Alan Cooper reviews: Richard Bailey, piano
Cults Parish Church present
Richard Bailey: Piano
Cults Parish Church
Sunday, 09 November 2014
Richard Bailey’s piano recital for sound on Sunday evening drew a large crowd to Cults Parish Church as part of their ongoing Music in the Sanctuary series. His programme featured one large scale contemporary work: Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. This piece was having its second outing at this year’s sound Festival having been played at a Lunchbreak Concert on Thursday 30th October by Christina McMaster. By the way, the Festival programme spells the title of this piece in two different ways in the programme, neither of which quite matches the spelling in the score or of the South Carolina town it refers to. But that is neither here nor there.
Richard Bailey also played a piano piece by Anton Webern – actually this composer’s only piece for solo piano. It nevertheless stands as a landmark work in “modern” music. I have put the word modern in inverted commas because the piece was composed between 1935 and 1936. This makes it 78 years old, so not quite contemporary. Nevertheless it lies closer to Rzewski’s piece than to either Mozart’s or Beethoven’s music and even the two Chopin Nocturnes which concluded the programme were composed a hundred years before the Webern Variations.
Richard opened his recital with Mozart’s Fantasie in d minor (1782) K397. The introductory Andante had more than a hint of Bach to it but the rest was pure Mozart. Richard played it with outstanding expressiveness. Variety of dynamics, attack and tempo suggested the full colours of Mozart the composer of opera in Richard’s performance.
The second piece in the recital was Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. Refreshments are always served after the Cults concert and round the tables in the Hall everyone was enthusing about Richard’s performance of this piece. It begins with a minimalist rumbling pattern on the lowest part of the piano then with forearm and elbow employed to get the note clusters it rises up through the keys. Something I noticed in this performance but missed before was the marriage of mechanical rhythm with the idea of boogie-woogie bass. Later on, the blues song sang out clearly but the marriage between the sounds of the mill and black American inspired music were clearly expressed in Richard’s performance and that is what I think the audience really loved.
In huge contrast with Rzewski’s sound painting, Richard continued with Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 27 No.2 “Quasi una fantasia” but instantly recognisable as The Moonlight Sonata. The opening movement was properly atmospheric and was followed by a bright jaunty Allegretto. The finale can be played with considerable ferocity but this would not have worked on the relatively small Cults piano. Richard chose, I think wisely to add a fine seasoning of delicacy to his interpretation and it was marvellous to watch his hands spidering at high speed across the keys.
Webern’s three movement Variations are not unlike romantic music from which every trace of sugar has been removed. The wide leaps in the melodic line were accomplished with superb precision and all three movements were nicely paced regarding the composer’s requirements: Very moderate – Very fast – then Calm and flowing. In this music short moments of silence are used just as expressively as the notes themselves.
Following on from the Webern were two Nocturnes by Chopin: Op. 9 Nos 1 and 2. These were played with superb fluency, the second being particularly well known and therefore much appreciated by Sunday’s audience yet it will please sound to hear that it was Rzewski’s music that made the biggest impression.
© Alan Cooper, 2014
