Reviews

‘I am no less enchanted by these concertos…having lived with them for more than 12 years. The Piano Concerto grabs you right away with hammered, rising chords…That is just the first of the concerto’s 13 sections that take listeners through fascinating worlds of sounds and styles. The second section is a piano solo that is soon underscored by dirge-like horns en masse taking the theme through three brief sections of variations. Yet all the while a tension is mounting. But just as a movie-reviewer doesn’t give away the ending I will only tease you with a mention that the rest of the work includes such delights as a piano-and-tuned-percussion duet, commentary by bongo-like soft drums, and at one point an upright piano playing a classical rag. By now you should have the idea: Dickinson is enamoured of the simultaneous presentation of different types of music – what he dubs style-modulation. Sort of Ivesian but not as direct. Dickinson’s Piano Concerto is mostly slow, yet its 24 minutes pass all too quickly for involved ears.
Stephen Ellis, Fanfare, May/June 2000

‘Conflicts, juxtapositions, attempted syntheses – Peter Dickinson’s work is full of them, all shook-up, all mixed-up, all jazzed up (Schubert and Edward MacDowell are among his victims!), yet always keenly imagined and meticulously reasoned and realised. His catalogue of works is not so much large as intriguingly varied. Keyboards – piano and organ – are well provided for: the Piano Concerto and Organ Concerto are major scores, the Blue Rose Variations for organ (after MacDowell) is a substantial piece, and the collection entitled Rags, Blues and Parodies is fully characteristic of his creatively personal approach to popular music…Much originality has gone into song-cycles and vocal works…London Rags [brass quintet including Patriotic Rag] is ‘all about the business of being British’ – which is, in a sense, what most of Peter Dickinson’s music is about, a quest for identity, for unity-in-diversity, order from chaos – but achieved through accepting the diversity and chaos and coming to terms with them.’.
Christopher Palmer, BBC Proms programme, 20 August 1986

‘Songs in Blue [Novello 2000] brings together five of Dickinson’s songs written for [his sister] Meriel and various collaborators, but linked by a common thread of parody and reworking through contemporary American idioms. Burns’ ‘A Red, Red Rose’ is shown in a new light, encased in a cool, languid, bluesy piano accompaniment…Byron’s ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’ exists in a country where Britten’s cabaret songs meet Ravel…in Schubert in Blue, the Viennese master’s familiar melodies get a make-over in boogie-woogie style…Aficionados of Sarah Walker and Roger Vignoles’ recitals might already be familiar with these entertaining and affectionate numbers: there’s encore material here, for sure!’.
Matthew Greenall, The Singer Oct/Nov 2000, p 29

‘A Conifer disc of three works by Peter Dickinson contains his remarkable Outcry, a cantata for mezzo-soprano (Meriel Dickinson) chorus and orchestra in which five poems about cruelty to animals are set with an inventive fertility that is at its peak in the chilling description of a badger hunt. Minimalist procedures are used with discretion and genuine imagination in the Mass of the Apocalypse…while The Unicorns, in which Elisabeth Söderström  is accompanied by brass, is another gripping demonstration of Dickinson’s responsiveness to words.’
Michael Kennedy, Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1989

‘An endearing piece lasting only 12 minutes, Merseyside Echoes is filled with nostalgia for the idealistic Beatles era of the 1960s, and it has what seems to be rare in much contemporary music – a sweetly diatonic flavour. It contains three rousing, but violent fanfares and two pop songs written by Dickinson…we have a sonic panorama in which echoes are created as the fanfares fade away…The pop songs are jolly or pensive by turn and the whole score, superbly realised by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Barry Wordsworth, pulsates with life.’
Neil Tierney, Daily Telegraph, 8 December 1988

Perhaps the most haunting of his vocal works is the 1982 cycle The Unicorns written on commission to the Swedish mezzo Elisabeth Söderström and Solna Brass, and to a text by John Heath Stubbs. The unusual sonority of the instrumental part brought out the best of Dickinson the melodist: Lullaby is a minor modern classic, and the cycle is well represented in good quality recordings. A major non-orchestral work…is the impressive Mass of the Apocalypse, an outwardly un-English score which makes interesting use of piano and percussion in place of the more usual organ. Like Outcry, it is a work of considerable contemporary resonance and reinforces the utter absence of dilettantism in Dickinson’s work. He is an impressive figure who merits greater international recognition.
Brian Morton in Contemporary Composers, St James Press (1992)

Two of the main preoccupations of Peter Dickinson’s ingenious and entertaining Piano Concerto are the co-existence of ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ musics and the idea of simultaneity, of more than one thing happening at once. Dickinson’s ingenuity lies in the audibility of this demonstration and in the fact that his simultaneous strands can so clearly be heard and distinguished. The sense of perspective, of seeing one music through another (almost literally at one moment when a brief ‘window’ of D major…opens in the midst of another toccata) is very striking, and draws one back for further hearings, for the pleasure of watching this finely crafted orrery of a concerto go through its intricate but lucid rotations.
Michael Oliver in Gramophone (1986)

