WILLIAM BLAND: PIANO SONATAS, VOL. 3; KEVIN GORMAN, PIANO
BRIDGE 9596

"If you're not familiar with William Bland's music, a good place to start is with the Fifteenth Sonata's slow movement. The first sound you'll hear is a towering chord pitting major against minor. As this chord enters into dialogue with insistent, ominous bass octaves and accrues increasing levels of dissonance, you might anticipate a violent, abstractly methodical piece of music. You'd be wrong. Somehow, the heightened dissonance leads to a minor triad, as if a kaleidoscope has been twisted and ambiguous patterns have been resolved into familiar shapes. A somber cello-like melody takes over; its accompanying chords begin with pure minor triads and move through escalating levels of dissonance, leading each time to a yet darker bleaker center of minor tonality. The darkness intensifies: virtuoso pianistic flourishes sit side by side with craggy chords that seem to be clusters but reveal themselves to be dominant chords leading to the next key. And then, a gorgeous, hazy, major-inflected melody emerges, in which elements of dissonance inject themselves like aftershocks from the fraught music that has come before. The movement reaches an exalted climax, equally suggestive of ecstasy and irredeemable despair. This is music that both embraces and breaks tonality; that both shows its craftsmanship and bares its soul. I find it brave and revelatory.

Now listen to the slow movement of the Sixth Sonata, titled 'Song of the Great Hawk'. The two movements are in some ways two sides of one coin. When 'Song of the Great Hawk' begins, you might think you are about to hear something almost vernacular--perhaps in the realm of New Age or meditation music. A slow, single-note pentatonic melody in mid-treble range supports shimmering arpeggios of fourths and fifths in the upper treble. Next comes a simple minor-key melody in the upper treble accompanied by steady eight-note arpeggios in the bass. The progressions are diatonic, and the chords change on the downbeats. But as Bland develops these simple materials, the rhythm becomes less regular, the harmonies less connected to a tonal center. The shimmering arpeggios become brilliant and more extensive; the minor key material incorporates gentle internal dissonances. Bland uses familiar language and even uses it in familiar ways--his evocation of the soaring hawk uses tropes that we recognize as connected to spaciousness, nature, and spirituality--but Bland does not simply 'use' the tropes; he has created a piano fantasy on them in a way that makes them wholly original and wholly his own. The expectations we are led to have at the outset of this movement, as with the corresponding movement in the Fifteenth Sonata, are proven wrong--or, at least, are proven to be far from the whole story.

One of the most touching aspects of Bland's music is the extent to which he makes homage to past memories, cherished friends, and meaningful artistic influences within it. The 'Sixth Sonata' is subtitled 'Bestiary--con amore'. Each movement of what I'll dub Bland's "Bestiary Sonata" makes reference to something specific in Bland's personal history. The opening movement, titled 'Bear Dance,' ends with a quotation from the popular song 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic,' which an older cousin had sung to frighten Bland as a child. The movement itself is driving and bracing, with murky, dissonant material in the low bass punctuated by crisp accents. The program notes suggest an affinity with Stravinsky; I also hear Bartok's influence. But this is not a portrayal of childhood fear; Bland casts the bear as his "spirit guide," and there is something almost affectionate in these bass growls, as if Bland is giving us a window into bear language much as Messiaen did in his bird music. The fourth movement, entitled 'Dragon,' is a homage to a close friend who was a fan of the metal band Limp Bizkit. We hear the power chords of a metal band; we hear the pulsing rhythm of a rock concert. But again, this is Bland's music, not a portrait of other music: the raw material of what he has heard in the outside world has been filtered through his own sensibility and comes out with his own fingerprints on it: the virtuoso octaves: the thickening of texture until clusters predominate; the forays into bitonality. Even the most explicit metal-band references are carefully composed, wholly integrated into the overall drama of the movement. Perhaps my favorite movement of the sonata is 'A Panther with His Head Turning to the Right'. There is also a superb movement with this title in Bland's Ninth Sonata; both have a jazzy sinuous quality, but are quite different from each other. In the Sixth Sonata, the movement is languid, with a hazy sensuality suggestive of a smoke-filled after-hours blues club. Yet within this atmosphere, Bland manages to quote two pieces by Charles Ives.

Kevin Gorman has been a tireless advocate for Bland's piano music. This is his third volume in what promises to be a complete cycle of Bland's piano sonatas (one in each major and minor key). Gorman has a superb command both of the music and the piano itself, navigating Bland's technical demands with seeming ease. He is attuned to every nuance of Bland's emotional palette and knows both how to highlight important lines in thick writing and how to sustain emotional continuity in transparent writing. The only criticism I have of the recording is a slightly over-resonant acoustic, which can make the thickest writing a little murkier than I suspect is intended (I wonder, for example, what the low-bass growls in 'Bear Dance' would sound like in a live performance). But this is a disc that deserves the highest recommendation."