Erik Chisholm Centenary Celebration
Murray
McLachlan (4 January)
This challenging programme of Murray McLachlan’s ’official’ Wigmore
Hall debut recital was devised as an Erik Chisholm Centenary
Celebration at Wigmore Hall and given there first on the day
this once famous Scot had been born a hundred years before. A
musical polymath, Chisholm (1904-1960) was active in his relatively
short life as a composer who drew on diverse cultural influences,
and he worked too as organist, conductor and administrator, notably
in Cape Town where the centenary is being celebrated with productions
of his operas. It did Chisholm and his memory a great service
for McLachlan to have devised this sequence, centring on the
presentation of the London premiere of a major sonata, surrounded
by music which significantly influenced him, a testimony to Erik
Chisholm’s wide ranging enthusiasms.
Out of Doors was a reminder that Chisholm was a friend of Bartók,
and the first to bring him to UK, where he purchased “all
the piobaireachd music he could lay his hands on!” The ’small
piece’ by Sorabji (no easy one though), brief but typically
wild, reflected this maverick composer’s friendships with
Ronald Stevenson and Chisholm. Stevenson was present, amongst
many luminaries of an earlier generation, and his Sonatina after
the Weill-Brecht opera struck a welcome lighter note in the second
half, following Janácek’s memorial sonata which
had received a luminous and moving performance from McLachlan,
none better to my recall (Chisholm was an authority on Janácek
and wrote the first major study of his operas in English).
Each half had one extremely demanding major work. Chisholm’s 35-minute
Sonata (1939) “fuses Bartókian textures and harmonies with Celtic-inspired
melodies, rhythms and colours”. The opening of the first movement suggests
a Scottish piper and the pianism is of the kind that exploits the orchestral
potential of the piano, unfashionably as of now, but welcome to hear again.
I found the Scherzo a little heavy and relentless (often a misnomer, q.v. Brahms
and Chopin) and wondered if the textures might not be lightened a little and
the dynamics more varied? The Lament for the loss of the submarine Thetis (an
event I remember well, though only 12 at the time, shortly before War was declared)
is an expansive slow movement, and the rhythmic energy of the finale brought
to mind the first sonata of Tippett, composed around the same time.
Finally, the ’operatic’ Edizione Definitiva of Busoni’s great
Fantasia, in which “extensive use of the sostenuto pedal in performance
can cast fearful shadows” over the Bach fugues. McLachlan’s exemplary
programme note stresses how ahead of its time was the “plethora of futuristic
harmonies” in which Busoni realises new possibilities, “rising
on the shoulders” of Bach’s fragment towards a new future. It is
possibly unrealisable in its totality, rather as there can never be a last
word on Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, and it is relevant that Chisholm
brought Egon Petri to Glasgow’s Active Society for the Propagation of
Contemporary Music for a Busoni recital.
To bring us down from the heights, Murray McLachlan finished with two little
Chisholm Scottish Airs as encores, exactly right. He had demonstrated sensibility,
concentration and endurance throughout a notable recital, for which he was
duly acclaimed by a near full Wigmore Hall audience, marred only by some persistent,
uncovered coughing from the keyboard side.
An indication of the north/south divide in Britain is that whilst this programme
is to be toured widely up north and recorded for CD, apparently nothing else
is scheduled in Southern England by the Erik Chisholm Trust, so do look out
for the release of this recital programme on CD.
Peter Grahame Woolf
http://www.classicalsource.com
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