A fascinating journey through Peter Dickinson’s output for solo organ.
[Complete Solo Organ Works on Naxos 8 572169]
The Dickinson journey is traced here in supremely well-articulated and strongly characterised performances by Jennifer Bate…The disc is a fine birthday tribute to a composer who has escaped the confines of the predictable without ever ceasing to communicate.
Arnold Whittall [Gramophone July 2009]

REVIEW OF TWO NAXOS CDs [2009]
TEMPO
JANUARY 2010
Peter Dickinson: Complete solo organ works.
Jennifer Bate (organ). Naxos 8.572169.
Peter Dickinson: Lullaby from The Unicorns; Mass of the Apocalypse; Larkin’s Jazz; Five Forgeries; Five Early Pieces for Piano; Air; Metamorphosis. Naxos 8.572287.
    The appearance of two CDs of the music of Peter Dickinson is especially welcome as a telling cross-section of the composer’s distinctive voice, his exuberant originality and willingness to challenge convention. Their release in 2009 marked the composer’s 75th birthday season, which saw some major live performances including a Prom organ recital and Wigmore Hall concert, as well as a new paperback edition (Boydell and Brewer) of his book about Lord Berners. It is fitting that Dickinson should be recognized alongside the 2009 ‘anniversary English composers’ Purcell and Handel, and his contemporaries Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies, for his remarkable contribution to the British musical scene, as composer, writer and pianist. As an author and academic he has introduced significant ideas about the interface of serious and popular styles, championing Lennox Berkeley and Billy Mayerl through his ground-breaking monographs. He has also brought to greater attention the riches of the American musical avant-garde, through founding a department at Keele University in the 1980s and creating a Master’s Degree at London University in the 1990s, authoring books about John Cage and espousing the popular idioms of blues and ragtime. Those interests have, since the 1950s, influenced his own rich compositional output, his distinctive technique of ‘style modulation’, and as his career as pianist and accompanist to his sister, the mezzo-soprano Meriel Dickinson. While a handful of CDs are already available of his song cycles and concertos for piano and organ (on the Albany label), Naxos have now provided a chance for listeners to become more fully acquainted with Dickinson’s refreshing oeuvre in a variety of genres including organ, played by the outstanding Jennifer Bate, and a mixed choral-vocal instrumental CD containing several première recordings, including two major works.
    The two major works are from the mid- to late 1980s: the Mass of the Apocalypse (1984) and Larkin’s Jazz, a music-theatrical song-cycle of 1989. There are also earlier works which anticipate the later ones, from the 1950s and 60s, and some which have undergone transformations – such as the soulful Lullaby that opens the CD, a première recording of a 1986 flute and piano version of a song composed for his unfinished opera The Unicorns (1967), and two earlier short flute works of the 1950s. The power and delight of Dickinson’s Mass of the Apocalypse, composed for the 300th anniversary of St James’s Piccadilly, where the première took place in 1984, is its ability to challenge conventional boundaries: it is part Mass and part Music Theatre, a mixing which anticipates similar blurring of genres in the work of younger composers such as James Macmillan. In each of the five movements, the choral mass texts alternate with extracts from the Book of Revelation recited by a narrator (in this 1988 recording Rev. Donald Reeves). The very opening is arresting in its dramatic choral ‘muttering’ echoing the speaker’s text, the canvas swept through with wild marimba arpeggios, from which the English liturgy unfolds ‘Christ have mercy’, rising to a climax then receding. In the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Benedictus’ a driving ‘rock’ beat with the choir in block harmony in the outer sections chromatically rises to a climax, interspersed by the narrator with a high tingling piano, joined by the repeat of ‘Holy Holy Holy’. The accompaniment combines minimalist patterns with more complex harmony, while there are dramatic aleatory sections for percussion (glockenspiel) and high piano filigree.
    That drama is contrasted by the atmospheric, hushed tableau of the ‘Agnus Dei’, the expressive heart of the work, its watery, bell- like sonorities cut through by the narrator’s rhythmic enunciation, spiced by low piano, vibraphone and tam-tam, counterpointed by the blues-like modality of the chorus. The beguiling soundscape, with dovetailed soprano and alto motifs resonantly receding into the distance, heightens the impact of the joyous Bernsteinesque ‘Gloria’ all the more, its minimalist zest and choral energy leading to a climactic ‘Amen’. Yet the Apocalyptic final word is the dark, mystical meditation of the ‘Ite Missa Est’, a remarkably eloquent epilogue in which subdued choral vocalise mingles uncannily with an exotic blend of marimba chords, resonating bass notes and tam-tam.
