Chisholm & Sorabji

Murray McLachlan & Yonty Solomon (pianists)

Eric Chisholm Trust recital at Purcell Room, London 6 July 2005

Two pianists, champions respectively of these two rarely played composers, shared this recital and in the second half gave a two-piano version of The Forsaken Maid (1936) a ballet score by Eric Chisholm (1904-65) based on Highland Airs.

Chisholm's Night Song of the Bards is an extensive set of nocturnes composed over the period 1944-51. They are descriptive tone poems which John Purser, Chisholm's biographer, rates as ' an astonishing visionary and pianistic tour-de-force '. There are six extended pieces, the second stormy, some of the others predominantly reflective, relying often on ostinati and repetitive figurations, and requiring virtuosity and stamina. I should have been happier with just two or three, and did not find it a convincing cycle taken as a whole. McLachlan is an energetic, extrovert pianist, but the textures could have been more refined in the strenuous passages, and he might have been wiser to have had the back curtains closed behind the piano; the prolonged climaxes were inclined to be overwhelming.

Kaikhosru Sorabji [Leon Dudley] (1892-) was an English eccentric of mixed parentage; in later life a wealthy recluse who lived in Dorset in defensive isolation, refusing to have his extravagant music played for many years. Opus clavicembalisticum takes nearly three hours, and the Jami symphony is nearly 1000 pages long (New Groves). Eventually in 1976 he lifted his ban on performances for Yonty Solomon and one other pianist.

Sorabji and Chisholm were close friends but Le Jardin Perfumé (1927) was very different music from Chisholm's and Yonty Solomon a very different pianist from Murray McLachlan. The piece is 26 mins long (short for Sorabji) in a single rhapsodic movement of no discernible shape or form. Capturing ' febrile, sensuous and torpid acts of love' it is undeniably beautiful mood music, mostly quiet and, in the pianist's words, ' mesmeric and labyrinthine' , replete with decorative arabesques and Scriabinesque trills and admired by Delius. It sounded beautiful under Solomon's loving hands and I was glad to have heard it once, but would not seek it out again.

Both composers are now recorded (Chisholm extensively by Dunelm) but the extremely sparse attendance at the Purcell Room (no other critics seemd to have responded to invitations?) showed what an uphill struggle is the rehabilitation of neglected composers from earlier generations.