MICHAEL FINNISSY

Verdi Transcriptions
Piano Concerto No. 4
Piano Concerto No. 6
To & Fro, Snowdrift

Metier Sound & Vision 2002, MSV CD92027 (2 CDs)

Michael Oliver, International Record Review April 2002

You might call Michael Finnissy a ‘post-modern’ composer (but in his case ‘post’ doesn’t mean ‘Thank God modernism’s over’); it’s no less relevant that he’s a formidable pianist who knows a vast repertory of music. his Verdi Transcriptions are not usually literal: you’ll sometimes but not often be able to sing along with Verdi’s tunes. they might just as well be termed ‘Meditations prompted by verdi’. In No. 5, for example, rooted in the quintet from Ernani, a sonorous and indeed Verdian cantabile is often accompanied by a complex of other material, at times suggesting what Liszt might have made of that quintet, often how Charles Ives might have treated it; you may fancy that you hear echoes of many other composers. As if all this weren’t rich enough, together with it goes an acute understanding and enjoyment of all the things that sheer virtuosity can draw from the piano. My listening notes, which for much newish music tend to be sprinkled with technical terms to be translated into decent English later, here include ‘wow!’ and ‘crumbs!’.
But it’s an entirely creative use of virtuosity, even in the feats that Finnissy demands from the pianist in his Fourth Concerto. Several hands and superhuman velocity are the minimum requirement here (towards the end there’s a passage that almost out-Nancarrows Nancarrow) but it’s the piano’s range of colours and textures that is being explored, not the pianist;s ego. Often enough in the Verdi pieces (a majestic 90 minute cycle), Finnissy is matching Verdian imagery with pianistic and fundamentally modern ones: a limpid glitter evokes the Venetian lagoon of I due Foscari but tempests follow, and lightning staccato clusters, and sepulchral rumblings like a Kraken stirring beneath the Adratic. Grace notes in an aria from Giovanna d’Arco prompt poised and ornate lines of Finnissy’s own, then denser and even more florid counterpoint. Most striking of all, in the last and longest transcription of ‘Tu che la vanité’ from Don Carlos, isolated and detached descending notes – sketching emptiness and stasis – seem less derived from, than the essence of, Verdi’s melody. What develops may be Finnissy’s own ‘dramatization’ of that opera’s plot, and the end – complex overlapping downward scales, each setting off clouds of bass resonance – is both a highly original response to Verdi and a magnificently pianistic sound.

At the other end of Finnissy’s range, To and Fro is a delicate and charming sketch, rooted in the blues, while the 13th Transcription presents – in 70 seconds – a Verdian melody intact but with evocative ‘scenery’ as a sort of miniature Nile Scene. Throughout, Ian Pace’s technique astounds, and his enthusiasm for this music is infectious. In his booklet note he calls the Verdi work ‘one of the most significant contemporary cycles for piano’. His playing, and a splendidly sonorous recording, make that claim seem an understatement.

Arnold Whittall, Gramophone April 2002

You don’t have to decide whether the demands Michael Finnissy makes of his pianist are transcendental or diabolical to be dazzled by Ian Pace’s playing on this pair of discs. Even in the Piano Concerto No. 4, which takes the ‘bash and crash’ cluster style to new heights -or depths – there is plenty of quiet writing where Pace’s hands traverse the keyboard with a vertiginous velocity matched by supreme delicacy of touch. And his pearly voicing of the multiple trills with which the sixth concerto ends is further evidence of absolute technical control, a quality fully realised in the magnificently truthful recording by Metier’s producer, engineer and editor David Lefeber.
The two concertos, with a pair of shorter pieces, provide the prologue and epilogue to the set’s principal offering, the two books of Verdi Transcriptions, 18 pieces in all, and ranging in length from just over one minute to more than 26 minutes. The booklet notes, written by Pace himself, provide details of all the Verdi items involved, although the original tunes, rhythms and harmonies are only very rarely recognisable, and when they are the tension between them and the context Finnissy provides is considerable.

Verdi’s music is the starting point for transformation processes which aim to preserve – as Finnissy has put it – ‘the energy, passion and wide-rangingly generous humanity’ of Verdi’s operas. You could certainly argue that in its boldness, emotional intensity and love of display, Finnissy’s music is truer to Verdi than any abject imitator of the Verdi style could ever be. On the other hand, pushing things to extremes was not the Verdian way either: yet by the time we get to the long final movement, which only very gradually tears itself away from contemplative restraint to more florid and vehement gestures, you could be persuaded that such visionary intensity is exactly the kind of quality in a creative artist of which Verdi approved, and is as true to our contemporary experience as Verdi’s style was to the spirit of 19th century Europe. After all, there is nothing anti-romantic about Finnissy’s own style, and the beginning of Book 2 of Verdi Transcriptions is the point where he seems to display the roots of that style – in Skryabin, Szymanowski, even Sorabji – most clearly.

