught Hesketh as an undergraduate at the Royal College of Music. Hesketh cites material from the fifth string quartet (1969) of his ‘teacher and friend’, stating in his score preface that this is ‘a work [Horovitz] considered to be one of his most personal’. Hammond also plays a Tibetan prayer bowl, and is directed to use an EBow to sustain certain piano sounds just before the coda and as the final gesture of the piece. This is a more substantial work than the other tributes, at just over 17 minutes long. The piece gradually emerges from tentative-sounding rapidly repeating high notes interrupted by bursts of energy. A long single-line passage in the treble register suggests isolation, while rocking figures evoke a comforting lullaby. The Tibetan prayer bowl appears after a maniacal toccata section; as in many other pieces on this album, the extreme contrasts in mood are striking.
Brilliantly performed by Hammond, all the works on this disc would be a welcome addition to the repertoire of pianists interested in contemporary music. The collaboration between composer and pianist is an unusually fruitful one, and one hopes it will continue for many years to come.