It may seem odd that a corpus of piano music should have waited so long to be recorded, but that of Bill Hopkins is attendant with its fair share of conceptual and interpretational difficulties. Nineteen years since his sudden death, aged only 37, Hopkins’ fastidious, not to say tortuous manner of thinking left him frequently unable, or at least unwilling, to commit his thoughts to paper. Of the eight or so works completed, Etudes en serie (1965-72) is his most substantial, a milestone in contemporary piano literature but problematic as to its understanding.
The principal influences on Hopkins when he began the Etudes were Jean Barraque, with whom he had studied in Paris, and Samuel Beckett. The premise of composition might be: how to create evolving musical structures which, poised on the brink of negation, are unstable in a positive, dynamic sense. Conceptually, the Etudes succeed brilliantly; heard as a cycle or in part (Hopkins’ guideline for selection is cunningly non-interventionist), they synthesise Darmstadt serialism with the tonal translucency of such masterworks as Debussy’s Etudes and Ravel’s Miroirs. No other piano music of the era can match their sensuous logic, although Hopkins’ dismissive attitude later in life indicates that he himself came to doubt his achievement.
Had he lived to hear Nicholas Hodges’ commanding realisation, he would surely never have done so. With 1964’s Sous-structures (imaginative open-form miniatures recalling the fluidity of Boulez’s Notations or Zimmermann’s Konfigurationen) and two Ebauches rejected from an earlier version of the Etudes completing the recital, this is a release to be acquired and savoured. Recorded sound is lucid, and there are absorbing notes collated from Hopkins’ own writings, evidence of a composer for whom the realisation of greatness itself proved too great.'