The Verdi Transcriptions were composed between 1972 and 1988 (with revisions in 1995), the two concertos in 1978 and 1980-1, and the original versions of Snowdrift and Two & Fro also belong to the 1970s. There is much more Finnissy piano music to come, much of it more recent, and Pace has it all at his phenomenal fingertips. This must be one of the most ambitious recording projects of our time, and it deserves the widest encouragement and support.

Philip Clark, The Wire, March 2002

This two CD set of Michael Finnissy’s piano music played by Ian Pace documents the composer’s extraordinary slant on tradition. In a sense everything Finnissy does is a comment on one tradition or another, but the conceptual clarity behind the Verdi Transcriptions makes the work particularly approachable. When he began it in 1972, he envisaged four separate books of music, but by 1986 he had only finished the first book, and nine years later he combined the remaining material into a second. The work was premiered in that form by Ian Pace in 1995 during his season of Finnissy concerts at the Conway Hall. But why Verdi?
Finnissy describes being touched by “the energy, passion and wide-ranging generous humanity of Verdi’s operas”, and his transcriptions transform those qualities into a powerful personal statement. Some pieces kick Verdi’s foundations away altogether and reassemble them again through the prism of Ives’s piano music, or the compositional splicing and jumpcutting that Finnissy has borrowed from film. Others graft his embellishments on top of Verdi’s original. The nine sections that make up Book One, meanwhile, are cunningly contrived to form a massive 40 minute structure.

Starting in the dark bowels of the piano, an aria from Oberto is restructured so it can have an acrid and spiky two-part conversation with itself. The fifth section (based on a septet from Ernani) represents a contrasting apex of brightness and joy. Verdi’s original line pokes through scintillating decoration of building complexity and Pace’s pianistic achievement in keeping both strands active is quite remarkable. The piece splinters in section six into angrily deconstructed clusters and the effect is shattering. After the impact of Book One, the looser structure of Book Two makes it feel less convincing but the individual pieces are no less impressive. This work ends with a colossal half-hour re-composition of an aria from Don Carlo that begins in a decidedly Feldman-like manner before the calm is punctured by rude interruptions that imperceptibly build into frenetic avalanches of descending notes.

In his piano concertos Finnissy adopted ideas from the late 19h century French composer Charles Alkan – the finnissy of his day who wrote music of tremendous harmonic and structural complexity, and created the illusion of the pianist being both soloist and orchestra in his Concerto For Solo Piano. Finnissy’s Concerto No. 6 (1980 – 81) starts with a bang, but is a rather clandestine piece that spins obsessively in the lower register of the instrument and suddenly shoots to high end trills for its conclusion. Pace has described Concerto No. 4 as the wildest piano piece ever written. Imagine your favourite Cecil Taylor solo transcribed and then repeated with the conviction and heat of he source performance. This piece relentlessly reinvents the instrument as an orchestra controlled by a single pair of hands, something for which Ian Pace is superbly equipped.

Christopher Dingle, BBC Music Magazine, *****

Once again Metier is doing Michael Finnissy proud. This is the fourth release in its ongoing Finnissy survey, and the second to feature the extraordinary pianism of Ian Pace. And what a feast it is. The Verdi Transcriptions form the vast centrepiece, but are framed by two concertos for solo piano (cf Alkan) and two shorter pieces, Snowdrift and to and Fro. As ever with Finnissy, the range of expression is vast. By turns beautiful and disturbing, and rarely less than thoroughly captivating, he refuses to be pigeonholed, always remaining capable of subverting our sense of order or disorder.
The 18 pieces of the Verdi Transcriptions, ranging from barely more than a minute to a near half-hour fantasia, each draw material from a different opera. In some, such as that based upon the Romanza from Aida, the source material is readily apparent. Elsewhere the original is simply a starting point, while some pieces are his reaction to the mood created by the relevant points in the operas. The result is something thoroughly new, and entirely compelling, especially when given the ardent advocacy of Ian Pace, whose ability to combine thoughtfulness with extreme virtuosity can be heard nowhere better than here. Recommended.