Bowen: Piano Music

Time to dust off York Bowen in that case. Not all of his music even got into print, but what we have here is not only of good quality, it is of consistently good quality. I suppose the idiom could fairly be called early 20th century romantic. The harmonic style is tonal, and any flirting with whole-tone scales is minimal. The music is approachable and even slightly melodious, not in any sense forbidding although I readily believe Hough when he says that it takes time to reveal itself properly. Some of the titles - preludes in all keys, ballade, berceuse - are obviously borrowed from Chopin, but I don't hear much direct influence of Chopin's style. What I do hear is the Russians, who of course trace their descent more to Chopin than to Schumann or to Brahms, and I think I hear not only Rachmaninov and Medtner as Mr Pott does but also Scriabin in his less mystical phase. It is however 'absolute' music, not autobiographical, descriptive or representational music, and to that extent it could be said to hark back to Chopin himself, who kept his distance from the literary influences that so strongly imbued the music of his contemporaries and musical descendents. In fact in the Ballade that Hough gives us here there is a clear and explicit reference to Chopin's own second Ballade, but that is a gesture of deference, a musical doffing of the cap, rather than any sign of direct stylistic influence.

By all accounts Bowen himself was a pretty formidable virtuoso of the piano, which is exactly what one would infer from the difficulty and obvious professionalism of his piano writing, which strikes me as far more skilful and adept than that of, say, his friend and contemporary Arnold Bax. It takes someone who is more than just the next virtuoso to handle it, and it presumably needs no saying by now that Stephen Hough is exceptional even by today's formidable virtuoso standards. He is the complete professional, meaning that in the right sense, namely that he is sternly self-disciplined in everything he does. His technique is prodigious, but one could say that too of our late beloved Ogdon, who rivalled Hough in musical insight too but projected a very different persona and took a more autoschediastic approach. A lot of Ogdon's charm was that we never exactly knew where we were with him. With Hough we have a much better idea of that. He is not precisely calculated to the nth degree as Michelangeli was, but n minus 1 might describe the effect - intellectual, calculated certainly, but calculated very accurately and with emotion and belief behind it.

This is music that I find it difficult to imagine anyone disliking or being bored by now that it is back in official favour. To me it is highly attractive stuff and quality stuff too. I could not help noticing that it seems to have attracted much more comment than other British music of the period that has interested me personally, music by Bax, Bliss and Rawsthorne for instance. A great bonus and relief for me is that it is entirely innocent of contamination from what Constant Lambert well termed 'the cowpat school' of British music, and while it avoids modernism even to the modest extent that Walton went in for that it is music with integrity and consistency. It has been a pleasure to me to make its acquaintance and the pleasure is one that I recommend in general.