This is a release combining recordings
Eric Parkin made in the early '70s of the music of William Baines and of E.J. Moeran. (
Parkin recorded the Baines pieces again in the mid-'90s for the Priory label.) Baines was a Yorkshire composer who died at the age of 23 in 1922. The notes from the original release, included here, suggest that Baines had a provincial musical education and independently developed a style of writing that in some ways resembled Alkan or Scriabin. Yet Baines might have had access to the music of those composers, as well as that of
Debussy and Bax, with whom he also shares some characteristics. What comes through his music -- its coruscating tonalities and references to landscapes -- is a sense of free-form composition that isn't quite improvisational, but it isn't bound to conventional Romantic techniques of writing. It is very picturesque, purposefully, often meandering in mood and only occasionally building to intense passion. The Seven Preludes have the greatest range of emotion and the most structure, but still feel mostly non-linear in form. Ostinato figures are used in the first of the Silverpoints suite, and a dissonant rocking accompaniment sets off a "melody" in low octaves in the third of the Twilight Pieces, "A Pause for Thought." Those are the most immediately recognized formal elements in Baines' music; any others are hidden within the tone poem atmosphere of his music. It's pleasant stuff for daydreaming, interesting for its time and place, yet not anything that would set Baines on a comparable level with Scriabin or
Debussy. Similarly, the music of Moeran can be almost as wistful as Baines', but there is a lot more structure and convention in Moeran's use of melody and form. He uses harmony to create emotions and colors that are more than one-dimensional, but less multifaceted than Baines' music. He also uses folk tunes and folk-like melodies like many of his contemporaries did. Bank Holiday is very reminiscent of
Grainger's Shepherd's Hey. Underneath the quasi-stream-of-consciousness picture-painting of both composers' music,
Parkin is extremely sensitive to touch and dynamic shaping, never letting it become too impressionistic. The sound is slightly hollow in the Baines recordings, much better in the Moeran, but both pick up the full range of the keyboard when the music extends out to the extremes of the piano.