Alan Cooper reviews: Philip Mead
Philip Mead, Piano
Music in the University in association with sound
King’s College Chapel, Aberdeen
Thursday, 6th November 2014
Philip Mead, an acknowledged master of advanced contemporary piano repertoire is also Founder and Director of the British Contemporary Piano Competition. He is one of the most prolific commissioners of new and exciting piano repertoire. In Thursday’s programme we heard him introduce and play three new world premières of works by composers all three of whom have close connections with Aberdeen University Music working for or having received PhD degrees in composition.
In between some of the new pieces, he performed works by Bartók and Debussy, either because they had features that mirrored aspects of the new works, or because they stood in direct contrast to them.
The first world première was of a work which has been over ten years in gestation. Composer Simon Willson writes that even now he is not entirely sure about his own piece “…now it’s done it makes me feel uneasy. I’m not sure why”. I hope I can put the composer’s feelings at rest when I say that this was one of the best pieces in the recital. Philip Mead explained that this piece follows some of Schoenberg’s ideas on atonal composition before he embraced full serialism. It is a work in which there is absolutely no repetition, he said. Taken literally that is no doubt absolutely true but in another sense it is not true at all. The piece is made up of what the composer refers to as episodes and interludes and even within that boldly recognisable musical patterning there was melodic shaping that had definite structural implications. Chords, trills, contrapuntal writing, repeated notes – all of these contributed to the overall shaping of the music and at the end, the opening melodic sequences were mirrored in chord sequences. This confirmed the composer’s suggestion of arch or sonata form. I felt that structurally it was a particularly satisfying work.
One could say that Willson’s piano writing was quite brittle in its sound textures and so in a totally different way is Bartók’s Suite Op. 14. I was fortunate to be seated where I could get a clear view of Philip Mead’s hands and it was tremendously exciting to watch his extreme virtuosity in action as well as hearing the results in these two pieces. Bartók’s Suite has distinct folk resonances but the rhythms which started out as a reflection of folk dance also suggested the aggressive sounds of 20th century industrial life – a fascinating piece brilliantly played.
Timothy Raymond’s In the orbit of Venus had an intriguing title. Philip Mead explained that many of its repeated note sections were in fact Morse code signals. As Timothy Raymond’s programme note states there is a vast complexity of reference that gave birth to this piece including the hermetic concept of Fibonacci numbers. I was reminded of a local science expert whose wife was very keen on choral singing. He absolutely hated being dragged along to her concerts and complained endlessly about it. I remember him turning up alone at a sound concert. “I thought you hated music”, I said to him. “Oh no!” he replied. “It’s just her music I hate. This music I absolutely love. It speaks to me in a language I can totally understand”. Sadly the person in question and his wife are no longer alive but I am certain he would have loved Tim Raymond’s piece. It was full of exploratory colour and glorious imaginative visions brought thrillingly to life once again by Philip Mead’s compelling virtuosity.
Debussy’s music often has pictorial references and his Pagodes from Estampes is just one such piece. There was an exhibition in Paris that included Gamelan players which both Debussy and Ravel are said to have attended. Of course, as Philip Mead explained Pagodas and Gamelans are from totally different parts of the world but it is still a great piece and it mirrored the imaginative power of Tim Raymond’s piece.
Ribbons by Paul Tierney made fascinating contrasts between slow playing at the lower end of the piano register and busy music at the upper end of the instrument’s range. I mentioned to the composer after the concert that his music made me think of some of the pieces in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Paul Tierney said that this had never crossed his mind but perhaps there was some underlying influence? Anyway I like Mussorgsky and I enjoyed Tierney’s piece too.
Philip Mead closed his recital with an absolutely astonishing not to say terrifyingly virtuoso performance of Stephen Montague’s Paramell Va (1981). In 1985 Philip Mead formed a duo with Montague called Montague/Mead Piano Plus that tours internationally. This was a minimalist piano piece driven to the utmost extremity and it was included in the programme as being the extreme opposite of Simon Willson’s piece which opened the recital – from a piece with no repeats to one which is all repeats but both phenomenally difficult to play.
With this concert followed immediately by Jillian Bain Christie’s magical tour of Scandinavian vocal music I left the Chapel with my ears and musical sensibilities absolutely “spaced out” – but that at its best is what sound aims to do. It flings the windows of musical experience wide open and is quite different from those concerts that give you no more than what you had been expecting.
© Alan Cooper, 2014
