Michael Kieran Harvey - Carl Vine: The Piano Music 1990-2006 (2006)

Carl Vine is an Australian composer who has been active in a range of genres, from film music to public spectacle (he composed part of the music for the closing ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics) to music informed by modernist concepts. The piano works here owe a debt, recognized in the notes by pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, to American composer Elliott Carter, and manipulations of rhythm and tempo play central structural roles in both the pair of piano sonatas and the profusion of miniatures recorded here. But Vine's music is more accessible for the general listener than Carter's. For one thing, he sometimes uses jazz syncopations as one of the rhythms that are set up and reworked and made to clash with one another -- a highly inventive device that respects both jazz and contemporary classical music. Sample the unnamed fourth of the Five Bagatelles, track 8, or the title movement of the four-movement Red Blues for student pianists for compact examples; the jazz influence is also present in thePiano Sonata No. 2. For another, most of the music has a tonal dimension. More generally, Vine gives you a more thorough release of tension than Carter does. The complexities of his sonata movements give way to exciting flourishes, and many of his miniatures have a lyrical tinge; the "Romance" movement of the Anne Landa Preludes (2006) has exactly the mood the title suggests. Vine is probably most gifted as a miniaturist. The last half of the album is entirely given over to short pieces, which, Vine indicates at least in the case of the Anne Landa Preludes, may be played individually or in smaller groups as well as in full sets. Each bagatelle (for that is really what they are) sets up an absorbing little problem of its own. But hearing all the pieces together gives a better idea of the subtle shades of mood they contain. The Five Bagatelles are compact, compelling pieces, each a minute or two long. The Anne Landa Preludes, intended as a sequel to those bagatelles, are accompanied by fanciful little programs written by the composer, and one of them, for "Divertissement" (track 20), gives a good idea of what Vine's music is like in general. "Perhaps the trajectory of our lives is so oppressive that we need constant diversion to cope," he writes. "Or else our lives have no real trajectory but consist entirely of unrelated diversions, some of which appear weighty. But then no primary path can exist from which to divert, and so there can be no such thing as a diversion. What appears diversionary turns out to be the primary trajectory of our lives. What to do then, if it gets boring?" Sympathetically performed by Harvey, this music is an intriguing sample of work from a contemporary music scene not much known in the West.