BAYLISS LINKS
Review
of Piano Sonatas, Organ music recordings
Website
£13.50 incl. P&P
Colin Bayliss was
born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire
and is a productive determined and
seemingly indefatigable creator of
music. This sixty year old composer's
catalogue includes two operas, four
symphonies, ten concertos and three
piano sonatas. There is every sign
that this list will continue to lengthen
and I hope that we will get to hear
the orchestral works as well as those
for chamber groupings.
The
six quartets on this set date from
the 1990s. They declare, as does the
composer's revealing liner-note, his
awe and love for the quartets of Bartók,
Janáček and Shostakovich. The
mark of these composers, especially
the first and last, can be felt in
the long First Quartet. The
four movements are packed with prickly
life, accommodating both melody and
dissonant fibre. The music chitters,
grunts, rages and serenades. Ostinati
are launched at the drop of a hat
and the accents of the melodies that
volplane and curvet above a typical
Bayliss ostinato often have a mid-European
tang.
The Second Quartet
is only half as long as the First.
It began life as the First Piano Sonata.
This work seems at first slightly
more relaxed than the predominantly
earnest First. It has overtones of
nostalgia and a haunted sense of life
lived at high summer - such as you
might find in the exuberance of Smetana's
First Quartet. The haunting becomes
more tense and forward in the second
movement with moments of serial gravity
relieved by an almost pastoral lyricism.
This recalled for me the atmosphere
of the last two quartets by Frank
Bridge. The finale gambols along at
speed like a rapidly sketched summation
of all that has gone before - and
those Eastern European flavours return.
The Third Quartet
reworks Bayliss's Signatures for
solo viola. The composer claims parallels
with a divertimento but again the
subject matter is shot through, across
its six mosaic movements, with as
much tragedy as entertainment. Once
again his telling trademark of ostinato-with-melody
can be heard (end of first movement
tr. 9). The modal Scottish folk melody
which the composer mentions, but does
not identify, provides a unifying
element. This quartet, with its sequence
of six very short movements, provides
a sort of quintessence of the Bayliss
style and a succinct digest of many
of his fingerprints. The practice
of structures in small interleaved
plates is again applied in the Fourth
Quartet which is in no less than
thirteen segments played continuously.
The movements each take a single note
of the tone row; resolution is provided
in the final adagio. The language
here is sometimes more extremely dissonant
than in the earlier works. Percussive
effects provide impactful ostinatos
as at tr. 6, On the other hand searching
Bergian melodies of great beauty also
sing out as in the andante piacevole
(4). The pattering dissonance
and Stravinsky-like stomp of the allegro
molto is full of dynamic contrast.
The final adagietto is an impressive
rounding out to a work accommodating
great differences and subtle collisions.
There are so many contrasts and sharp-turns
here that we might well regard this
work as a sort of character-analogue
of Pictures at an Exhibition.
The Fifth Quartet
is based on three paintings by
the great Norwegian painter Edvard
Munch. The first is the famous The
Scream - a painting of remarkable
resonance in the 20th century. The
Scream can be heard, often quietly,
in all its shredded despair and horror
but we also get the preamble and rationale.
Bayliss nicely catches the remorseless
of the path to the climactic scream
and the melted and charred psychological
landscapes of the mind that lead to
it. Melancholy uses a beautiful
and gently sorrowing Norwegian folk
song Millom bakkar og berg ut met
havet. It’s a remarkably done
piece and the one which I would encourage
Bayliss novitiates to start with.
The movement ends with a humming shudder
that fades to niente. The finale,
The Dance of Life, again employs
percussive effects as well as those
Smetana intimations mentioned above.
They pick up the crash of old folk
dances which have become innocent,
purged of danger by convention and
patterned rules with the more threateningly
overt feral sexuality of the tango.
The movement ends with an ambivalent
repeated moan and a quietly breathing
figure.
In a formal concession
to symmetry the last quartet (to date)
- named after the ensemble who were
to record all six quartets - Bayliss
returns to four movement format. The
first is quite romantic with an oceanic
swell and surge and with lyrical material
to the fore. After a wispy pattering
scherzo full of light, air, ostinatos
and silky dissonance comes an affectionate
and almost sentimental adagio with
a passing resemblance to Valse
Triste. Its smooth aspects are
disturbed by a sort of panic-suffused
dissonance and it is this element
which opens the movement. The finale
ends with a passive questioning gesture.
These recordings
are closely miked to capture vivacious
and nuanced music-making with apt
vitality. There are some explosive
pizzicati here which are lent impact
as much by microphone placement as
by the players.
Anyone who has any
interest in the string quartet in
the twentieth century has no choice
- they must hear these impressive
works. These works stand in the company
of Bridge, Bartók and Shostakovich
and are by no means dwarfed by them.
Rob Barnett
The Lochrian Ensemble 
