Gavin Bryars has spent most of his career defying the categories critics keep trying to press him into. He emerged from the British experimental scene of the early 1970s — he was there when the Sinking of the Titanic first went under, so to speak — and the minimalist label got attached early and has stuck with the tenacity of a barnacle. It doesn’t quite fit. Bryars thinks in loops and long arcs, yes, but his harmonic imagination is richer, more wayward, and frankly more interesting than the word “minimalist” suggests.
This Naxos disc makes a quiet but persuasive case for his range.
After Handel’s Vesper started life for harpsichord — and you can still hear the plucked ancestry in its opening pages, a certain cool evenness of attack that sits oddly, productively, against the sustain of the modern piano. Ralph van Raat handles the transition with care. He doesn’t try to make the instrument sound like something it isn’t. The piece opens in a kind of luminous stasis, modal and patient, and then — without warning, really — it gathers itself. By the time a trill breaks the surface around the eight-minute mark and baroque figuration comes flooding in, Bryars has done something quietly ingenious: he’s made Handel feel like a memory surfacing rather than a quotation being deployed. The fantasia element is genuine, not merely gestural.
Ramble on Cortona is the disc’s most private piece. Bryars derived his themes from Laude, a vocal work of his that in turn draws on thirteenth-century Italian manuscripts discovered in Cortona — sacred songs, essentially, stripped of their liturgical scaffolding and left to wander. The title hints at Percy Grainger, and there’s something of that open-air, folk-inflected quality in the music’s gait, though Bryars quickly moves somewhere Grainger never went: into a slow, meditative interior that feels almost Spanish in its textures, as if Cortona and Castile had somehow merged on the page. Ghostly ascending figures in the treble haunt the piece throughout. Van Raat plays it with a luminous, slightly detached delicacy — he understands that this music should feel overheard, not performed.
The concerto is another matter entirely, and the most ambitious thing here.
Bryars titled it The Solway Canal and built it around poems by the late Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, who died in 2010 — the same year the concerto was written. Whether Morgan’s death was the catalyst or a coincidence the notes decline to say, which is itself a kind of Bryarsian reticence. The Solway Canal, that improbable waterway connecting the Clyde and the Forth, runs through Morgan’s late work as a symbol of connection and passage, and Bryars takes that imagery seriously. The piano is not a soloist in any conventional sense here; it’s woven into the orchestral and choral fabric like a voice in a conversation, sometimes leading, often just present. You could invoke the Busoni Piano Concerto — which also deploys a chorus — but that would be misleading. Busoni’s concerto is a monument. This is something more intimate, more elegiac.
The Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic under Otto Tausk plays with transparency and real rhythmic subtlety; Capella Amsterdam brings exactly the right kind of blended, slightly impersonal beauty to the choral writing. Van Raat’s contribution is harder to isolate, which is the point — he disappears into the texture willingly, and only occasionally does the piano surface with something that sounds like individual utterance.
Bryars is now past seventy, and this album — made in Amsterdam’s fine acoustic spaces in 2010, a year that was clearly productive for him — catches him in confident, unhurried command of his own language. The disc won’t convert anyone who finds his aesthetic too still, too content with its own quietude. But for listeners willing to slow down, there’s real depth here. Recommended without reservation.
