Catalogue Connection: 21107

This album collects nearly all of Hughes’ music written for solo piano over 30 years, from when he was still at school to the latest, written just weeks before being recorded in October 2022.

“Variety is very much the point for me. I don’t have a single piano ‘style’, but cut my cloth according to the occasion,” says Hughes in the sleeve notes.

The subsequent collection of music is rewarding. It reminds me of those sample CDs that record labels used to put out, a cross-section of new signings or whatever (they may still do, for fans of vinyl); always good value for money because of the mix of good, new music, and the couple of bands you weren’t so keen on added to the charm. (The best was “Drag City A to Z”, bands like Six Organs of Admittance, Smog and Bonnie Prince Billy linked by comedian Demetri Martin on top form).

This is like those. It opens with the lovely “Song of the Walnut”, written for the composer’s son while he was in utero and the size of a walnut.

Some songs are as lovely, others livelier, some a little discordant but it doesn’t matter because none are very long and something else will be along shortly.

Similarly, some pieces sound like they could be played by a proficient learner, others are more fierce.

Mills is a friend of Hughes and clearly understands the music well.

This came out a little while ago on Divine Art, DDX 21107.

The British composer Bernard Hughes is composer-in-residence at St. Paul’s School in London, where this disc was recorded. This is only his second listing in the Fanfare Archive: His Not Now, Bernard appeared on an Orchid disc reviewed in Fanfare 44:1. This new disc on Divine Art, entitled simply Bagatelles, presents his complete output for piano (so far).

The music is pithy and often tart—which makes the warm glow of Song of the Walnut, with which the program begins, an exception. The “walnut” was the composer’s son in utero, when he was indeed the size of a walnut. Pianist Matthew Mills gives a lovely account, with his tone as warm as the harmonies. It is balanced by Song of the Button, a similarly embryo-based composition—but this time the size of the infant, his daughter, was that of a button. It is an inspired piece of programming that these two pieces bookend the Partita, and contrast maximally with its mode of utterance.

The Partita Contrafacta (counterfeit partita) moves towards a more objective stance. Written for the present pianist (and indeed for the present disc), each of the seven movements cleverly presents a substitution and is built upon a pre-extant work. For example, the first movement is “Boogie-woogie—instead of a Prelude (after L. Couperin).” It is utterly brilliant in concept, compositional execution, and performance: The link with Couperin lurks in the background while the piece also offers a tribute to Nancarrow. Even more appealing is the idea of a “Tango—instead of an Allemande (after J. S. Bach),” jazzy and catchy. The “Ländler—instead of a Courante (after H. Purcell)” is a riot in Hindemith-tinged color, based on a march from the Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Perhaps most fascinating of the choices of the “ghost” pieces is the one by Jacquet de la Guerre, a “Boléro—instead of a Sarabande.” It is Rameau’s shadow that is cast over the “Halling—instead of a Gavotte” (a movement with a simply delicious end), while Handel hovers over the “Mazurka—instead of a Minuet.” The true highlight is the ever-so-bouncy “Tarantella—instead of a Gigue (after F. Couperin),” which takes the Couperin original and reframes it in the minor.

The twelve Bagatelles, from which the disc derives its title, take Czerny to places he surely would never have imagined. I wonder if Ligeti stalks the opening “Melody”; and Nancarrow seems to return for the “Study for accuracy in the playing of double octaves.” It is one of three hyper-difficult movements called “Study”—here, “Study for dexterity in alternating between the hands.” Matthew Mills is a superb pianist, completely undaunted by Hughes’s demands. The compositional variety is enormous, with a sort of post-Debussyan haze to the fourth piece, “Footprints” (it is modeled after Debussy’s “Des pas sur la neige”). The piece called “Bog Face” is unutterably haunting, saying much with drops of treble and spatially separated gestures. My hat certainly goes off for Mills’s evenness in the scale study (the ninth movement), while Hughes’s ear for telling simultaneities certainly shines in the penultimate (untitled) Bagatelle.

Presented in a “graded sequence” of eleven movements, the Miniatures date from various periods in the composer’s output. The word “graded” is presumably deliberate, as Hughes states that the pieces ascend to around Grade Five of the ABRSM (Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) syllabus. More to the point, Hughes also states he takes these pieces as seriously as any other; one presumes there is something of a challenge involved here that Hughes relishes. There is real care lavished on these often highly appealing morsels, and Mills finds the humor within the final “Anacharsis Cloots.”

