Robert Simpson - Complete Solo Piano Music (Raymond Clarke)

Information

Composer: Robert Simpson

• (01) Piano Sonata
• (04) Variations and Finale on a theme of Haydn
• (09) Michael Tippett, His Mystery
• (10) Variations and Finale on a theme by Beethoven

Raymond Clarke, piano

Date: 1996

Label: Hyperion

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA66827

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Review

It’s convenient that all Simpson’s piano music fits on to a single CD. But if you were hoping to find representative works from all periods of his career, it’s not so convenient to find that four decades separate the two earlier works from the two later ones.

Yet the Piano Sonata and the Variations and Finale on a Theme of Haydn, composed in 1946 and 1948 respectively, have much in common with the Beethoven Variations from as recently as 1990. In each case the piano writing is rugged, plain-speaking and disdainful of colour and effect, often recalling Schubert in chunkiest Wanderer Fantasy vein. In each case, too, Simpson’s compositional resources feel as limitless, as they are, in point of fact, strictly focused. Whether weirdly hanging in the air or nearly exploding with fierce joy, this music is absolutely single-minded in its exploitation of the potential energy of its material.

The big-boned opening bars of the Sonata could be a homage to Nielsen’s Symphonic Pieces, Op. 3, were it not for the fact that Simpson had yet to encounter that composer. Among the more remarkable features later on are long-limbed unaccompanied lines which have the suggestive power of fugue subjects but whose potential is worked out in other, equally intriguing polyphonic ways. As in Brahms’s Op. 1 Sonata, the general strenuousness of texture and eagerness to take possession of musical space suggest a composer “springing ready-armed from the head of Zeus” (to quote Schumann). From the piano repertoire of the Sonata’s own time I can think of nothing quite like it, except perhaps parts of Tippett’s First Sonata.

The Haydn Variations are on the same palindromic theme Simpson was to take 34 years later for his huge masterpiece, the Ninth String Quartet, and the piece shares some of the same ideas. But as Lionel Pike remarks in his insert-notes, this is no mere interesting forerunner. It works its compelling way through statuesque stillness and Diabellian humour, to Hammerklavierian energy.

The tiny Tippett tribute from 1984 is like a response to the slow movement of the older man’s Third Piano Sonata, heard through a prism of Scriabinesque tritones. And the last movement of that same Tippett work comes to mind in the characteristically engrossing Beethoven Variations. But all this mention of other composers is only a question of affinities, not overshadowing influences. Simpson dances to no one’s tune but his own.

The Beethoven Variations were composed for Raymond Clarke, who brings to them, and to the other pieces, an unimpeachable mastery of technique and idiom. His dedication to the Simpson cause is on a par with the other discs in the remarkable Hyperion series, as is the clarity of the recording. Never mind the faintly audible patches of traffic noise in the quieter moments; if you are on the right musical wavelength you won’t notice them.

-- Gramophone

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Robert Simpson (2 March 1921 – 21 November 1997) was an English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster. He studied composition under Herbert Howells. Simpson is best known for his orchestral and chamber music, and for his writings on the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. He wrote 11 symphonies as well as concertos for violin, piano, flute and cello. His extensive output of chamber music comprised 15 string quartets, 2 string quintets, a clarinet quintet, piano trio, clarinet trio, horn trio and violin sonata. The Robert Simpson Society was formed in 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Simpson_(composer)

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Raymond Clarke (born 1963 in Bournemouth, England) is an English pianist who often champions twentieth-century music.

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/a.asp?a=A819

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