Lyrita Records releases its Graham Hair Piano Music album on 1 November 2024, performed by Martin Jones (SRCD 436).
Graham Hair
Composer Graham Hair writes: “I met pianist Martin Jones as a consequence of writing the Concert Study Wild Cherries and Honeycomb as a test-piece for the Scottish International Piano Competition, in 1998. Martin heard about this piece from the chairman of the competition jury, Bryce Morrison, and this eventually led to my writing more Concert Studies over the next fifteen years, as well as the other works on this album.
Twelve Transcendental Concert Studies on Themes from the Australian Poets, refers specifically to the post-Lisztian Tradition of virtuoso pianism (including such figures as Australian pianist Percy Grainger), which has always seemed to me a corecomponent of Martin Jones’s pianism. The titles are all drawn either from specific poems or from specific passages within those poems.
Two other commissions are also represented: Dances and Devilment and Sunlit Airs, commissioned by the Australian pianist Michael Harvey in 2000, and Under Aldebaran, commissioned much earlier, by the Sydney International Piano Competition, during the mid-1980s. All of the other works were written between 2008 to 2024.
Étude-variations: Under Aldebaran is also a Concert Study, based on the poem by Australian poet James McAuley, but is very different from the collection of the ‘Transcendental’ 12. It’s the only atonal piece in this album, and by far the most complicated in its detail, and was written many years earlier.
Rococo Fantasies is a set of 11 bagatelles. Each moves from one tone-centre to another: often via ‘chromatic mediant’ harmony (a major or minor third above or below the tone-centre). Book One contains 6 of them. They endeavour to create a variety of idiosyncratic rhetorical characters by swerving between multiple metrical, thematic and textural ideas rapidly in the course of a few measures in some of the pieces, but beavering away at just one or two (over rapidly modulating harmonic changes) in others.
Passacaglia on the chorale ‘Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist’ by J.S. Bach is based on a chorale melody derived from the famous plainsong hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. This is the ‘ground bass’ on which this Passacaglia is built. However, like many Passacaglias in the Canonic Repertoire, the theme often strays into the upper voices of the texture, and because of the relative length of the theme, it has something of the sense of a set of variations as much as of a Passacaglia.
…During recent times (2008-2024), I have completed more compositions than in all the previous periods put together, though in some cases that has meant completing projects started earlier: in a time characterised by the decay, and in many cases the collapse, of the institutions which have dominated political, social, economic and cultural life and practice during the three post-war generations (1950-2024). The subtitle of my forthcoming book, The Scottish Voices Reader, puts it thus: Cultivating the Classical Traditions in the Age of the War on Everything.” © Graham Hair
Twelve Transcendental Concert Studies on Themes from the Australian Poets, refers specifically to the post-Lisztian Tradition of virtuoso pianism (including such figures as Australian pianist Percy Grainger), which has always seemed to me a corecomponent of Martin Jones’s pianism. The titles are all drawn either from specific poems or from specific passages within those poems.
Two other commissions are also represented: Dances and Devilment and Sunlit Airs, commissioned by the Australian pianist Michael Harvey in 2000, and Under Aldebaran, commissioned much earlier, by the Sydney International Piano Competition, during the mid-1980s. All of the other works were written between 2008 to 2024.
Étude-variations: Under Aldebaran is also a Concert Study, based on the poem by Australian poet James McAuley, but is very different from the collection of the ‘Transcendental’ 12. It’s the only atonal piece in this album, and by far the most complicated in its detail, and was written many years earlier.
Rococo Fantasies is a set of 11 bagatelles. Each moves from one tone-centre to another: often via ‘chromatic mediant’ harmony (a major or minor third above or below the tone-centre). Book One contains 6 of them. They endeavour to create a variety of idiosyncratic rhetorical characters by swerving between multiple metrical, thematic and textural ideas rapidly in the course of a few measures in some of the pieces, but beavering away at just one or two (over rapidly modulating harmonic changes) in others.
Passacaglia on the chorale ‘Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist’ by J.S. Bach is based on a chorale melody derived from the famous plainsong hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. This is the ‘ground bass’ on which this Passacaglia is built. However, like many Passacaglias in the Canonic Repertoire, the theme often strays into the upper voices of the texture, and because of the relative length of the theme, it has something of the sense of a set of variations as much as of a Passacaglia.
…During recent times (2008-2024), I have completed more compositions than in all the previous periods put together, though in some cases that has meant completing projects started earlier: in a time characterised by the decay, and in many cases the collapse, of the institutions which have dominated political, social, economic and cultural life and practice during the three post-war generations (1950-2024). The subtitle of my forthcoming book, The Scottish Voices Reader, puts it thus: Cultivating the Classical Traditions in the Age of the War on Everything.” © Graham Hair
'A revelation of 21st-century pianism, both in Hair’s writing and in Jones’ playing.'
Maureen Buja, Interlude, 23 December 2024
Maureen Buja, Interlude, 23 December 2024
Martin Jones has been one of Britain’s most highly regarded solo pianists since first coming to international attention in 1968 when he received the Dame Myra Hess Award. The same year he made his London debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and his New York debut at Carnegie Hall, and ever since has been in demand for recitals and concerto performances in Europe, Russia, Australia, Canada, North & South America. He has made over 90 recordings with Nimbus Records exploring music that is not often played including the complete works of 18 composers.
'Martin Jones is a skilled and sensitive artist with an imaginative response that is faultless.' Gramophone
'Martin Jones is a skilled and sensitive artist with an imaginative response that is faultless.' Gramophone
Electronic press kit and listening link available from Ulysses Arts Ltd.