Circuit. T1. Relent. Carnal. From Yellow to Yellow.
White. Furniture. T2

Noriko Ogawa, Kathryn Stott pfs
Tokyo Symphony Orchestra / Naoto Otomo

BIS BIS-SACD1517 (69’)

Muscular minimalism – but Fitkin works best with fewer moving parts

I wondered, when I’d finished listening, how a composer capable of the sublime T1 (where Erik Satie meets Morton Feldman) could also write gauche, crowd-pleasing trash like Circuit, where Louis Andriessen meets Karl Jenkins, and Jenkins wins. But then Graham Fitkin remains a genuinely puzzling presence. During the late 1980s, riding the wave of a new generation of British composers who had embraced minimalism, Fitkin wrote music and kept his head down. Not for him the anti-Thatcher polemics of fellow Andriessen pupil Steve Martland and, frankly, his music always encouraged one to look more kindly on him than Martland’s faux-Dutch minimalist rants. Even within the wiring of Circuit, Fitkin’s 2002 work for two pianos and orchestra, murkier ambiguities lurk inside crystalline string clusters that cower in the middle-distance of the orchestral frame. But otherwise Fitkin’s motoric bombast wears thin – a descending keyboard flourish that heralds the climax would have sounded old-hat to Prokofiev or Grieg.

Nothing wrong with the performances – Stott and Ogawa play with appropriate muscle. But the accompanying selection of solo and two-piano pieces suggest Fitkin focuses better around fewer moving parts and when he turns up the quiet. The jazz-derived patterns of Furniture (1989) build overarching tension through mathematically simple but expressively complex shifts of accents; T1 (1999) moves its opening phrase (too similar to Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo motif to be a coincidence?) around various transcriptions – no rhetoric, no excess, just a winsome idea elaborated with purpose and restraint.

Philip Clark