Baines: Pictures of Light – Honeybourne

Some composers you discover the way you discover a scent from childhood — suddenly, unbidden, and with a jolt that makes you wonder how you ever forgot. William Baines is like that for me. I first heard his name muttered by an elderly piano teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, decades ago, who spoke of him the way people speak of a promising nephew who died too young — with a kind of proprietary grief, as if the loss were personal rather than merely historical. It was and is. Baines died at twenty-three, in 1922, of tuberculosis and overwork, having spent his adolescence composing at a rate that still seems slightly unhinged — a symphony at seventeen, quartets, songs, and around a hundred and fifty pieces for piano, most of them fiendishly difficult and nearly all of them shot through with a wistfulness that has nothing to do with being English and everything to do with being mortal.

Duncan Honeybourne clearly understands this. He has made something of a specialty of the undersung corners of British piano music — his Joubert recordings taught me things I didn’t know I needed to know, and his account of Christopher Edmunds’ Piano Sonata for EM Records was a small revelation — and here he brings the same patient advocacy to a composer who has been shockingly ill-served by the record catalogue. Eric Parkin’s pioneering Lyrita LP, made around the fiftieth anniversary of Baines’ death in 1972, remains a touchstone; his later Priory disc mostly just repeated the earlier programme, oddly, as though the repertoire itself were finite. It isn’t. There’s a whole shelf of Baines still waiting.

Honeybourne opens with Paradise Gardens, composed when Baines was not yet twenty, and the playing has exactly the quality this music needs and rarely gets — a sense of wonder that hasn’t curdled into whimsy. You hear Debussy in the harmonic language, inevitably; you hear Scriabin’s ecstatic tremors too, and perhaps a whiff of Cyril Scott. But Baines never had the luxury of formal study — he was essentially self-taught, working in Yorkshire far from the conservatoire culture of London — and there’s a rawness under the perfumed surface that no amount of French influence quite domesticates. Honeybourne doesn’t try to smooth this over. Good.

“The Naïad,” drawn from the Three Concert Studies, gets a reading of real filigree brilliance — the passagework glitters without turning brittle, which is harder to achieve than it sounds, given how easily this repertoire tips into salon prettiness. Tides and Silverpoints, both composed in that astonishing 1920–21 stretch when Baines must have known, on some level, that time was short, receive performances of unusual gravity. Honeybourne resists the temptation to rush the climaxes. He lets the big washes of sound in Tides actually breathe, pedal blurring just enough to suggest the sea without drowning the harmonic detail underneath — no mean feat on a piano recorded, as this one was, in the resonant embrace of Holy Trinity Church, Hereford, where the ambient hall-glow could easily have swallowed inner voices whole. It doesn’t. The engineering is exceptionally sympathetic.

The Island of the Fay — not to be confused with Poe’s story, though the atmosphere is comparably eerie — unfolds with a spectral patience that reminded me, oddly, of late Fauré, though the two composers could hardly be less alike biographically. And the title work, Pictures of Light, composed across Baines’ final agonized years of 1920 to 1922 as his health collapsed, is the emotional center of the disc. There’s a fragility here that Honeybourne captures without underlining it in red pen — no interpretive italics, just clean, unsentimental voicing that lets the music’s own vulnerability do the work.

The Eight Preludes are lesser-known and welcome for it; nice to have some Baines that isn’t merely repeating what Parkin already gave us fifty years ago. And the Five Songs, with tenor Gordon Pullin, are a genuine discovery for me — Pullin sings with an unforced, slightly reedy tone that suits this repertoire’s intimacy, though I confess the recorded balance occasionally favors the piano at the tenor’s expense, a small quibble in an otherwise scrupulously prepared release.

Robin Walker’s At the Grave of William Baines, composed in 1999, closes the program — an elegy for an elegist, in a sense, and a generous, non-showy tribute that never tries to out-Baines Baines. Wise of Walker. Wise of Honeybourne to include it, too; it reframes everything that came before as unfinished business, which of course it was and remains.

Is this now the best available Baines collection? I believe it is — more generous in its reach than Parkin, better recorded, and played with an advocacy that never curdles into mere reverence. William Baines deserved a longer life and a much longer discography. This disc won’t give him the first. It goes a considerable way toward the second.