THE SANCTUARY, QUEEN’S CROSS CHURCH
Monday 13th February, 2023
DUNCAN HONEYBOURNE Piano
PROGRAMME:
Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)
3 Klavierstücke D. 946 (1828)
William Baines (1899 – 1922)
Tides (1920) 1. The Lone Wreck; 2. Goodnight to Flamboro’
Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie (1847 – 1935)
Scenes in the Scottish Highlands, Op 23 (1880)
1. On the Hillside, 2. On the Loch, 3. On the Heather
Phillip Cooke (b. 1980)
Songs of Morning and Night
Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856)
Fantasie in C, Op. 17 (1836)
ENCORE:
Schumann/Liszt
Widmung
Monday’s concert, the fifth in our current season, was to have been given by the Trio Orfeo but their visit to Aberdeen had to be postponed to a later date because of illness. It was fortunate that champion concert pianist Duncan Honeybourne happened to be visiting the area and was willing to fill the void with a series of performances for a number of North East Chamber Music Societies.
Of course we were sorry to miss the Trio Orfeo but Monday’s performance by Duncan Honeybourne could not have been bettered. Looks of astonishment and delight on the faces of many in the gratifyingly large audience were surely testimony to that.
Honeybourne’s programme itself was outstanding. The Schubert and Schumann works which enclosed the rest of the programme sat at the very pinnacle of dazzling romantic pianism. To watch Honeybourne’s hands as they spanned the piano keyboard as if born to do so was a pure delight in itself.
Of course Schubert never wrote film music, the cinema did not exist in his day, but the first of the three pieces in his Klavierstücke showed that he could easily have done so. Ferocious handfuls of repeated notes melted into wonderfully gentle passages and then back again. Duncan Honeybourne easily captured Schubert’s cinematic changes of mood both with technical brilliance, and time and again with admirable depth of feeling. The second of the three pieces was played with balletic muscularity, wonderfully graceful but full of strength too. The final piece had a jollity of spirit delivered with splendid lightness of touch. Lightening changes of mood and piano colour from awesome drama to delicious gentleness marked this glorious performance.
Duncan Honeybourne has been associated with revelations of marvellous undercurrents of British piano music, much of it undeservedly forgotten. Was this because of the rise of atonality in the twentieth century? Composers who wrote ‘nice’ music were sniffed at by the prevailing cognoscenti when I was a student in the 1960s. “Oh no! He writes tunes! How terrible!” Perhaps I exaggerate. Or do I? With the coming of a new millennium that has changed and so performers like Honeybourne are helping to bring composers like William Baines and Alexander Mackenzie back into the sunlight of modern performance. That’s where the next two composers in Monday’s programme were coming from. Honeybourne introduced them before he played and had nice words to say about them. His performances certainly proved him right.
The two ‘sea pictures’ if I can borrow Elgar’s words for ‘The Lone Wreck’ and ‘Goodnight to Flamboro’’ were wonderfully graphic in their portrayal of their subject matter. Honeybourne’s fingers swept waves across the keyboard.
Alexander Mackenzie’s ‘Scenes in the Scottish Highlands’ were also powerfully pictorial. Longer pieces with considerable depth of colour, well crafted as piano works and with more than a touch of nobility, not at all ‘shortbread tin music’ as some Scottish pieces can be. I particularly enjoyed the jolly song-like qualities of ‘On the Heather’
After the interval it was time for a very different style of piano music with ‘Songs of Morning and Night’ by Phillip Cooke. He was present in the audience to hear his six pieces, three ‘aubades’ or morning pieces followed by three ‘nocturnes’ or evening pieces. The morning pieces used the lower section of the piano keyboard while the evening pieces used the upper section. Compared to all the other pieces in the programme, these were gentler, slower works using pre-existing folksongs, popular songs and so on. The rhythmic disjunction between left and right hand in the first aubade was fascinating. As Honeybourne explained, not a note was wasted. I felt harmonic clashes brought out something of the soul of the piano itself. The very piano sounds themselves were what mattered. Perhaps a little like electronic music? But more easily digested. Moments of musical meditation rather than the fire and passion at the heart of certain of the other pieces. That is what we were back to, and then some with the final work in Monday’s official programme. This was Schumann’s ‘Fantasie in C, Op. 17’. Although in a sense from the same stable as Schubert’s music which opened the programme, this was a very different work. Shaping, and in a sense thoroughly worked out emotional story-telling were important here. Honeybourne played all three movements with astonishing fluency and passion. I felt myself drawn into the music and taken on a sometimes whirlwind journey by both Schumann and Honeybourne. The second movement in particular is fiendishly difficult but Honeybourne made it seem free and easy. The arrival of the melodic passages in the finale were so satisfying. It felt like we were arriving home in a wonderful way.
Honeybourne earned a joyous ovation for this performance. He rewarded us with Liszt’s piano solo setting of Schumann’s song ‘Widmung’ whose words begin, “Du meine Seele, du mein Hertz, Du meine Wonn’, o du mein Schmerz,” Honeybourne delivered all the feeling and delicious passion in Liszt’s piano solo arrangement of the song. Well, what could possibly have been better than that?
ALAN COOPER