    The song cycle Larkin’s Jazz is no less impressive for its unconventional design, its 11 contrasting sections assembled into a satisfying dramatic structure. Crucial to the cycle is the setting of four Philip Larkin poems in a contemporary equivalent of recitative – the motivation for which, as the composer explains in his accessible sleeve notes, was Larkin’s belief, as expressed to Dickinson, that his poetry was self-sufficient. The narrator here is the baritone Henry Herford, supported by the virtuoso Nash Ensemble in this première recording of the first performance in 1990. Each poem is framed by a Prelude and Commentary, sections which bring to the fore Dickinson’s music-theatrical techniques and distinctive ‘style modulation’ mixing seriousness with the allure of jazz, notably in the ingenious transformation of two classic jazz numbers of the 20s and 40s, by Sidney Bechet and King Oliver.
    At the start, the solo trumpet in the Prelude to ‘Reasons for Attendance’ points up the opening line ‘The Trumpet’s Voice, loud and authoritative’, while the steady drum beat illustrates dancers who shift ‘Solemnly on the beat of happiness’. The poem itself is accompanied with atonal piano ripples and eerie cello harmonics, while in the Commentary, clarinet and piccolo engage in a sprightly duet, joined by strumming cello and bell-like percussion. In a similar modernist idiom is the third poem, ‘Love songs in age’, the Prelude to which features tone-rows in the piano’s bass and ensemble. The second and fourth poems contrast with overtly jazzy idioms. One of
    Larkin’s jazz favourites was Sidney Bechet, and in the Prelude to ‘For Sidney Bechet’ the clarinet, as one might expect, displays its vivid virtuoso obbligato, replete with drum kit and syncopated ensemble. The poem’s recitative is to an evocative solo alto flute (marked ‘style of Bechet’), framed by jingling chimes, while the ‘Commentary’ is a wild jam session led by saxophone. This leads to a climax and abrupt silence, for the hushed start of the serial Prelude to ‘Love songs in age’, which is followed by an expressionistic saxophone dominated texture. Only in the final poem and its framing section do we encounter overt quotation: King Oliver’s ‘Riverside Blues’ of 1923. Magical textures and cinematic distortions of the quotation meditate on the deeper philosophical aspects of the poetry.
    The most recently-recorded work of the CD is the entertaining Five Forgeries for piano duet, played here deftly by John Flinders with the composer. Composed in 1963, they illustrate a nuanced form of musical impressionism, in the comic sense of taking on the voice of another: here the voices of Poulenc, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Delius and Bartók. Such refined fun shows Dickinson’s penetrating appreciation of those composers’ identifying features, and points to his ability to modulate between styles. Also making a first recorded appearance are Five early pieces, fluent essays composed in 1955–6 while the composer was organist at Queen’s College, Cambridge. Dickinson’s technical skill is equally well displayed in his organ music from those student days, as evinced in the CD of Complete Organ Works recorded stunningly by Jennifer Bate, on three different and notable London organs – the 1883 Willis from St Dominic’s Priory, the 1955 Harrison & Harrison of St James’ Muswell Hill and the 1963 Walker of St John’s, Duncan Terrace, Islington.
    The oeuvre spans nearly 50 years from the introspective Howells-like A Cambridge Postlude of 1953, to the galvanic Millennium Fanfare (1999), and traces Dickinson’s own development from a Stravinskian neo classicism, and the influences of Ives and Satie, onwards to some really outlandish dramatic aesthetic as in the Meditation on ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ of 1958, the serially-influenced Study in Pianissimo (1959) and the minimalist Dirge (1963). Then there are refreshing colouristic essays such as Carillon (1964).
    It was after the Organ Concerto, an ebullient, daring work from 1971, that Dickinson espoused jazz and ragtime in his music, further developing his interest in American idioms. Those influences are clearly evident in one of the most unusual highlights of the disc, the Blue Rose Variations of 1985, which was performed at a Birthday Prom by
    David Titterington at the Royal Albert Hall 25 July 2009. The theme, MacDowell’s famous ‘To a Wild Rose’, is transformed through various combinations of blues and ragtime, in a highly original, unexpected and often witty harmonic and rhythmic tapestry unique to the organ repertoire. The precisely-notated jazz syncopations of the initial blues-transformed theme, projected in a reedy solo, are echoed in the complex metrical shifts of the first variation for virtuoso pedal solo, the third, crunchy variation for full swell, and the agile fifth variation. In this superb recording, Jennifer Bate delightfully contrasts those with the more subdued second variation, a barrel-organ-ish rag with the pedal on two-foots and the playful, bouncy textures of the fourth variation. The set is brought to a rousing finish with the symphonic closing variation, the theme heard in swirling arpeggios and in pedal augmentation in the bass. Both CDs attest to Dickinson’s multi-faceted musical personality as composer, pianist and writer; his style maintains an individual freshness while also absorbing, reflecting and contributing to the currents and trends of his time. In celebrating his achievements on the occasion of his 75th birthday, one hopes that more performances and recordings of his still-unfamiliar major works will continue to materialize to bring his unique perspective to an ever wider audience.
MALCOLM MILLER