The Three Studies are made of sterner stuff, playing with rhythmic disjunction and a tendency towards ascending repetitions. The central “The Cornice Fish Passacaglia” is certainly very clever, but is also highly engaging. Mills’s characteristic precision is a real contributing factor to the success of this music. The final “False Alarm” seems to shift towards Minimalism before opening out into a more lyrical, contrasting space.

A recomposition of a Fauré Prélude, using a rotational technique learned from his teacher Parham Vir and with an insert of a Bach chorale, Hughes’s O du Liebe meiner Liebe is arguably the most stunning work on the disc. Mills’s loving way with tissue-delicate textures helps; he can also convey intensity at higher dynamic levels without breaking the tone of the piano. The astonishing Strettos and Striations is Hughes’s largest work for piano. It is taxing for the pianist on many levels, most notably in its relentless movement—until, that is, the calmer final section. Mills’s evenness of touch is here the factor that enables the work to succeed so well. A rhythmic section for widely separated hands is beautifully placed in the structure. Finally, a short Cradle Song offers a “quiet goodnight to end the album,” as the composer puts it. It’s short, but very sweet.

So, this is a stunning album and a fine introduction to the music of Bernard Hughes. More, please.

38 piano pieces by English composer Bernard Hughes, most of them miniatures cobbled together into suites. Partita Contrafacta (Counterfeit Partita) has seven dances, each a substitute for a baroque one, and each crediting a baroque composer. All are witty and expertly crafted; my favorite is ‘Tango—instead of an Allemande (after JS Bach)’. Bagatelles has 12 little pieces, including some “insanely difficult parodies of Czerny”. A group of Three Studies includes a head-spinning Cornice Fish Passacaglia’. The album’s longest work (9:37) is the dizzying Strettos and Striations.

Superb playing by pianist Matthew Mills, for whom Hughes composed many of the pieces.

Featuring pieces from right across his composing career, Bernard Hughes’ piano music is engagingly diverse with music ranging from the insanely difficult to that written for amateurs. Always intelligent and characterful, this is a disc of wonderful short pieces.

There is an enormous range and diversity on this disc of Bernard Hughes’ piano music. Under the title Bagatelles, on the Divine Art label, pianist Matthew Mills has recorded a programme of 38 short movements. Mills is a friend of Hughes’ and the composer wrote his Partita Contrafacta for Mills to premiere on the disc. Whilst some of the pieces are, to quote the  composer, ‘insanely difficult’, others were written specifically for amateurs to play, and the pieces range in date from that most recent Partita Contrafacta to works from the 1990s.

There is also an engaging diversity of style which gives the recital a sense of variety. It is clear that Hughes engages with music in different ways and that he has no single conception of what a piano piece might be. 

We begin with the gently lyrical Song of the Walnut, walnut being Hughes’ and his wife’s nickname for their son when still in utero, and there is a companion Song of the Button (referring to their daughter) later in the programme.

Song of the Walnut might lull you into a false sense of security, because Partita Contrafacta is anything but gentle, it is witty, complex and fiercely intelligent. Hughes has written a seven movement quasi-Baroque suite where each movement is based on music by a past Baroque master (L. Couperin, Bach, Purcell, Jacquet de la Guerre, Rameau, Handel, F. Couperin), but each movement is a modern dance, so we have a slow, spiky Boogie-Woogie that gets faster and faster, a delightful Baroque Tango, a weird yet robust Landler, a quietly unnerving Bolero, an engaging, richly-texture Halling, an intriguingly spiky Mazurka, and a rather traditional feeling Tarantella. Each piece has a sense of character and imagination, the work is thus full of contrasts, but Hughes cleverly links them, each begins on the final note of the previous.

Hughes’ 12 Bagatelles date from the 1990s and early 2000s and the title has a clear element of irony as though short, the pieces are certainly not trifles and some are very difficult. Each has a clear style and whilst three are labelled ‘Study’, all of them have that study element in that each examines a particular aspect of performance or character. The first Study – for dexterity in alternating between the hands is insanely fast and exciting, and clearly very tricky to play. This is followed by character pieces that are by turns spare, fierce and then shimmering with echoes of Debussy. Study – for accuracy in the playing of double octaves is another fearsome one and here the sheer complexity of fast textures reminds one of Nancarrow! If Eros Laughs proves to be gentle filigree whilst Bog-Face is eerie and spare. Inspired by a Stevie Smith poem, Bog-Face is dedicated to Matthew Mills who gave the premiere of the complete Bagatelles. 26th April, 1827, morning has an intriguing sense of narrative though is based on a Schubert piece, whilst Study – for evenness in executing scale passages is another insanely fast one. Grazioso combines gentleness with rich textures, Anarcharsis Cloots is striking, whilst the final one Nocturne, based on a John Field nocturne, shimmers then evaporates.

