This is the third collection of Paul Bowles’s music that I have heard in the past few months (see reviews in June and July), and I still find him something of an enigma. There are times when his simplicity, his bareness and brevity weave a quite disproportionately strong spell. His settings of Tennessee Williams’s Three and of the anonymous Spanish Mes de Mayo last 90 seconds and a sniff over two minutes respectively, yet both seem perfectly simple and simply perfect, and you think of how many other composers would have taken twice the space to half the effect. Any sonata for oboe and clarinet is bound, you might think, to sound as though a piano part had gone missing somewhere, but Bowles’s two-part inventions sound quite complete. Indeed, the way that the two instruments retain their individual characters in the first two movements, only combining to a unity in the third, is ingenious and satisfying.
But then again the stripped lyricism of the Flute Sonata, adroitly though Bowles varies and repeats his material rather than really developing it, can seem a little stretched over 12 minutes: might it not have better made an eight-minute Sonatina? On the one hand the Lorca songs (this is their first recording) can seem very slender lyrical trifles; on the other their very plainness throws the poems’ surreal imagery into striking relief. Something similar happens in Scenes d’Anabase, where Bowles finds striking gestures to parallel St-John Perse’s strangely vivid poems. But here, uncharacteristically, the music needs performance on a grander, more assured scale. Genteelly uttered, the ragtime strains of the last song can seem merely winsome, not bold.
The other performances are good, though: Brian Staufenbiel’s light tenor suits the Spanish and English settings rather well, both sonatas are more than competently done and the pianists respond affectionately to Bowles’s epigrams and to the haunting Nocturne, a post-Satie waltz of great charm and nostalgia. The recordings are good but rather close.'