Kenneth Leighton is at last receiving something like due recognition, and this disc is an ideal introduction to his music. ‘Too conservative for modernists, not conservative enough for conservatives’ is a fair enough statement of his position, but this collection makes it quite clear how much both groups are losing by ignoring him. It ranges from very early pieces (the diminutive and immensely likeable second Sonatina was written when Leighton was 18) to very late ones (the composer premiered the Four Romantic Pieces in 1987, the year before his untimely death), and gives a good idea of his imaginative range as well as what remained constant within it. Among the latter was melody, above all, and in close second place, vivid and at times virtuosic pianism.
The Sonatina’s second movement is based on a quite gorgeous, slightly French-inflected melody; the third of the Four Romantic Pieces (the slow movement of this late Sonata in all but name) is a dark elegy, rooted in the blues, rising to great eloquence. Both are audibly by the same composer, and it was the same pianist-composer who wrote the flamboyantly pianistic first Study (and the dazzling fifth: what an encore piece!) as well as the grandly craggy gestures of the Bach- and Busoni-inspired Fantasia Contrappuntistica (given its first performance, by the way, by the 14-year-old Maurizio Pollini).
‘Dark’ and ‘craggy’ are words that recur as this chronological survey proceeds; knotty intensity and bony economy are other characteristic Leighton moods. But there is elegance as well (in the by no means trifling miniatures of Pieces for Angela), and formidably strong contrapuntal writing.
Margaret Fingerhut plays superbly; more than that, she is obviously thrilled by the nobly Bachian chorale at the centre of the Fantasia and exhilarated by the finger-twisting syncopations of its final fugue and of the fourth Romantic Piece. An extremely rewarding recital, finely recorded.'