NEVER mind the old one about oak trees from acorns. From a few basic elements, developed and woven into a fiendishly complex, kaleidoscopic structure, John McLeod has fashioned a monumental edifice for his Third Piano Sonata, played yesterday at the climax of an all-Scottish recital by pianist Murray McLachlan (and recently released on CD by the same musician).
In terms of musical characters that populate the piece, there's an assertive, decisive figure, contrasted immediately with a more shadowy, elliptical element; then a restless - almost, at times, frantic - rhythmic figure which drives and propels the piece with terrifying force. Later, in an oasis of calm (which returns at the end of the piece) there is a window on to another musical sphere - that of the great sixteenth-century Scottish composer Robert Carver, upon whose music the sonata reflects.
But what McLeod does with this lot, in one of his finest and most effective compositions, is build them, extend them, undercut them, short-circuit them, slam them into each other so that they develop into a massive structure with hugely dramatic momentum and a simmering intensity that bubbles, boils, and erupts with volcanic force.
Both the composition and the powerful, piano-jangling performance it received yesterday from Murray McLachlan amount to a tour de force of virtuoso pianism. And it did rather obliterate the pieces that preceded it: six rather overdrawn and sentimental Scotch Dances by Hamish MacCunn and the thoroughly European Nocturne by A C MacKenzie. Much more interesting were the three Keats Preludes by J B McEwen, which rippled away impressionistically, somewhere between Debussy and Scriabin, but with a distinctively aphoristic character of their own.
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