Portrait with Piano: Jenny McLeod
Portrait with Piano: Jenny McLeod was released late last year as Atoll Records’ 80th birthday tribute to the composer. It opens with McLeod’s light-hearted Music for Four from 1986, a rock-influenced foil to the bracing intensity of Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion with which it was originally paired on an NZSO concert tour. From the frivolous opening “Dolly Bird”, pianists Stephen de Pledge and Rae de Lisle have a ball with music reminiscent of McLeod’s acclaimed film score for The Silent One a few years earlier. The reflective “Little Song with Cakewalk” conjures up a Parisian jazz club and “Hey Down” bounces along speedily with assertive percussion. All the musicians accept with glee McLeod’s implicit invitation to send the music up.
The album’s portrait of McLeod is painted by a well-chosen selection of her piano music spanning 50 years of an eventful career. Piano Piece 1965 was created in Paris by a 24-year-old McLeod, “using”, she has written, “as much as I understood of Boulez’s ‘frequency multiplication harmonic technique’”. Substantial and uncompromisingly atonal, it’s the work of a young composer writing in a foreign musical language, but McLeod’s intuitive momentum and sure sense of piano sonority shine through in a lovely performance by de Pledge.
Like Music for Four, the two Rock Sonatas were written in the mid-80s. Their form is classical, but the immediate appeal comes from the rock ‘n roll Mcleod played from her teens onwards, the music occasionally tinged by her love of the music of Debussy and Douglas Lilburn. Elastic playing by both pianists and a bluesy drive reveal McLeod wringing all possible colour, beauty and grandeur from the rock language.
After these works McLeod turned away from rock idioms to seek inspiration elsewhere. The most recent tracks on the album are the 2015 Seascapes for piano trio, arrangements of two of her lauded 24 Tone Clock Pieces for piano. Centenary tributes to Lilburn, these trios refer to his astringent lyricism and austere motivic language. The occasional Gallic flavour and little jazzy fragments, however, are all McLeod - it was through “tone clock” theory that she found what she has called her “own true and original voice”.
Portrait with Piano Jenny McLeod (Atoll) is available from Marbecks
You can read more about composer Jenny McLeod in this 80th birthday tribute
This album review was first published in NZ Listener issue February 12, 2022