CARL VINE
A sonata is not so much a musical form as a concert-creating event, rarely to be captured by a recording. It also allows for different ways of interpretation, even at the moment of playing. From its 18th-century beginnings, when Domenico Scarlatti introduced a dynamic theatrical edge to texture and phrase, the sonata comes to mean a special interaction between music and the player. The latter is placed at the centre of paradox and conflict inherent in performance itself – between public display, the virtuoso solo command of the instrument, and the ‘private’ world of solo expression – between abstract connective processes and the vivid foreground moment temporarily in focus.

Carl Vine’s two piano sonatas deliver these features in a rich measure. Heard together in one programme with his two cycles of shorter pieces, they make a larger journey as a concert event. Opening a two-concert celebration of the composer’s 50th year, the performance of these works is heightened by their close connection with the particular qualities of today’s pianist, Michael Kieran Harvey.

Born in Perth in 1954, Carl Vine studied piano and composition at the University of Western Australia. He has been based mostly in Sydney since the 1970s and had nation-wide responsibilities in his roles as one-time Deputy Chair of the Australia Council and, currently, Artistic Director of Musica Viva. A language as a composer grew from several sources – his work as one of the early exponents of electronics in live performance, his highly-developed skills as pianist with the ensemble Flederman, and many years’ experience as composer and musical director for dance theatre.

Vine’s large body of work extends from six symphonies, concertos and many dance and film scores to solo and chamber works, but his special achievement for Australian music is qualitative, the accomplishment of an individual technique which he has taken on a wide arc of development. A tradition that can be traced to Debussy and Ives, along with more recent composers like Elliott Carter and Conlon Nancarrow, forms a background to his characteristic juggling of melodies and harmony. At most moments in a Vine score there will be a sense of multiple streams of sound in a crowded terrain of notes, quicker rhythmic ideas within slower ones and vice eversa, sections forming out of each other through the surge of one rhythmic impulse or its displacement by another.

This kind of multiple rhythm is heard even in the simple opening of Sonata No.1, where the three elements of melody, chords and bass establish a restless cohabitation out of which the ear can follow the evolution of the piece. In common with the second sonata, the work is in two movements, with shared over-arching materials viewed from different angles. The episodic, shifting forms indicate the sonata’s origin as a commission for Graeme Murphy and the Sydney Dance Company. Its public premiere was given by Michael Kieran Harvey at an Astra concert in North Melbourne Town Hall in 1991, following a preview performance at the then La Trobe University Department of Music. From 1992 it was given numerous performances with dance, and has subsequently achieved wide recognition and popularity in the Australian piano repertoire.

Sonata No.2 is a rare example in Australian music of a work commissioned by individuals – Harvey himself together with Graeme and Margaret Lee and the Sydney Festival – and was premiered at the Sydney Town Hall in January 1998. It is a little more than speculation to say that Vine, having heard how fast Harvey could play the first sonata, wrote the second to push him further towards his limits. However, the greater difficulties of the sonata are musical ones. As against the generalised textures of the first sonata, from which different ideas and currents were drawn, the textures of the second are more specific and more original, overlaid with longer ‘conventional’ melodies. In the resulting maelstrom of notes the challenge is for the player to set out the powerful long-range form of the work. There is a sense of much greater dimensions compared to the first sonata, arising not merely from the slightly longer duration (nearly 20 minutes), but rather from remote distances established in zones of sound across the entire span of the keyboard, at different stages of the work drawn into temporal proximity or pushed further apart.

Two sets of shorter pieces make up the rest of Carl Vine’s solo piano music to date. Red Blues were written as character-pieces for younger student players, and adapt his characteristic style to a more limited keyboard technique. Five Bagatelles grew from a request for Vine to play the piano at the annual fund-raising dinner of the Australian National AIDS Trust in 1994. “As a result I wrote ‘Threnody‘(for all of the innocent victims) - simple enough for me to play, and specifically dedicated to the cause.” This became the final piece in the cycle of five. Bagatelles are of course understood as a miniature form compared with a sonata – here, however, they are also in a sense about the largeness of a single musical moment or melody, held in focus while its internal life is explored.

The piano work of Andrew Byrne forms a contemporary sounding-board from an Australian composer of a younger generation, whose primary interest is also in the play of polyrhythmic musical ideas. Born in Melbourne in 1966, he studied at La Trobe and at Columbia University in New York, where he currently lives. His activities there have included organising concerts of various kinds with both local and Australian composers. The intense rhythmic focus of his own music gravitates more towards the informal ‘downtown’ performance environment than the traditional concert hall. The piece Six Dances, however, was commissioned for the formal concert series of the contemporary New York group Speculum Musicae, and premiered at Merkin Hall by the pianist Stephen Gosling in December 2002 (dances 1, 2, 3 and 5). The first complete performance was given by Michael Kieran Harvey in Perth last year.

Based entirely on overlays of a single motive from West African drumming, the Six Dances make formidable rhythmic demands on the pianist while calling for the variety of sound that a live player can make across reiterating patterns. “These pieces come from a larger piano cycle called Vanishing Points, in which I am concerned with the idea of telescoping time, creating music that relentlessly drives to the climax – the vanishing point on the ‘musical horizon’. To that end I have harnessed some of the energy inherent in polyrhythmic techniques. Sparks fly when dissimilar rhythmic cells are superimposed.” Within the dense post-minimalist textures, each piece establishes a distinctive character of keyboard register and musical unfolding. They are performed in succession without a break.

– JMcC


Born in Sydney, MICHAEL KIERAN HARVEY studied at the NSW Conservatorium and the Liszt Academy in Budapest. He came to international prominence with the award of Grand Prix at the Inaugural Ivo Pogorelich Competition in 1994, where his performance included the Vine Sonata No.1.

He is a significant force in Australian music, supporting the work of composers in many genres, from ‘mainstream’ orchestral concertos to experimental music with electronics. His recent activities have included a Melbourne concert of music by Kate Neal at the World Wide Warehouse, a Move release with sonatas by Nigel Westlake and Lawrence Whiffin, and an ABC Classics CD with the Vine sonatas and music by Tim Dargaville and Frank Zappa. For Astra he has given numerous first performances, and played two of the largest works of recent repertoire otherwise unperformed in Australia – Wolpe’s Battle Piece and Donald Martino’s Fantasies and Impromptus. Other Astra concerts included duo recitals with violinist Miwako Abe and flautist Mardi McSullea.