John McLeod: Piano Sonata No 3 [download]

With this Sonata John McLeod has produced a composition of remarkable power, exciting virtuosity and great emotional depth. The use of a quotation from Scotland’s greatest Renaissance composer, Robert Carver, makes a particularly appropriate link with the origins of the commission and the composer’s birthplace, and seems to lend to the work a perspective of timelessness - almost a universality - which deepens the musical experience.

The Sonata plays without a break but is cast in two balancing parts. The opening section, beginning with a chord based on A flat (a passing reference to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E flat, Op 31 No 3), uses a mosaic construction sometimes employed by Tippett and Stravinsky. Gradually the perspective becomes clearer as a Tarantella assumes prominence. Virtuoso writing challenges the paints as the full resonance and range of the piano is freely used in developments of considerable intensity. At the half way point a slow bell-like section unfolds a quotation from the Dona Nobis Pacem of Robert Carver’s Missa L’Homme Armé. The music is very still and a calm settles, almost as though a far distant past is being recalled. The Carver theme is developed before the opening material reappears and is reworked showing many thematic interconnections. The sonata ends quietly in a coda which, while recalling the Carver theme, settlers on a very low A flat - reminding us of the very first note of the work. The opening chord, which was somewhat enigmatic at its first appearance, is thus ‘solved’ in a final unison spreading over the whole keyboard. The frenetic anxieties of the opening movement are resolved and the virtuoso challenges finally stilled in this epilogue of telling piano resonance.

(Roger B Williams)