January 28, 2022
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Reflections for Piano
A couple of years ago, Navona released a 2-disc set of Australian composer Mark John McEncroe's music on a release titled Reflections and Recollections. For this fourth volume, Musical Images for Piano (Navona 6391), McEncroe focuses on pieces specifically for piano (the earlier volume were orchestrations of some of his piano pieces). Pianist Van-Anh Nguyen performs the eight works here.
This is a relatively laid-back collection of musical meditations often with simple harmony and a Satie-esque like laying out of simple melodic ideas. Often times the music tends to have a 2-voice contrapuntal style that provides some interest though these ideas tend to shift rather quickly when they do appear. "For Cecile" is perhaps one of the stronger pieces where the waltz rhythm and structure moves the melodic ideas into interesting harmonic territory. The pieces are generally cast in a New Age-like classical style that can sometimes be a bit repetitive in its ideas from one work to the other. Many have a stream-of-conscious feel which can give them a meandering quality that is enhanced when the harmony becomes more interesting.
Nguyen is quite adept at working her way through these different moments sometimes more impressionistic in sound, other times moving into darker realms. Harmonic movement can be a bit strange from time to time which leaves some phrases hanging in the air like incomplete, or interrupted thoughts. The pieces are thus like miniature rhapsodies whose titles provide one possible interpretive window for the listener to engage.
The current release provides fans of McEncroe's style a good hour of musical backdrops some of which work better than others.