Rockin' Rudy's

I seem to have taken my time to get to town again after the release of Piers Lane goes to town in 2013 (Hyperion CDA67967), with the recordings on the present album split between 2015 and 2022. Not only has this new journey had its delays, the repertoire extends from the 1700s to 2019 instead of concentrating, as before, on the twentieth century, and this time it focuses very much on the dance, whether courtly, folk, ballroom, novel or even barbarous. Like its predecessor, this album contains pieces I've mainly performed as encores, and mixes the well-known with works composed specially for me, the noble and contemplative alongside the populist and humorous. In other words, it's a collection of very personal guilty pleasures, and I hope the composers involved wouldn't be too shocked by the antics of their new neighbours.

When I was about twelve years of age, I discovered Baroque keyboard gems in Schirmer's two volumes of Early Keyboard Music edited by Louis Oesterle (1854-1932). I was particularly taken by Jean-Baptiste Lully's Air tendre, with a Courante connecting it to a three-part set-Allemande, Sarabande et Gigue-arranged to create an overall suite in E minor. I started my first-ever full-length recital with the suite, following it with the Sonata in B minor by Franz Liszt. I received a somewhat condescending review for the programme from a Melbourne critic, who suggested that when Mr Lane was a little older, he'd realize one doesn't juxtapose an inconsequential suite by an early French opera composer with the monumental Liszt sonata. To be fair to him, I had followed the sonata with two Rachmaninov preludes, all before the intermission-not something I would deem artistically satisfying these days, but imagine my sense of justification when one of the first recitals I attended at London's Wigmore Hall (it must have been 1979) was Shura Cherkassky playing my Lully and the Liszt sonata as a first half! Imagine, too, my surprise when I discovered rather recently that the five Baroque dance movements were not by Lully at all-they'd been misattributed by Oesterle and were actually by John Loeillet, born in Ghent (in the Spanish Netherlands at the time) as Jean Baptiste Loeillet, but known as `the London Loeillet' after his move to the English capital and to avoid confusion with his first cousin, the composer Jean Baptiste Loeillet of Ghent! To muddy the waters even more, his surname was occasionally published as `Lully' or `Lullie', though he was entirely unrelated to the Italian-born French opera composer. While not as prolific nor as historically important as the French Lully, the London Loeillet was no slouch: he was an adept performer on the recorder, flute (the transverse version he helped popularize in England), oboe and harpsichord, was published by John Walsh in London, and was responsible for presenting Arcangelo Corelli's twelve Concerti grossi to London audiences. He published thirteen pieces as three `Lessons for the Harpsichord or Spinet'. The Air tendre (`Slow Aire' in the English publication) is the second piece in Lesson 1, the Courante (`Corant') the third, the Allemande (`Almand') the first. The Sarabande is the third piece of Lesson 2, but transposed from D major to C major, and the Gigue (`Jigg') the fifth piece of Lesson 1.

I first came to the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski through his works for violin and piano: the enchanting Fontaine d'Aréthuse from the three Mythes (Op 30) and the haunting Nocturne and Tarantella (Op 28) hooked me in, to revel in piano pieces like the early Études (Op 4), the dense yet miraculously diaphanous textures of the Métopes (Op 29) and the sensuous virtuosity of the Masques (Op 34). Szymanowski was born into an illustrious and artistic family on 3 October 1882 in the village of Tymoszówka, now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine. He commenced music studies with his father, but from 1901 attended the State Conservatory in Warsaw, an institution he himself directed from 1926 to 1930. He was a bit of a nomad by nature and travelled widely in Europe (he founded the Young Polish Composers' Publishing Company in Berlin, 1905-12), North Africa, the Middle East and the United States, at the same time absorbing such diverse influences as Islamic culture, ancient Greek drama and philosophy. After treatment in Davos for a virulent form of tuberculosis, he settled in Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains in the early 1930s and his composing soon reflected the inspiration of Polish folk music and in particular the music of the Polish Highlanders, the Gorals. He wrote: `My discovery of the essential beauty of Goral music, dance and architecture is a very personal one; much of this beauty I have absorbed into my innermost soul.' This resulted in, among other works, many mazurkas for the piano, including the Op 50 set of twenty, the first four of them dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein, the legendary Polish-American pianist and bon viveur, for many the greatest-ever Chopin player. Speaking of Szymanowski's early works, Rubinstein said: `His style owed much to Chopin, his form had something of Scriabin, but there was already the stamp of a powerful, original personality to be felt in the line of his melody and in his daring and original modulations.' Wagner and Strauss, Debussy and Ravel all went into the brew that is true Szymanowski, but the distinctive ingredient, as with Chopin, was the culture of his native land. The two mazurkas I play here are intended to be performed together-Szymanowski connects them with the word `enchaînez'. The distinctive winding melody of the first, with its bass pedal point sounding nearly all the way, its rubato and mystical decorative melismas in outer sections, and its more active and chromatic middle section, contrasts perfectly with the insistent rhythms of its faster, more angular partner, marked `Rubasznie'-brusquely.

One of my postgraduate professors at the Royal College of Music was the much-loved South African pianist Yonty Solomon (1937-2008), himself one of the few students of the revered British pianist Dame Myra Hess (1890-1965), who, with the help of her dear friend the Irish composer-pianist Howard Ferguson (1908-1999), founded, programmed, performed in and directed the extraordinary wartime series of lunchtime concerts that took place every weekday from October 1939 to April 1946 at the National Gallery in London. In 2006 my friend Carmel Hart came up with the idea of celebrating those concerts in their original venue, Room 36-the Barry Rooms-under the glass dome on the second floor of the Gallery, and asked me to help programme and organize the event. I ended up directing what became the annual Myra Hess Day until 2014, and was able to programme many remarkable concerts over the years, including Yonty's final performance (Bach's Goldberg Variations), the legendary violinist Ida Haendel, who had played in the original wartime concerts, and the Contiguglia brothers, who had been students of Dame Myra herself. I also commissioned the show Admission: One Shilling, in which Dame Patricia Routledge voiced Hess's words and thoughts while I played ten pieces or movements from her programmes. We have performed that work over ninety times in various countries. I also once replicated Dame Myra's first lunchtime programme at the Gallery and it included her selection of thirteen of Franz Schubert's hundreds of brief dance movements, many of them just two lines long, all of them imbued with his inimitable magic.

Another of Yonty Solomon's students at the Royal College of Music was my dear friend Timothy Murray, who also studied piano with Peter Wallfisch and composition with Anthony Milner and John Lambert. He is listed here as T K Murray to differentiate him from the other British composer Timothy Murray, born in 1977! After Yonty passed away, Tim wrote an elegy for piano and string orchestra, Landscape in memoriam Yonty Solomon (2009), which I premiered in London an