On Drinking The Stars (FARPOINT RECORDINGS fp089), we can enjoy a double CD set of the music of Dublin-born composer John McLachlan, here played by Mary Dullea.
I like it well enough, but if I have a reservation it’s that the composer is mostly concerned with nuances of form; each piece is almost an exercise to demonstrate his mastery of such devices as repetition, short pieces, miniatures, diptyches, grid shapes, and framing. That said, he clearly cares about content and meaning too, to the extent that certain works translate successfully into mental images or themes – ‘Grand Action’, a highly “eventful” piece, is a tribute to another musician and piano technician, and ‘fiaili ceoil’ muses on the metaphor of weeds and the unstoppable power of nature to take over even the most desolate of ruined landscapes. There are three pieces themed on Winter, and also ‘Drinking The Stars’ – which promises a certain amount of critical thinking as it refers to the “tendency of modern society to digest false beliefs as truths”; this one has potential to tackle such modern issues as fake news, gaslighting, and the spread of misinformation across the internet, but McLachlan prefers instead to keep things decidedly light-hearted.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that John McLachlan is not an enthusiastic experimenter or modernist; I quite liked ‘X’ on the second disc, and its use of a set of chords arranged in the shape of a letter X to determine its form reminds me a little of the sort of thing John Cage might do, or anyone preoccupied with graphical scores. His intellectual ingenuity in knitting together and ordering the elements of this particular miniature has been exquisite, but it still doesn’t quite satisfy my yearnings for severity, or abstraction. It might simply be that the highly talented Mary Dullea has too much expressive technique for my tastes, but that’s a minor quibble. ‘Grand Action’, mentioned earlier, is another high point; I seem to recall finding echoes of Cecil Taylor in its pre-planned complexity and its wild leaps across the keyboard range, which isn’t to say either McLachlan or Dullea have a jazzy bone in their body. ‘fiaili ceoil’, also mentioned earlier, is another strong piece you might find yourself returning to; the prospect of global environmental ruin, a theme which in other hands might have become a solemn or shrill piece of political hectoring, is addressed in a very elegiac fashion, each well-placed melancholic chord falling like another teardrop on behalf of the human race and lamenting our catastrophic failure to act as good custodians of the planet. Interestingly, one starting point for him here was historical baroque keyboard music such as that practised by Girolamo Frescobaldi.
Blue cloudy images on the covers are by Joanna Kidney. From 8th December 2023.