Bennett Piano Works – Martin Jones

A pianist’s obituary tribute has a way of curdling into hagiography, all the rougher edges filed down for the occasion. Martin Jones, bless him, does nothing of the kind here. He plays Richard Rodney Bennett’s piano music with a jazzman’s ease slipping in and out of a modernist’s rigor, never quite letting you settle into which Bennett you’re getting at any given moment. That instability, that refusal to sit still stylistically, turns out to be the whole point.

Start with Noctuary, the big statement here, twenty-four minutes built on fragments of Scott Joplin filtered through a harmonic language indebted to Bennett’s years absorbing Boulez and the Darmstadt crowd without ever quite becoming one of them. It shouldn’t work. Ragtime bones under serialist skin — on paper it reads like a dissertation topic, not a piece anyone would want to hear twice. But Jones finds the seams and plays right through them, the left hand occasionally suggesting a stride pattern before the harmony wrenches sideways and refuses the tonic. There’s a whiff of Michael Tippett’s later piano writing in the way gesture outstrips syntax, though Bennett’s ear was always more tactile, more pianistic in the Lisztian sense of knowing exactly how weight falls into the keybed.

The three early works — the Sonata from 1954, the Fantasy of 1962, the Five Studies that followed hard on its heels — belong to Bennett the student, freshly returned from Paris and Boulez’s tutelage, still working out what serial mastery could actually do for him rather than to him. They’re astringent, sometimes forbiddingly so, and Jones doesn’t try to soften them into something they’re not. Good. The Sonata in particular has a clenched, athletic quality — nine minutes that feel considerably longer, not through any fault of the playing but because Bennett hadn’t yet learned, or hadn’t yet permitted himself, the wit that would later loosen his idiom. Compare it to Peter Maxwell Davies’s contemporaneous keyboard essays and you hear two young Englishmen wrestling with the same continental inheritance and coming out the other side utterly different.

Then the later Bennett arrives, and something relaxes in the room. Three Romantic Pieces from 1988 sound almost unapologetically indebted to Fauré and to Poulenc’s slow movements: long-limbed melodies, harmony that resolves when you least expect gratification and then lingers there, savoring it. Jones’s pedaling in the second piece is especially fine, cloudy without smearing, the sustain never quite covering the inner voice that keeps threatening to become a real tune. The Impromptu on a Theme of Henri Dutilleux, barely four minutes long, is a lovely bit of homage-as-conversation. Bennett borrows a fingerprint gesture and turns it slightly, the way you’d finish a friend’s sentence differently than they would themselves.

Not everything earns its place. The short occasional pieces, the Haydn Impromptu, “Taking a Line for a Walk,” the birthday miniatures, are pleasant enough parlor items, dispatched by Jones with unfussy charm. They pass the time agreeably rather than rewarding close listening. That’s fine. Not every piece needs to be a statement. Bennett himself resisted the idea that seriousness and entertainment were opposites, and a disc that includes both his knottiest Darmstadt-era essays and his most disposable trifles is at least being honest about the composer’s own catholic tastes.

“Tango after Syrinx” is a small delight: Debussy’s flute solo run through a Piazzolla filter, dry wit substituting for solemnity. Jones dispatches it with a knowing rhythmic snap that suggests he’s enjoying himself. Good; he should be.

The recorded sound, from the Metronome engineers, sits a shade close for my taste. You get every hammer noise, every pedal thud, more of the mechanism than some listeners will want. But there’s an argument for that kind of unvarnished truthfulness in repertoire this exposed: nothing to hide behind, no resonant hall-glow smoothing over the harmonic acid. Jones has never been a pianist interested in glamour for its own sake, and Bennett’s music, at its best, isn’t either.

Is this an essential disc? Not in the way a great Chopin or Schumann cycle is essential. But it’s a valuable corrective to the notion, encouraged by the film scores and the cabaret records, that Bennett was primarily a tunesmith who happened to write some serious music on the side. Hear the Sonata against the Three Romantic Pieces and you get the composer whole: a man who never fully abandoned Boulez’s discipline and never fully surrendered to it either, triangulating between Paris, Broadway, and something entirely his own. Jones understands this, and plays accordingly. Recommended, with the caveat that you take the frivolous alongside the serious, which is, after all, exactly how Bennett himself seems to have wanted it.