Malcolm Dedman (b. 1948)
Piano Music Volume 1
Reformation (2009)
Piano Sonata No 2, 'In Search' (1984)
Four Kinds of Love (2008)
Piano Sonata No 3, 'To the Memory of an Angel' (2021)
Nancy Lee Harper (piano)
rec. 2021, Victoria, Canada
TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC0649 [66]
What with Toccata’s way of introducing us to the unknown or of drawing back light-excluding curtains on little known aspects of the known, I was surprised that Malcolm Dedman’s name rang a distant carillon. In the British Music Society’s newsletter 29 from 1986, notice was given of a British Piano Music series of recitals by Richard Deering (remember his British music miscellany on a Saga LP?). On 27 March at the Purcell Room one of Dedman’s sonatas was to be performed.
A Londoner, he came to music via piano lessons from the age of five, given by his mother. Here, in what promises to be a multi-volume ‘shelf’, is a complete Dedman recital and it’s of some substance. The music is purposeful and the notes tell us that he was an autodidact with his skills shored by composition lessons from Patric Standford at the Guildhall and a Masters from Thames Valley University. Since 2007 he has made his home in South Africa away from the central conurbations. Now nominally retired, he teaches and as well as revising old scores has also, nothing daunted, written new ones. He cites his debt to Messiaen and Bartók but acknowledges the impact of ‘post-modernists’ and of his beleaguered but gritty determination to speak directly to audiences. In addition to much piano solo music, he has written a Danses Concertantes for strings and a Piano Duet Concerto.
There’s a princely crock of gold on this disc which proffers four significant works from the period 1984-2021. In 1986 Dedman embraced the Bahá’í faith. Some of these scores have titles that suggest a deeply earnest mind rather like that of Alan Bush; the music likewise, although Dedman is never glum. His Reformation is rockily defiant and takes in aspects of boogie-woogie, jazz and the dynamism and poetry of Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin. The earliest piece here is the second sonata In Search. Its two outer movements again remonstrate with the listener as if confronted by a disputant. John Ogdon would have relished this music. There’s a degree of repetition of phrases but it never becomes tedious; more tender and mesmeric. The central Lamentoso pays out a slowly insinuating and engaging melody as if there were all the time in the world. There are parallels here with Rawsthorne’s Ballade.
The 2008 Four Kinds of Love owes its expressive to the Bahá’í faith. The movements, ingeniously and with religious severity, ring the changes on love with four tracks: 1. ‘Love of Man for Man – Unity of Spirits’; 2. ‘Love of Man for God – Divine Faith’; 3. ‘Love of God for Man – Inexhaustible Graces’; 4. ‘Love of God towards the Self – God is Love’. The music is chaste or head-bowed and tender, of bell-like clarity and what feels like moral fibre. It is touched with a measure of Messiaen or Szymanowski but without either composer’s magnetic draw towards dense complexity. Gorecki and Sisask in the ascendant. The most recent work presented is the Third Sonata To the Memory of an Angel which rather raises expectations of Marjan Mozetich or Australian Brenton Broadstock. In fact, it leans more towards Broadstock than Mozetich although textures adhere as usual to a brave clarity. The sincere Lisztian schema is reflected in the movement titles: I. ‘Struggle’; II. ‘Overcoming Difficulties’; III. ‘Spiritual Guidance’; IV. ‘Fulfilment (Into the Light)’.
By now Toccata has effectively established a “style guide” for their notes. It is applied here: English only, well written, not excessively abstruse and of encyclopaedic standing. On this occasion, the pianist is the author.
Rob Barnett
