Kenneth Hesketh (b. 1968)
Hände – Music for Piano
Contents listed after review
Clare Hammond (piano)
rec. 2023, Concert Hall, Cardiff University School of Music, Cardiff, UK
Paladino Music PMR0137 [70]
The collaboration between Kenneth Hesketh and Clare Hammond has been a durable and fruitful one, including an earlier recording horae (pro clara) from 2016 on the BIS label (review), a title one should be aware of if you find yourself liking Hände. The Paladino Music label has also worked with Hesketh in the past with In Icto Oculi appearing a year later (review), so there is a lot of admirable synergy going on with this 2024 piano album.
The programme includes works written specifically for Hammond but opens with a substantial piece that predates their artistic relationship. Poetic Conceits is in six movements, with three of its titles taken from John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Neatly structured, this is one of those pieces that has an overarching logic that is wrapped up nicely by its concluding Epitaph. But with a richness of detail along the way that draws in the listener as one might be when reading poetry. These are messages and narratives that are at times enigmatic, at times reflectively poetic and sometimes disturbing if you let your imagination lead you down each contrasting pathway. Virtuoso technique and impressively impactful drama are elements in the writing, but the ear and memory take away more from the atmosphere and sense of narrative rhythm in the work as a whole.
Poetic Conceits has a movement dedicated to Henri Dutilleux on his 90th birthday, and so Pour Henri is a good choice to follow: a miniature composed after Dutilleux’s death in 2013 that weaves in some of his music with a French song Bonne Anniversaire. Heu, heu, heu is another miniature, this time for Doktor Peter Hanser-Strecker’s 70th birthday in 2011. This has elements of pop music and some gestures from Stravinsky’s Petrushka to add intrigue to an intense few minutes of madly celebratory music.
Hände, or to give it its full title Hände: Das Leben und die Liebe eines zärtlichen Gesclechts (Hands: the life and love of the fairer sex) was composed for Clare Hammond and can be performed alongside a 1928 film of the same name, excerpts of which can be found on YouTube. The characters in the film are represented by hands “in an avant-garde, dance-inspired narrative”, and the music follows this imagery closely while having plenty of its own descriptive qualities, so you can create your own mind’s-eye film without any difficulty. The piano notes are at times transformed with the strings being struck using knitting needles, and there are some moments played on a set of small bells, enhancing the timbral contrasts already built into the score. Gestural character is an inevitable part of the nature of this music and there are some sections with plenty of darkness and violence, but Hammond sums up this unusual collaboration of imagery and sound in that “the ethereal soundworld that Hesketh creates mirrors the bizarre and eerie atmosphere of the film.”
Chorales and Kolam reworks some of Hesketh’s piano and orchestra work Uncoiling the River, “reordering and recontextualising it” to bring forward background harmonic progressions and turning them into chorales, with ‘kolam’ referring to intricate patterns made outside homes in India to bring good fortune. Lullaby of the Land Beyond is a memorial, “a small wreath” to Oliver Knussen, initially forming a gentle contrast to the previous piece, but as ever with Hesketh there is always a kernel of restless energy waiting to burst through.
The programme concludes with Auszüge aus einem kleinen Totenbuch (Excerpts From a Small Book of the Dead), which honours another colleague and friend, Joseph Horowitz, who died in 2022. The piece is conceived as a sort of ‘Yahrtzeit’ candle, lit in memory of the departed on the anniversary of their death. This is a deeply atmospheric piece, with a few ‘special effects’ enhancing the mood, but by no means turning the work into a percussion clinic. Hesketh is too tasteful to employ external or unusual effects beyond anything that is in service to musical expression, and this in some ways sums up this programme in the authentic sincerity of its content. This kind of music inevitably won’t appeal to everyone. As with all things well-crafted and built on a foundation of finely honed expertise, these pieces have a quality of permanence and necessity, and there is nothing superficial or thoughtless here, in both the compositions and the performances.
Dominy Clements
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Contents:
Poetic Conceits (2006)
Pour Henri (2011)
Heu, heu, heu (2012)
Hände (2015)
Chorales and Kolam (2019)
Lullaby of the Land Beyond (2018)
Auszüge aus einem kleinen Totenbuch (2023)
