Review by Gordon Kerry, Loudmouth, September 2023
Artist(s): Robert Johnson (horn), Ole Böhn (violin), Jenny Duck-Chong (mezzo-soprano), Francesco Celata (clarinet), Geoffrey Gartner (cello), Rowan Phemister (harp), David Kim-Boyle (siren), Alison Pratt / Daryl Pratt and Joshua Hill (percussion), Daniel Herscovitch (piano).
Label: TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC 0591
“An invaluable collection of works celebrating a composer who should be a household name in this country’s music.”
Reviewing Quercus Trio’s recent disc, Limelight Magazine’s Clive Paget remarks that Don Banks’s Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano ‘is perhaps the toughest music on the disc…also, perhaps the hardest work to love.’ Perhaps. But is that such a bad thing? There is, no doubt, a great deal more new music routinely played now than there was when the Trio was premiered in 1962, but while much of it is fresh and thrilling, much of it seems to express a desperate need to be loved. And as many composer finds out, even the most rapturous response is sadly, often, less the beginning of a life-long love affair than a one-night stand.
Quercus Trio’s recording of Banks’s Trio brings the tally to five that I know of – pretty good shooting for a piece of nasty modern music by an Australian composer – and it appeared only months after this important Toccata Classics disc, devoted to Banks’s vocal and chamber music, performed by a number of highly distinguished Sydney-based musicians.
Banks should be a household name in art-music circles, and is indeed remembered in the Don Banks Award which honours musicians of considerable eminence. Born a century ago this month (hence the flurry of celebrations…what? Oh…as you were), Banks grew up in Melbourne and, like his six-years-younger contemporary Peter Sculthorpe, studied at the Melbourne Conservatorium. The earliest piece included in this collection, and given a terrifically agile performance by Daniel Herscovitch, is the Sonatina in C sharp minor for piano, which Banks composed in 1948 and performed shortly before his departure for London in 1950. As one would expect from a student of Dorian Le Gallienne, this is engaging, if slightly old-fashioned, music of formal clarity showing a youngish composer completely au fait with early-to-mid-century British and French music, and supremely confident in knowing what sounds well on the instrument.
Further study in the United Kingdom was de rigueur for composers of that generation, but Banks had the especially good fortune to work with Mátyás Seiber, the legendary composer and mentor who had not only committed the sin of being Jewish in Hitler’s Germany, but had taught prospective German composers about 12-note serialism and jazz. Banks also studied with two composers who made serialism the basis for very different styles: Milton Babbitt in the USA, and Luigi Dallapiccola in Italy.
Settling in London, Banks worked his way up in the music profession, as copyist, arranger, jazz pianist, and short-order composer for the Hammer Horror film franchise, all of which contributed to the development of his amazing technical proficiency, ear for sound, knowledge of idiomatic instrumental writing, and efficient professionalism.
An early work from the London years is the Five North Country Folk Songs, composed in 1953 for soprano Sophie Wyss for whom Benjamin Britten wrote Our Hunting Fathers and Les Illuminations. Comparisons with Britten are inevitable with these songs: Banks makes few or no appreciable changes to the folk-melodies, while weaving a piano accompaniment around them that that, like Britten’s, create a sense of the uncanny, reminding us that the world they describe is irrevocably lost. In this, of course, Britten himself acknowledged a debt to another Melburnian, Percy Grainger, whose folk song settings retain the strangeness of the originals in a way that the Cecil Sharp/Vaughan Williams circle arguably did not. Banks here has ideal interpreters in Herscovitch and mezzo Jenny Duck-Chong, though I would have liked the voice slightly more forward in the mix – in moments of activity in the accompaniment, the piano’s brightness and resonance just occasionally overpowers the text, and from personal experience I know what assiduous preparation these two artists would have made.
