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Haskell Small: 25 Preludes / Goldberg Variations
(Haskell Small Website)
4Tay Records Inc., 2004
(4Tay Records Website)
Haskell Small, piano
Nikolas J. Lund
January 21, 2007
(See a Review of Haskell Small’s Renoir’s Feast)
This review represents the second installment of my three-part review of those works of Haskell Small on CD which have become recently available for me to review. For further observations on this singular composer-pianist, please click here.
In this release from 4Tay Records, we have the opportunity to engage Mr. Small in his capacities not only as a performer of his own piano works, but of ones which occupy an already canonical position in the Western repertoire: J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Because the CD has been organized with Bach first, it is to this music that we turn first.
One notices immediately that the recording quality of these Goldbergs is quite high. There is occasionally a sort of rustling noise in the foreground, but it sounds to me like it is within the recording space itself, and I surmise that it must be the musician himself, perhaps oblivious to the rustling of his shirt cuffs in his ecstatic confrontation with Bach’s notes. And it is, of course, maybe only one’s over-attunement to the meta-mumblings on the iconoclastic Glenn Gould recordings of these pieces that lead one’s ear in and out of the foreground. Certainly we would like to thank Mr. Small for accommodating us with a performance that does not dabble in any unnecessary noise.
The interpretation itself accomplishes an extremely refined and highly literal line from Bach. Each variation exists entirely on its own terms, and the intellectual effort that was obviously exerted in developing an overall more balanced interpretation pays off in the thoughtful and contemplative space allotted to each of these delicious musical morsels in the feast. And then, prepared as we are for further morsel munching, Bach’s recapitulating Aria takes us on to Small’s own 25 Preludes, which clearly nod to Bach via the “de-innovations” of Chopin, whose own 25 Preludes (Op. 28) showed us what a relief it was to do away with entirely that scary ensuing Fugue which otherwise always followed the Prelude.
Though well beyond either of these composers of miniature worlds, Haskell Small’s Preludes start us off straightaway in a world where the harmonic influences of Debussy and Scriabin are in immediate evidence. Then, by the third piece, we are confronted with a jazz-like shuffle language, far more reminiscent of an American pianist I cannot quite name than any of these other towering European figures. Strangely enough, actually, these occasional moments of jazz may well be the key to Haskell Small’s enigma, appearing in the most unexpected places, and so infrequently.
In the Prelude after Chopin, one might say that this “self-defined” form functions as a series of small canvases upon which the creative composer is allowed to display his whole wide range of musical language. And assuming that Mr. Small has taken his lead from the past—whose reverence thereto is so well articulated in the Goldbergs—it is safe to say that each of these tiny works holds within some part of their creator. Without a doubt, one can cite the brilliance of each and every piece in that a single hearing tells one exactly how much Mr. Small has to offer as a composer.
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