William Bland (b. 1947)
Piano Sonata No. 6 “Bestiary – con amore“ (2001)
Piano Sonata No. 15 (2004)
Kevin Gorman (piano)
rec. 2024, Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, USA
Bridge 9596 [47]

I believe this is the third disc in Bridge’s project to record all twenty-four of William Bland’s sonatas for piano. He studied with a wide range of composers including Benjamin Lees, Ernst Krenek, Earle Brown and Richard Rodney Bennett, which could account for the stylistic variety in his music. 

 In the early 80s, the late Yvar Mikhashoff curated for the Almeida Festival in North London series of concerts looking at the development of American piano music. A later iteration was collected in the four-CD set on Mode Records “Yvar Mikhashoff’s Panorama of American Piano Music” and is well worth searching out. Mikhashoff performed music from Gotschalk and MacDowell through Ives, Cowell, and Cage and beyond, so this sonata, in its extraordinary variety, seems to condense those four-hour concerts into one work. I am not certain that I have ever heard so many different styles in one work as in this sonata.

Movement one is Bear Dance,a pounding brutalist tour de force in which rhythm is to the fore. Cowell and Ornstein spring to mind, particularly the latter’s Suicide on an Aeroplane. It is absolutely thrilling; this is clearly a very big bear. Towards the end one can hear a quote from The Teddy Bear’s Picnic, as if to show everything will be all right.

The violence of movement one is swept away by the rippling arpeggios of the second movement, Song of the Great Hawk. Beginning gently with a modally heroic theme, it grows and the piano right hand colours the melody with clusters. Lou Harrison would have been very pleased. The third movement, A Panther with his Head turning to the Right, goes to the heart of American piano by exploring the blues. Like William Albright and William Bolcolm, Bland feels happy incorporating American vernacular into his writing and here it serves brilliantly as a moving slow movement. In the second section, Bland references two works by Ives and the harmony becomes thornier. It is a darkly mysterious, very impressive movement. Percussive writing reappears in the fourth movement Dragon. It reminded me of Frederic Rzewski, but the notes tell me nu-metal band Limp Bizkit were an inspiration. Pounding, and brilliant, the energy of a rock concert is captured without my having to venture out. The great repeated chords at opposite ends of the keyboard make me smile. In the finale, Regard,the composer is reflecting on Edward Hicks’s painting The Peaceable Kingdom. That work,inspired by Isaiah 11 verses 6-7 exists in sixty-five versions. In contrast to what has gone before this movement is a simple utterance, yet seems entirely fitting to end this panoramic work.

The Sonata No 15 is, in complete contrast, written in three recognisable movements with no subtitles. The first is a concert waltz that for all its brilliance is tinged with melancholy. Major collides with minor to give a bittersweet taste to the harmonies and melodies. The second movement is a rhapsodic nocturne. In its passion it is very Romantic, like advanced Scriabin mixed with Rachmaninoff. The finale pulls out all the technical stops. It is a free fantasy based on one of Gottschalk’s most famous works, Souvenir of Puerto Rico. That is difficult enough, but Bland piles on the difficulties in a truly brilliant twenty-first-century take on the nineteenth century. In its wide-reaching span, although much shorter, it shares something of the sound world of Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated. The popular rubs shoulders with spiky modernism in a most satisfactory way.

Kevin Gorman seems to be the main performer of Bland’s music, and he is a very fine advocate. He has the virtuoso technique to make music out of the difficulties and the ability to make the stylistic differences logical. The very wide sonic spectrum he draws from his Steinway is realistically captured by the engineers. 

If I have referenced a variety of composers throughout this review it is because the composer has done the same in the works. In doing so, he goes against what was for so long the ideal in western classical music that a composer should develop their own recognisably unique style and stick to it, but he goes beyond imitation and pastiche and out of the variety creates works which make sense in themselves. 

This is the first music I have heard by Dr Bland, but I doubt it will be the last, as it is quite fascinating. My only disappointment is the short playing time of the disc. 

Paul RW Jackson 

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