Simon Callaghan: Complete Piano Music: Rebecca Clarke & William Busch
Lyrita

Simon Callaghan has performed an admirable public service in recording the complete piano music of William Busch (1901-45) and Rebecca Clarke (1886-1949), the pianist's efforts laudable for ensuring their music lives on. Whereas Bach and Schubert will never disappear when performances and recordings of their works are so plentiful, figures with lower profiles such as Busch and Clarke are far more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time, making Callaghan's release valuable for more than purely musical reasons. The release of the seventy-minute set requires no more defence than the music itself, however, which is splendid and performed exquisitely by Callaghan, a Steinway Artist of no small renown. His current repertoire boasts over fifty concertos, a number of them staples but many of the rare and underrepresented kind. This rewarding programme appeals too for interspersing concise stand-alones with three lengthy theme-and-variations opuses, two by Busch and the other by Clarke.

Busch, who preceded his career as a composer with early success as a concert pianist, died young of an internal hemorrhage, leaving behind a modest yet distinguished number of compositions. Clarke, on the other hand, began her performing career as a violist and in 1912 joined the Queen's Hall Orchestra and established herself as one of the foremost violists in chamber music. She wrote many pieces but only a small number for solo piano, all of which are featured on the release. Its opening work, her beguiling Theme and Variations for Piano (1908) certainly makes a strong case for her music and at twenty-four minutes covers a healthy amount of stylistic ground. Buoyed by a folk-like lilt and infused with melodic charm, the theme provides a rich source for the sixteen variations and finale that follow. Each treatment distinguishes itself clearly from its predecessor: the gracefully flowing first segues into a solemn second; the animated third's spirited, the plaintive fourth wistful, the exuberant fifth boisterous, the elegant sixth eloquent, and so on. Moods and dynamics shift rapidly, making for a presentation that's breezy and entertaining. Callaghan's virtuosity is called upon for the faster parts, which he delivers with as much poise as the slower ones. Contrast is accentuated by certain transitions, from the sombre twelfth to the effervescent thirteenth, for example. After lyrical “Allegretto” and “Lento espressivo” variations, the work satisfyingly ends with a majestic finale.

Written in 1933, Busch's Allegretto quasi Pastorale reveals how well the two composers' works fit together. Melody is strong here too, and though the piece is short at under five minutes numerous engrossing variations develop out of an elegant theme. Preceding it by a decade is the even shorter Gigue, slightly longer than a minute but engaging nonetheless for its vitality, innocence, and charm. Both set the scene for Theme, Variations and Fugue (1928), which works an initial statement, ten variations, and fugue into a contrapuntally striking package. The work's generally sombre tone is set by the theme, after which contrasts in tempo, style, and dynamics are applied to it without losing its identity in the process. Memorable moments include the declamatory fifth, the crepuscular sixth, and the far-reaching three-part fugue. One critic went so far as to cite Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire when describing Busch's creation for the way it flirts with pushing beyond conventional notions of harmony.

The programme then returns to Clarke for Cortège (1930), itself a brooding meditation that in its own way suggests it wouldn't sound out of place alongside pieces by Schönberg, Berg, and Webern, and ‘He Hath Filled The Hungry,' which doesn't bear a formal date but is believed to stem from the mid-‘50s. A near-literal transcription for solo piano of the aria “Esurientes implevit bonis” from J. S. Bach's Magnificat, BWV 243, the piece is far sunnier than Cortège and radiates youthful innocence. Callaghan shifts back to Busch for the final pieces, the haunting Intermezzo (1935) and ‘Nicholas' Variations (1942). Titled after the composer's 1939-born son, the work ups the variations ante in following its angular theme with no less than twenty-eight treatments. Whereas the two earlier large-scale works by the composers present the variations as tidy sequences of separable miniatures, ‘Nicholas' Variations arranges them more loosely into multi-part sections. As a result, some appear as part of a scherzo-like series, while others compose an introspective set. It's not surprising that this late stage of Busch's composing career would see him exploring daring territory.

November 2022