This is the most enjoyable and convincing piece of advocacy for Percy Grainger's music that I have heard for a very long while. Martin Jones's playing, for a start, has a virtuoso exuberance (and an evident enjoyment in pounding out thundering good tunes in ever more outre harmonic guises) that strongly recalls descriptions of Grainger's own. Another part of this collection's success has to do, I suspect, with the fact that where a work by Grainger exists in numerous arrangements (are there many that don't?) the 'dishing-up' for piano tends to be the best of them: the sinew and what Grainger would have called the 'go' of the piece tends to be clearer when unencumbered by his brilliant but sometimes not very clearly focused orchestration. And besides, his harmony is a pianist's harmony, albeit that of an eccentric and devilishly resourceful pianist.
Grainger's affinity with Satie, his deep involvement with the sentimental as well as the raffish world of music-hall and his uncannily successful 'forging' of folk-songs (what is the heartfelt Colonial Song but a rich fantasia upon a folk melody that never was—so the homesick Australian Grainger simply had to invent one?): all these qualities are clearer in these performances of what I can't help thinking of as the 'authentic' Grainger than in most recorded collections of his orchestral dishings-up. The colours are better, not all that paradoxically: Grainger's 'scoring' for the piano is more beautiful and more right for the matter of each piece than most of his orchestral variants of the same ideas. And, praise be, both Handel in the Strand and Mock Morris can go at a dashingly brisk tempo on the piano, instead of the slightly rheumatic waddle that they have acquired over the years: I had thought that I was thoroughly fed-up with both of them, but I have changed my mind. I had not noticed the strength beneath the deliquescent chromaticism of To a Nordic Princess before (though having once discovered Mrs Grainger, the Nordic Princess herself, craftily spiking the fruit punch at a somewhat geriatric tea party with brandy, I ought to have suspected it), nor the real pain that suffuses the slow movement of In a Nutshell How sensible of Martin Jones to have suppressed the cyphering C from The Immovable Do: he has liberated its haunting serenity from Grainger's sometimes tiresome sense of humour. But what huge fun In Dahomey is: sub-titled with nothing less than precision ''Cakewalk Smasher'' it makes Scott Joplin sound very sober-sided.
I suppose I had better say something about the recording. By rights I ought by now to have been driven to distraction by the sound of that tank, or whatever else it is that Nimbus use as studio, and by their strangely disembodied microphone placement (the effect is of floating blindfold in mid-air, alone in a large room with Martin Jones and his piano, vainly trying to work out how far away he and it are). But the sheer zest of his playing won me over to such effect that I found myself getting used to the sound. Yes, his performances are that good.'