John R. Williamson Piano Music, Volume 2

Song of Nature. 12 Palindromic Preludes, Set 5. Sonata No. 4, 'The Palindromic'. Seven Interval Studies.
Lament for Sarah+.

Murray McLachlan, + John R. Williamson (pianos)

The following review was printed in International Record Review, October 2003 issue, page 69.

Dunelm Records DRD0176 (full price, 1 hour 14 minutes) Website www.dunelm-records.co.uk
Producer/Engineer Jim Pattison Engineer Joyce Pattison Dates December 17th, 2002 January 19th, 2003.

Dunelm Records are giving little away in their documentation, for John R. Williamson, who was born in Manchester, is hardly a household name, and listeners might like to know a little more about the composer whose music they are being encouraged to buy. The booklet notes, which I suspect are by the composer himself, do not tell us much about the music, other than the bare bones.

Williamson's music is nothing if not consistent; he has a uniform style in his keyboard writing which is predicated upon a chordal-arioso manner in which the underlying chordal bases remain fluid but hardly 'progress' in the sense of inner movement; what we have is a fascinating mixture of coloration in the harmonies, much of them founded upon diminished sevenths and ninths, but fully chordal as befits music written for the piano. The result is a style not unlike that of a heady late-Romantic sensuality, but this should not be taken as merely atmospheric or Impressionistic, for there is another layer of genuine compositional skill at work here: the structural use, indeed at times almost an obsession, with palindromic writing - in which, and purely mnemonically, halfway through the music retraces its steps, as it were; nor is this necessarily the emotional expression in reverse.

Of course, any music can be played backwards as well as forwards - the skill lies in devising music which makes sense in these terms, and it must be said that Williamson is often very successful within this rather stringent framework. On the other hand, with such exceptions as the Scherzo in the Fourth Sonata, there is little light and shade in the writing, and I would recommend hearing this CD a work at a time, rather than playing it through at one sitting. Murray McLachlan is not an artist to waste his talents on music which is merely meretricious, and his involvement in this project guarantees a quality of art which is impressive.

The performers are admirable but the recording is not as clear as I should like; closer miking could have clarified textures better, but this is an observation, not a criticism as such. The composer himself plays Lament for Sarah, written following the death of a granddaughter, aged seven. With excellent piano tone throughout, this is a most interesting and recommendable issue of music by a composer who deserves a wider audience than he has hitherto enjoyed.

Robert Mathew-Walker