Search - Henry Cowell, Sorrel Doris Hays, Sorrel Doris :: Sorrel Doris Hays Plays the Piano Music of Henry Cowell

Recorde d in 1977, still today a very satisfactory collectio

Discophage | France | 10/05/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Considering the historical importance and the musical value of Henry Cowell's output for the piano, it is saddening to see how rarely it is played and recorded, then and now. Other than the invaluable recording of a selection of 20 made by the composer himself on Folkways in 1963 (Henry Cowell plays his own Piano Music), there wasn't much available in the LP era until 1977: usually limited selections included in miscellaneous collections (as with Shields 1976: Piano Music In America 1900-1945 and Miller 1976: Sound Forms For Piano). So the publication in 1977 by Finnadar of a modern recording of 24 pieces by Sorrel Doris Hays, adding up to an hour of music, was an important step - and it is this recording that TownHall has auspiciously made available on CD. It remains still highly valuable today - not only because, alas, not much new water has flowed under the bridges since (other than New Music - Piano Compositions By Henry Cowell / Brown, Hays, Kubera, Cahill, a 1997 New Albion CD that is flawed both sonically and interpretively, there is a good collection by Chris Burn on Acta but it is available - and none too easily - only in the UK, and Anthony de Mare on CRI's Wizards & Wildmen offers only 11 pieces, along with works of Ives and Lou Harrison), but also on behalf its own musical merits.



First, Hays presents most of Cowell's masterpieces - among the most notable published ones to be missing are only "Piano Piece", a compendium of the composer's techniques with clusters and swept strings, "Fairy Bells", a piece mixing plucked and clusters, as poetic and evocative as anything the composer wrote, and surprisingly hardly ever recorded, even by the composer himself (the only recording I am aware of is by Chris Burn), "Snows of Fuji-Yama" and "Exultation". She gives the impressive "Dynamic Motion" and its Encores, but unfortunately (following the composer's example) omits the 5th and last one, "Time Table", and shuffles them around rather than giving them in their normal sequence. She also plays only the first six pieces from "Nine Ings", nine short etudes with titles in gerund form (Floating, Frisking etc.) but these are not among the composer's most innovative and interesting compositions, though some of them present interesting studies in polyrhythms and out-of-sync right-and left-hand meters. In those she plays, she is snappier in the fast ones, more naturally flowing in the slow ones than Joseph Kubera on New Albion (who gives the complete set).



Usually Hays is very precise - more than the composer himself. She displays admirable precision and clarity in the polyrhythms of "Fabric". Sometimes she follows the composer's performance rather than his score, as when she takes a da capo repeat in "What's This" (1st Encore to Dynamic Motion), or when she adds an unwritten coda to "The Lilt of the Reel" - but not in "Advertisement", the extraordinary 3rd Encore to Dynamic Motion, where Cowell's kaleidoscopic improvisation must be nearby impossible to transcript.



But she is also less powerful than the composer, as in Dynamic Motion or "Amiable Conversation" (2nd Encore), and sometimes she is too controlled and lacks the touch of frenzy that others bring to the music, as, in "Advertisement", the composer or Roger Shields, or in "What's This", Burn or Cheryl Seltzer (Henry Cowell: Instrumental, Chamber and Vocal Music, Vol. 2). By the same token "Tiger" is cleanly articulated but again somewhat too controlled, with less frenzy than Joël Sachs (Henry Cowell: Instrumental, Chamber and Vocal Music, Vol. 1) and less massive pounding than Cowell; the approach underlines the kinship with Bartok but it also blurrs the individuality of Cowell. Hays' lack of heft is nowhere more detrimental than in "Anger Dance", where she seems not to know what an "Allegro" is and conveys no sense of anger. But in "Antinomy" (4th Encore), she has both plenty of power and a fine evocative palette.



Indeed what Hays usually does have is the evocative power required by Cowell's music, and also the tempo flexibility both called for by the composer's scores and erxerciced by him in his recording. She takes "The Tides of Manaunan" at a tempo significantly slower than the composer's, making it sound like some religious procession. Likewise, in "The Voice of Lir" (not recorded by the composer, but tackled by Chris Burn), her slow tempo conveys a feeling of pent-up menace, or of some great Awakening. Again it sounds like a solemn procession - but again she lacks power in the fff. She brings an air of nostalgic and dreamy solemnity to "The Trumpet of Angus Og", quite different from the mood elicited by Cowell (he makes it sound like an Albeniz evocation of Spain), but her shaping of the piece's dynamic surge is quite effective. In "Hero Sun" (another one not done by Cowell), she is much more extreme in her tempo choices than Chris Burn, more exuberantly joyous in the Allegro con brio section and more despondently burdened in the Largo. In "Aeolian Harp" - another of Cowell's hauntingly simple and beautiful harped piano compositions - she plays with fine atmosphere but not as many color shadings as the composer; she gives more solemnity to "Harp of Life" than Cowell and doesn't come close to his awe-inspiring evocative power, but still her upward surge is quite gripping. Her "Sinister Resonance" is not as sinister and resonant as Cowell's and she doesn't always play the exact pitches (the performer is instructed to play "guitar-like", by moving a finger on the string), but she makes a commendable effort to vary color. "The Banshee" is arguably Cowell's finest composition, played entirely on the piano strings, and a terrifying evocation of the "fairy woman who comes at the time of death to take the soul back into the Inner World". Unlike with so many others but like the composer himself and Chris Burn, under Hays' fingers one hears not just piano strings being swept in various ways, but the terrifying moans of a beast from the abyss.



All in all, this remains today a very satisfactory collection and, with the disc of Chris Burn, a fine modern complement to Cowell's own recording.

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