Miniatures is a graded series of 11 short pieces moving from simple to Associate Board grade five, and some date from the 1990s when Hughes was still at school. There is no sense of looking down, these are delightful pieces, each full of character and sounding as if they might be rewarding to play. Some, like Bist du, are striking indeed, and Fughetta hardly sounds like a piece for amateurs at all, which is probably what Hughes is aiming at. The final miniature, Anarcharsis Cloots is dedicated to Hughes’ son, now very much not a walnut!

Three Studies has a similar origin in that the pieces were all written for students as St Paul’s Girls’ School where Hughes works. The first, Count me out, begins with a deceptively simple pattern, and Hughes explains that in the studies he was interested in the procedures of Minimalism, but here he adds disruption too. The delightfully named Cornice Fish Passacaglia is a delightful thing, a passacaglia yes, but with Boogie-Woogies hints that mix spikiness with jazziness. We a back to repeat textures in False Alarm though again, Hughes delights in interrupting and disturbing the process, so the middle turns Romantic and the ending is manic.

The recital ends with three stand-alone pieces. O du Liebe meine Liebe from 2017, Strettos and Striations from 2005 and Cradle Song. O du Liebe meine Liebe is based on a Fauré prelude, though the results are more astonishingly complex than you might think and Hughes produces some wonderful delicate yet complex textures. At nearly ten minutes long, Strettos and Striations is the biggest piece on the disc. Here Hughes is stricter about his use of process, beginning in a minimalist way then gathering excitement and energy till calm returns. After all this complexity, the disc ends with the eerie yet tender Cradle Song.

Pianist Matthew Mills is clearly a marvel, his technique encompasses everything that the composer throws at him, yet each short piece is beautifully realised and the resulting recital is surprisingly satisfying and completely engaging. A disc of 38 short (some under a minute) movements might not at first seem like a recital that would grab you, but thanks to Hughes’ intelligence and Mills’ skill, this is a recital to treasure.

Bernard Hughes (b. 1974) has a wide-ranging knowledge of music, married to an insightful and idiosyncratic sense of humour (as this CD of his piano music spanning over 30 years confirms). I was amused by some of the quirky titles of his pieces. There are 38 of these on the CD, many of them quite short. They are grouped under four general titles. The first, Partita Contrafacta (Counterfeit Partita) takes seven baroque dance movements (let’s also call the first, a Prelude by Louis Couperin, a dance). It becomes the basis of a Boogie-woogie. After a fiery opening, Hughes deconstructs the boogie-woogie, slowing it way down and then speeding it up again. 

You can hear the spirit of J. S. Bach in an Allemande which Hughes transforms crazily into a Tango! The modernised, at least not Baroque, dances are powerfully distinctive in their styles. Hughes composes a Ländler, not all that modern, out of a Courante by Henry Purcell. Yet the originals are definitely there too, preserved, like ghosts. 

I was particularly amused when a Gavotte by Jean-Philippe Rameau was reimagined as a Halling, an extravagantly acrobatic male Norwegian dance, or again by François Couperin’s Gigue transformed cheekily into a Tarantella. These seven pieces are flanked by two very attractive short pieces dedicated to Hughes’s son and daughter. Before they were born, Hughes named them The Walnut and The Button. I was reminded of the gentle romantic spirit of Fauré in both of these attractive pieces.

Hughes and his virtuoso pianist Matthew Mills have been friends for years. The Bagatelles were composed for him. They are twelve piano studies, some of them fiendishly difficult demanding our full attention like the musical equivalent of plate spinning or complex juggling. 

Some unusual titles are there too, like Bog-Face, named after a poem by Stevie Smith. Mills plays these with joyful élan then in the following eleven Miniatures he makes these sometimes simple pieces (some of them composed when Hughes was still at school) sound important. 

The final section contains two of Hughes’s longer works, O du Liebe meiner Liebe based on a Fauré Prelude, and Strettos and Striations a dizzyingly exciting post-minimalist piece. The recorded recital ends with a short Cradle Song. It lives up charmingly to its title.

