Ralph van Raat - Gavin Bryars: Piano Concerto (The Solway Canal); After Handel’s Vesper; Ramble On Cortona (2011)

The music of British composer Gavin Bryars has been shaped by a variety of influences, from the avant-garde aesthetic of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew to minimalism, but its roots were in jazz performance, and it's easy to hear the sensibilities of jazz underlying the solo piano works, After Handel's Vesper and Ramble on Cortona. Both have an improvisatory quality and a harmonic language derived more obviously from jazz than from the Handel or the 13th century laudes that provide the source material. They have a mellow sweetness, and they unfold with amiable leisure. Bryars' Piano Concerto (The Solway Canal) is a darker work, an evocative soundscape that features the accompaniment not only of an orchestra but a choir. The piano part, frequently a simple melodic solo line floated over an arppegiated or chordal accompaniment, is far from the virtuosic showcase that typifies most concertos. The chorus, perhaps inevitably, draws the listener's attention most powerfully, and the piano part frequently takes on the character of an accompaniment. This flexibility of roles and the shifting musical focus should be problematic only for purists who demand that a concerto follow a preordained form, because the result, if not simple to categorize, is hauntingly lovely. Like the solo works, it develops at a reflective, unhurried pace. Its lack of dramatic contrasts in tempo is another element that sets it apart from conventional concertos, but it is highly effective in its moods of subdued melancholy. The album doesn't make the kinds of demands that show off Ralph van Raat's considerable virtuosity, but he brings just the right gentle poetry to Bryars' music. Otto Tausk leads Cappella Amsterdam and Netherlands Chamber Orchestra in a colorful and expressive performance of the concerto. Naxos' sound is atmospheric, clean, and well-balanced.

Review by Stephen Eddins, Allmusic.com

Gavin Bryars’ music tends not to deal in opacity. It can loop, gaining reserves of emotional response through repetition—the most obvious example is Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet—and it can allude, but it doesn’t obfuscate.

But Bryars has cast his net widely over the years and we should welcome evidence of his versatility. This latest disc includes two works for solo piano and his Piano Concerto, titled The Solway Canal. After Handel’s Vesper was written in 1995, originally for the harpsichord, but is heard here in a sanctioned version for piano. The calm start leads to more dynamic writing which casts off the air of relatively static post-minimalist writing. It embodies, to a degree, the kind of freedoms to be found in a fantasia, a feeling that is, for me, intensified at 8:40 when a sudden trill and simple figure announces the emergence of more explicitly baroque-leaning affiliations.

The title of his next solo piano piece, Ramble on Cortona, sets up Graingeresque expectations, but these aren’t wholly met. This is the composer’s only work originally conceived for solo piano, and bases its themes on Laude, a recent vocal work of his. These in turn derive from thirteenth century Italian music in manuscripts found in Cortona. Slow and meditative, it’s flecked with ghostly ascending treble steps. But one senses too the impress of Spanish textures as the music slowly speeds up in its journey. It casts something of a spell, as it’s quietly expressive.

The Concerto (The Solway Canal) was also written in 2010. It sets poems by the Scot Edwin Morgan whose death last year was either the catalyst for the setting, or a coincidence—we’re not told which. This isn’t, and one would not expect it to be given it’s Bryars, in any sense a traditional cut-and-thrust Piano Concerto. Here the solo voice is interwoven into the music’s textures. One might think that the Busoni Piano Concerto—which has a chorus too—is a spur, but if so it’s only in the vaguest of terms and I would prefer to think of that work only as a precedent. The work is wistful, often romantic and without flourish, and again deeply intimate in reach.

The Ramble and Concerto are both dedicated to the highly able soloist in this recording, Ralph van Raat, who shows every sign of becoming a Bryars muse of the first order.

Review by Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International