Michael Tsalka, square piano
Diana Weston, harpsichord
Wirripang Media Wirr 132
★★★
By Michael Morton-Evans
This is an interesting experiment which very nearly comes off. Wirripang invited four contemporary female composers to write works for what are essentially 18th-century instruments – the square piano and the harpsichord. In the 18th century domestic music was usually supplied by a woman at the harpsichord or spinet. When the square piano first appeared in the mid-1700s there was great excitement as the tones were more pleasing to the ear.
Herein lies the problem with what is an otherwise perfectly splendid collection of music. 21st-century listeners are accustomed to 20th-century pianos and expecting them to listen to a playlist of 39 individual pieces played on 18th-century instruments is a big ask, I suspect, for many.
The theme of the CD is childhood. The composers were asked to remember their childhoods and write accordingly. From Ann Carr-Boyd comes ‘Hopscotch’, for two keyboards, which encompasses the joy of a day in the park and a plangent number titled ‘I hate spinach’. Elena Kats-Chernin’s ‘The Rain Puzzle’ is, like much of her music, something of a puzzle. Romanian composer Violeta Dinescu offers 23 short pieces with amazing titles such as ‘The Southern Pufferfish’, ‘The Rhinoceros Bird’ and ‘The Camel Dachshund’.
The one exception to the contemporary list is 10 numbers by Hungarian Béla Bartók (1881-1945) from the 79 he wrote in about 1908 principally to teach children how to play the piano using Slovakian or Hungarian folk tunes.
The result is a little like the curate’s egg (good in parts). The individual ear will determine how much of it it can take.