Bernard Hughes (born 1974), currently composer-in-residence at St Paul’s Girls School in London (where Holst famously taught), is probably best known for his music  for children – at least in my house, thanks to his hugely enjoyable setting of David McKee’s story Not Now, Bernard (Orchid Classics ORC 100115). The present collection of his complete piano music shows that music for or inspired by children runs deeper through his output, whether in the pair of miniatures Song of the Walnut and Song of the Button, titled from the pet names he and his wife gave their then as yet unborn children (Cradle Song, perhaps, speaks for itself), or the Miniatures and Studies, both intended for young players to get their hands on a wide diversity of musical styles as they strive for Grade 5.

The Bagatelles and Miniatures were written over a wide period, the earliest pieces dating back to the 1990s; the Bagatelles took their final form in 2004, the Miniatures only in 2020. Unsurprisingly, both sets feel like fairly arbitrary collections rather than cycles, whereas the Partita contrafacta (2022) is more coherent, a set of seven reworkings of Baroque composers – including Bach, Handel and Purcell, framed by the Couperins – that collectively recast Baroque sources in wholly 21st-century postmodernist terms. Written specially for this recording and long-term collaborator Matthew Mills, this is the high point of the programme.

While broadly tonal in design, Hughes’s music is not averse to more aggressive or hostile styles: listen to the vibrant third and fifth Bagatelles, for example. The composer’s  chameleon-like stylistic diversity can make for an impression of anonymity, even in the larger- scale Strettos and Striations (2021), Hughes’s biggest piano work at some 10 minutes.

Matthew Mills performs throughout with virtuosity and undeniable understanding of the idiom, and Divine Art’s sound is first-rate.

This album presents the complete works of Bernard Hughes for solo piano, an eclectic collection covering a period of over 30 years. The oldest piece dates back to his teenage years and the most recent is a brand new suite, Partita Contrafacta, a quirky take on traditional Baroque dance forms. The rest of the music ranges from the large-scale Strettos and Striations to little occasional pieces written for the composer’s children. With such a varied range of music, there is something for everyone on this disc.

What makes this album truly special is the culmination of many years of collaboration between Hughes and Mills, who commissioned and premieres Partita Contrafacta on the disc. The two musicians have been working together for years, resulting in a deep understanding of each other’s artistic vision and an unparalleled ability to bring Hughes’ compositions to life on the piano.

By his own admission Bernard Hughes does not have a single musical style and this album reflects Hughes’ varied, wide-ranging approach – from music written for early piano students level to complex, virtuosic works, fleeting miniatures to ferocious, post-minimalist studies.

Some of the most touching and intimate pieces are those written for the composer’s children. Song of the Walnut and Song of the Button, for example, were written when his son and daughter respectively were still in utero –  tender, melodic pieces, the first a tiny lied, the second an uplifting hymn-without-words.

The Partita Contrafacta (literally “Counterfeit Partita”) obviously takes its inspiration from the Baroque suite – each movement has a single “affect”, in this instance, a series of dances, from Boogie-Woogie to Bolero, replace the traditional partita dance movements. The entire suite has a suitably Baroque grandeur, while the individual movements are distinctive, witty and highly inventive.

The Bagatelles, written in the late 1990s and early 2000s, offer a mix of styles, textures and technical challenges. Some are ridiculously tricky parodies of the studies of Czerny, others draw on existing works by Debussy, Schubert (listen out for references to the Allegretto in c minor D915) and Field (Nocturne). All are replete with expression, colour and variety. The Three Studies, in contrast, explore minimalism and the composer’s desire to engage with “a pianism shorn of romantic excess” (Bernard Hughes).

The Miniatures, written for early piano students, up to Grade 5, are similarly varied, attractive and tonal. It is clear that the composer has taken the trouble to write music which is appealing, challenging within the scope of the player’s ability, and replete with enjoyable melodies, and piquant rhythms and harmonies.

Overall, this is a most enjoyable and interesting album offering the listener insight into the breadth and variety of Bernard Hughes’s compositional output and his kaleidoscopic musical personality.

But perhaps what makes this album truly special is the culmination of many years of collaboration between Bernard Hughes and pianist Matthew Mills, who commissioned and premieres Partita Contrafacta on the disc. The two musicians have been working together for years, resulting in a deep understanding of each other’s artistic vision and an unparalleled ability to bring Hughes’ compositions to life on the piano, which he does masterfully with colour and vigour, humour and warmth.