Billy Mayerl Piano Music – Philip Martin

Every so often a pianist comes along who understands that Billy Mayerl was not merely a novelty act for the palm court, but a genuine miniaturist with a harmonic imagination worth taking seriously — closer kin to Delius and Ireland, filtered through Tin Pan Alley, than to whatever Reginald Foort was doing on the cinema organ up the road. Philip Martin belongs in that company. He plays Mayerl the way one might play late Fauré: unhurried, attentive to inner voices, willing to let a seventh chord bloom rather than snap shut.

This matters because Mayerl has suffered, over the decades, from being filed under “British light music,” a category that invites brisk, twinkly, wind-it-up-and-watch-it-go performances. Eric Parkin, God knows, could dazzle — his Chandos and earlier Saga discs (I still have the vinyl, somewhere, warped) established much of the modern Mayerl performing tradition, all crisp attack and dancing rubato. Susan Tomes, on her long-out-of-print Virgin disc, brought a chamber player’s poise but kept things moving. Leslie De’Ath, more recently for Dutton Epoch, split a sensible middle path. Martin goes somewhere else entirely.

Consider “Marigold” — Mayerl’s “Nola,” his signature tune, the piece every BBC announcer in 1930 could hum before the shipping forecast. Under Martin’s hands it loses its music-hall wink and gains a kind of autumnal poise; the syncopations are there, but folded inward, almost apologetic. Whether you want your marigold pressed or growing wild is a matter of temperament. I lean wild. But the argument is made with real conviction, not fudged.

“Evening Primrose,” composed in the last full flush of Mayerl’s compositional confidence in 1946, fares beautifully in this reading. Languorous without turning soupy, the chromatic slippages in the middle section are given room to register as harmony rather than decoration. Parkin’s version has more perfume and considerably more swagger. Martin’s has more shadow. I found myself, on a second and third hearing, preferring the shadow.

Where the approach runs into trouble is “Railroad Rhythm,” Mayerl’s 1938 evocation of the Coronation Scot thundering out of Euston. This is a piece that wants steam, cinders, the smell of hot oil on a footplate. Martin’s tempo is downright pastoral. The ostinato bass, which ought to hammer like a connecting rod, ambles. It is beautifully voiced ambling — every inner harmony audible, nothing smudged — but it is not, by any stretch, express service. I missed the danger.

The Aquarium Suite, the longest single item here at just over seventeen minutes, suits Martin’s temperament far better. These are essentially character pieces masquerading as a suite, and the composer’s fondness for parallel motion and pentatonic shimmer — “Willow Moss,” “Marine Legend,” whatever Mayerl called the individual fish that day — responds to unforced tempo and pedaling that never blurs. Martin’s control of half-pedal effects throughout this album deserves particular praise. You can hear the difference between genuine sustain and mere murk, a distinction too many Mayerl interpreters blur.

“Siberian Lament,” from 1934, comes off desolate and slow-breathing, more Rachmaninoff transcription than novelty foxtrot — which is presumably the point, since Mayerl absorbed Rachmaninoff’s harmonic fingerprints (those close-position seventh and ninth chords, that particular melancholy in the left hand) as thoroughly as he absorbed Gershwin’s syncopation. This is the man who gave British audiences their first real look at Rhapsody in Blue, at the piano himself, in 1925. The Gershwin influence and the Rachmaninoff influence sit side by side in Mayerl’s harmonic vocabulary, sometimes uneasily, and Martin chooses to foreground the latter throughout this program.

“The Harp of the Winds” drifts by in a wash of impressionist arpeggiation that recalls, distantly, Cyril Scott more than anything American. Martin lets it drift, resisting the temptation to shape it into something more assertive. Whether that is interpretive wisdom or interpretive caution I genuinely cannot decide, and I’ve listened four times now trying to.

Sound engineering for Somm is superb — close but not claustrophobic, with the piano’s upper register (Mayerl loved his treble decoration, all those chirping grace notes) captured with real clarity rather than glare.

Is this the Mayerl disc to own if you own none? Probably not — Parkin’s Chandos survey remains the more idiomatic entry point, all sparkle and period conviction. But as a second or third view, one that takes Mayerl’s harmonic sophistication with real seriousness, Martin’s opening volume earns its place. I hope Somm lets him finish what he’s started.