January 20th, 2005
The following review was printed in Piano International Piano, 8, Number 37, January/February 2005, p.80-81

Bartók Out of Doors Suite, Vol. 1: ‘With Drums and Pipes’. Sorabji Fantasiettina sul nome illustre del’Egregio poeta Hugh MacDiarmid ossia Christopher Grieve MCMLXI.
Chisholm Sonata in A, ‘An Riobain Dearg’ (uncut version). Stevenson A Threepenny Sonatina. Busoni Fantasia Contrappuntistica.
Murray McLachlan (pf)
Dunelm DRD0219 Full price
(78 minutes: DDD)

Chisholm Straloch Suite. Scottish Airs. Sonata in A, ‘An Riobain Dearg’ (abridged version).
Murray McLachlan (pf)
Dunelm DRD0222 Full price
(77 minutes: DDD)

Murray McLachlan makes a point of presenting the music of composers from his native Scotland – Ronald Stevenson, John McLeod, F G Scott and Ronald Center among them. His recent efforts have been dedicated to Erik Chisholm (1904-65), who was a dynamo in the promotion of new music. Among other projects, Chisholm founded The Active Society for the Promotion of Contemporary Music, drawing Bartók, Hindemith and Syzmanowski, among other luminaries, to his native Glasgow. Only now, though, are we able to form an impression of his own music.

One of McLachlan’s discs sets it in context: the stomping With Drums and Pipes from Bartók’s Out of Doors Suite and a coruscating Fantasiettina (1961) from Sorabji, a close friend of Chisholm’s, open proceedings. The first recording of Stevenson’s Threepenny Sonatina, a six-minute contrapuntal exercise on themes from Weill’s opera, also features along with a forceful, perhaps over-insistent, account of Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica in its ‘edizione definitiva’ (1920).

In IP March/April 2004 I reported on McLachlan’s première of Chisholm’s Sonata in A (1939): the work was thought to have survived incomplete until his daughter discovered the missing pages in South Africa. It is a major Scottish piano sonata, dark and powerful, transferring the essence of pibroch – the stark and decorative music of the Highland bagpipe – to the keyboard. The first movement is a gritty fantasy on An Riobain Dearg (‘The Red Ribbon’), the pibroch which gives the work its subtitle; the second is a scherzo which places a dance over a boogie-woogie bass, and the third is a haunting lament, inspired by the loss of the submarine Thetis in 1939. The finale bristles with jagged optimism, unsentimental and defiant.
What became obvious at that first performance and now on CD is that the Chisholm Sonata overworks its material. The abridged version McLachlan presents here attempts to resolve that objection, shaving some six-and-a-half minutes off the original 40-minute span. It goes some way to giving the work a clearer focus, but the first movement still comes in at eleven minutes and wanders yet.

Just as impressive as the Sonata, and better disciplined, is the sixteen-minute Straloch Suite (1933) which takes its melodic material from the 1627 lute-book of Robert Gordon of Straloch. The first movement is a muscular contrapuntal exercise, Chisholm’s treatment of Gordon producing a satisfying blend of two worlds. The second is a punchy disquisition on three of the Gordon tunes, with some exquisite quieter sections; and the third begins with off-beat chords à la Bartók which, McLachlan’s booklet notes caution, are found in the original works.

Chisholm’s Scottish Airs for Children – 22 adaptations of originals from Patrick MacDonald’s A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs (1784) – provide an ideal teaching resource, unite Scotland’s present with its past and, not least, bring us a sequence of scintillating, exquisite miniatures. Listening to all 22 at once doesn’t best serve the music; but a judicious selection would furnish a wonderful concert item, and most of them would make excellent encores. If McLachlan’s proposed survey of Chisholm’s complete piano music continues to reveal works of this standard, the history of British piano music will require radical reassessment.
Martin Anderson