Mattias Spee: Eclipse, Vol. 2: Hans Henkemans
TRPTK

Fittingly, Dutch pianist Mattias Spee (b. 1977) selected Eclipse as the title for a trilogy featuring material by overlooked composers—“music that nobody knows, but everyone should know,” in his words. After releasing the inaugural volume, focusing on the music of Austrian composer Joseph Wölfl, Spee was contacted by conductor Ed Spanjaard who was establishing a foundation to return his long-time friend Hans Henkemans (1913-95) to public awareness and wanted the pianist to be involved with the project. Though Henkemans' name and music were then unknown to Spee, the now-intrigued pianist accepted the proposal, excited to learn the Dutch composer's music and introduce it to others also.

In many cases where a musician reintroduces a forgotten composer's music, it's material that once enjoyed some degree of exposure and success. In the case of Henkemans, however, much of what Spanjaard shared with Spee were manuscripts that had never been published or premiered. This second volume, then, presents music never heard until now, which makes it all the more valuable. After examining the scores and determining that Henkemans' work warrants attention, the pianist set about performing some of the works in concert before recording the album in June 2022 at Muziekgebouw Eindhoven. All are performed by Spee alone but for the Concerto for piano and strings, Op.1, on which he's accompanied by the South Netherlands Philharmonic with Spanjaard conducting.

While Henkemans composed chamber music, an opera, and orchestral, vocal, and solo works, he's largely unknown and his works rarely performed. Yet as a pianist, he regularly appeared with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and was considered a specialist in Debussy, Ravel, and Mozart, though he performed as a soloist in his own compositions too. Stylistically, Henkemans was open-minded, evidence being his occasional use of twelve-tone melodies, but he was no dogmatic member of a particular school, his focus instead on the development of a personal style that defies easy categorization.

The sequencing of the material is a major part of the recording's impact and appeal. Essentially palindromic in structure, the collection bookends the album with sonatas and intermezzi and places the only non-solo piano presentation at its centre. To help create a fluid through-line, Spee intersperses four self-composed intermezzi in amongst the five Henkemans pieces. It helps greatly that the pianist has consciously written the intermezzi to complement the composer's material; in fact, not knowing otherwise, the listener would presume the Spee-written pieces to be ones by Henkemans. Whereas his Adagio & Variations is, for instance, sometimes Debussy-esque in its poetic expressiveness, the intermezzo that follows suggests a hint of Ravel. Similarly, the brooding introspection of the third and fourth intermezzi provide effective bookends to the sombre Andante con moto, which Henkemans composed on the eve of WWII. Spee's comment that the music has “something very Dutch about it” whilst also reflecting the influence of French composers such as Debussy and Poulenc is compelling.

Sonatina for piano initiates the album on a mysterious note with an expressive “Moderato” that plays like a nocturnal dreamscape. Playful, even impish by comparison are the central “Allegro giocoso” and concluding “Allegro molto,” the latter of which merges aspects of the first two movements into a beguiling and rather sardonic third. The orchestra's strings prove a compelling partner to Spee's piano in the Concerto for piano and strings, be it during the forceful “Adagio” or suitably lively “Presto.” At the work's centre, the stark “Adagio molto” exudes a cryptic, nightmarish quality reminiscent of Bartok or Schnittke. At album's end, the Sonata for piano is introduced with a wry, Weill-like march in the first movement before entering a stark, twilight realm in the “Molto adagio” and enlivening the recording's final moments with the declamatory “Allegro ma non troppo.”

July 2023