Mark John McEncroe: Musical Images for Piano: Reflections & Recollections Vol. 4
Navona Records

The solo piano recordings of Mark John McEncroe reveal how intuitive a composer he is and how much he allows instinct to guide his writing process. The settings on his fourth and, apparently, last volume in the Reflections & Recollections series often advance like stream-of-consciousness musings, with many unfolding in a way that suggests they're formalized transcriptions of real-time expressions. If the eight works sometimes meander, they're neither directionless nor lacking in shape. Each exploration possesses a distinct personality that intimates McEncroe developed a clear understanding of its concept before the formal writing stage occurred. Every composition is a self-portrait of its creator, but his impress as personalized in the extreme.

In contrast to other McEncroe releases featuring piano reductions of large-scale orchestral pieces, those on Reflections & Recollections Vol. 4 were created specifically for solo piano performance—which of course presents the tantalizing possibility that, in an interesting switch-up, an album featuring orchestral arrangements of the material could follow. Regardless, this fourth set, like the others in the series, must hold up on its own terms as an artistic statement, and true to form it does so exceptionally well. Integral to the material's impact is pianist Van-Anh Nguyen, whose performances were recorded in January 2020 at Trackdown Studios in Sydney, Australia.

As has been noted in these pages before, McEncroe came to composing after toiling in a number of different contexts, including as a label manager and in the food industry as a chef. As an adult studying classical piano, he became aware of how powerfully he was drawn to composing and so initiated study in music theory and composition with Australian music educator and composer Margaret Brandman. Today, he maintains an ongoing collaborative relationship with Mark J Saliba, who has orchestrated many a McEncroe composition and helped ready it for recording. Nguyen's story is unusual too. The Australian-Vietnamese pianist has performed on stages throughout the world; she's also, however, a TV host who was recently added to the Discovery Channel Asia team.

While McEncroe is no card-carrying minimalist, he refrains from cluttering his music with gratuitous ornamentation. Clarity of expression and directness of communication are present throughout the recording. Pensive, delicate, and stately, these ruminative travelogues often gravitate in a melancholy, plaintive direction, but there are playful moments too. Titles are often complementary to the tone and character of the music, with a touching hymnal quality permeating And the Congregation Goes — Amen, for example. Five of the eight pieces push past the eight-minute mark, durations that allow Nguyen to come at a representative piece such as A Celtic Andante or the ultra-episodic Fanfare — A Tribute to the Wilderness from a number of different angles and in a series of passes.

March 2022