Australian Chamber Rarities – Holland, Allworth and Strahan

Nobody buys a disc like this expecting revelations. You buy it — if you buy it at all — out of curiosity about a musical culture that has spent decades being politely ignored by the rest of the world, and occasionally that curiosity is rewarded more than you’d think.

Dulcie Holland is a name that means little outside Australia, and even there it means “the woman who wrote the theory textbooks,” which is a shame, rather like remembering Rimsky-Korsakov only for his orchestration manual. Her Cello Sonata, composed in 1993 when she was pushing eighty, comes from a player who studied with John Ireland in London in the 1930s and never quite let go of that inheritance. You can hear it in the harmonic language, tonal but restless, forever circling back to some half-remembered modal turn. There are patches, too, that suggest she’d been listening to Hindemith’s cello sonatas and maybe even some Shostakovich, though secondhand, filtered through decades of distance from the European mainstream. Is it a great piece? No. Is it a negligible one? No. It has backbone, and a certain wiry, unsentimental lyricism in the slow movement that catches you off guard.

Gary Williams plays it with evident conviction. Some passages sound almost improvised, so naturally does the bow find its way through the awkward registral leaps Holland writes into the first movement. He is not immaculate — there’s a moment or two of tuning that goes slightly sour, especially up in thumb position, though nothing that derails the performance. Max Olding’s piano playing is alert and idiomatic, if hampered somewhat by the engineering: the studio, or whatever space this was taped in, offers almost no bloom, no air around the sound, so the piano’s upper register turns steely under any real weight of touch. A shame, because Olding clearly wants to voice inner lines that the acoustic won’t let bloom.

The engineer on this project doubles as composer elsewhere on the disc, which is its own kind of Australian intimacy: everybody, it seems, wears three hats. His Lute Concerto is the disc’s real curiosity. One expects, from that title, some genial neo-Baroque confection, lute noodling prettily over strings. Instead we get something odder: period instruments — recorder, harp, viola da gamba, violone, baroque violin — deployed with a distinctly late-twentieth-century sensibility, harmonically unmoored, faintly astringent. The slow movement, marked con morbidezza, actually flirts with dodecaphonic procedure in the lute line, which sits uneasily, fascinatingly uneasily, against the antique color of the ensemble beneath it. Shakespeare gets quoted in the score, something about autumn and faded flowers, and whether or not you find that gesture pretentious, the music has an authentic melancholy that earns it. This is easily the longest movement of the three, and rightly so. The finale, built mostly around an accompanied cadenza recycling earlier material, rather runs out of ideas and just stops, as though the composer looked at his watch.

Then three shorter pieces round things out, and here the disc loses altitude. Colin Brumby’s setting of “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded” is a plain, serviceable chorale prelude for organ. Bach’s shadow is unavoidable with this tune, and Brumby doesn’t try to escape it, just writes something modest and reverent and gets out in under three minutes. Fair enough. But the transition into Eric Gross’s “Thanksgiving” arrives far too abruptly, with barely a breath of silence between sacred and — well, whatever this is. Gross’s piece has the harmonic profile of light music, mildly bluesy, the kind of thing a hotel lounge pianist tosses off between cocktails while nobody actually listens. It’s pleasant. It’s also entirely disposable, and its placement here, cheek by jowl with a chorale prelude on Passion chorale material, borders on the tonally bizarre.

So: a mixed bag, unevenly performed, unevenly recorded, unevenly inspired. The Holland sonata deserves a hearing and a better acoustic than it gets. The Allworth concerto is the real find, genuinely strange, genuinely original, worth returning to. The rest you can take or leave. For anyone mapping the byways of Australian composition in the years before that country’s musical culture found its more confident, internationally fluent voice, this disc has real documentary value. As pure listening pleasure, it’s patchy — but patchy with at least one passage of real distinction, which is more than most such anthologies can claim.