Of necessity, the Sonatina and Folk Songs are outliers in Banks’s output, where the Violin Sonata, also dating from of 1953, represents a transition towards his distinctive, mature style; Herscovitch notes that Banks considered it his Op.1. Its single movement is characterised by strongly-profiled (‘tough’, perhaps) and frequently terse motifs, presented in counterpoint that makes no attempt to disguise that the instruments are strangers in every way. The sense of formal rigour that the music projects is leavened by passages of genuine lyricism and moments of calm; both manners are perfectly embodied in the authoritative performances of Ole Böhn on violin, who ranges agreeably from a gruff assertive tone to moments of seraphic delicacy, and Herscovitch on piano.
Two other duo works extend this sense of Banks’s exploitation of the very different timbres of the instruments. A year after the Violin Sonata came the Three Studies for Violoncello and Piano, a set of two-to-three minute miniatures in which the manner of the Violin Sonata has become more refined and economical. Again, the instruments are completely themselves; in the first, Geoffrey Gartner’s long cello lines and impulsive ostinatos are offset by Herscovitch’s poised and aphoristic gestures. The Lento second piece moves from ruminative recitative, examining and setting aside its motifs, building to a briefly tremulous climax. Herscovitch notes that these pieces reflect Banks’s experience with Dallapiccola, with a certain lyricism derived from the freely used idea of serialism in the Lento, while in the third piece the texture is pointillistic, with the pitch material disposed in short motifs across suddenly changing registers. Gartner and Herscovitch display admirable ensemble in bringing this to life.
The Horn Trio of 1962 further elaborates the unity in diversity aspect of Banks’s work: the piece is not quite serial, but its free atonality doesn’t stop Banks creating recognisable motifs developed throughout: as Roger Covell noted in 1967, ‘Banks’s music can be heard caressing distinctive contours of his basic row over and over again, as if for the pleasure of feeling again the outlines that gave him stimulus for the whole work.’ This tactility, which works in fruitful opposition to the rigors of pitch organisation, also produces sudden smoochy chords, notably in the slow movement of the Trio, strongly reminding us of Banks’s love of jazz. For this gripping performance Böhn and Herscovitch are joined by the estimable Robert Johnson.
The Prologue, Night Piece and Blues for Two for clarinet and orchestra wears its jazz-affiliation in its title. As in the Three Studies, much is made of the instruments’ uniquely contrasting sounds, apart from short passages in rhythmic unison towards the start. Herscovitch is joined here by Francesco Celata, who negotiates the shifts in register and mood with grace and ease; the slow movement, in particular, a gradually rising clarinet melody surrounded by subtle, quietly powerful piano figurations, is especially beautiful.
All of the works thus far discussed are composed for ‘standard rep’ combinations; the 1968 Tirade for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble is much more self-consciously avant-garde in its marshalling of vast number of instruments played by three percussionists (Alison Pratt, Daryl Pratt, and Joshua Hill, with David Kim-Boyle credited as ‘siren’), as well as harp (Rowan Phemister) and piano (Herscovitch). Paradoxically, perhaps, such an ensemble offers a much more comprehensive ‘blend’ than some of the other combinations we have noted. Here Duck-Chong returns to speak, scream and sing Peter Porter’s text against a web of sound from the ensemble that can be vibrantly coruscating, distantly limpid, or bluntly violent. For all its many beauties the piece is an indictment by two expatriates of Australia’s then-philistine settler society, and many of their criticisms stand.
Tirade comes a year after Covell’s lament that it seemed unlikely that Banks would return to Australia in the foreseeable future to involve himself in this country’s musical life. In 1973, however, Banks did just that, taking up positions at the Canberra School of Music and the Conservatorium in Sydney, as well as chairing the nascent Music Board of the Australian Council of the Arts. These were somewhat thankless tasks, made worse for Banks when he became ill with the leukemia of which he died in 1980 at the age of 56. But one can only wonder how new music in Sydney in particular, and more broadly Australia, would have looked and sounded had he lived longer, teaching and composing.
The music Banks left, as presented in this invaluable collection, is ‘tough’ in so far as neither performers nor listeners can afford to give it anything other than their full attention. There are many works from many centuries of which that could be said, and which, like Banks’s, yield more insights and pleasure on repeated listening. And as Karen Carpenter reminds us, love may grow, for all we know.
Reviewed by Gordon Kerry for Loudmouth