Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.

Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.

Click cover art to view larger version
Track(s) taken from CDA67461/2

Piano Sonata No 4

composer
1983/4; first performed by Paul Crossley in 1985

Steven Osborne (piano)
Recording details: July 2006
Henry Wood Hall, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Andrew Keener
Engineered by Simon Eadon
Release date: November 2007
Total duration: 35 minutes 49 seconds

Cover artwork: Symphony (1915) by Michail Ivanovich Menkov (1885-1926)
Art Museum, Samara, Russia / Bridgeman Images
 

Reviews

‘Osborne's outstanding recording of the Piano Concerto … it's a lyrical piece with magical moments’ (The Mail on Sunday)

‘The mighty Concerto, starkly and confidently poised between Tippett's still richly potent earlier style and the brave new possibilities explored in its visionary central movement … the eloquence and fantasy of what is undoubtedly one of the major works of the 1950s is superbly projected in a performance which need fear no comparison with the best earlier recordings … as for the sonatas, Steven Osborne is at least the equal of Paul Crossley in interpretative empathy, and has the advantage of superlative modern recording. There's a further advantage: perceptive and lucid booklet-notes by Ian Kemp, Tippett's friend and biographer’ (Gramophone)

‘This splendid double album … performances that impressively set new standards in these often challenging works … Steven Osborne seems to have the measure of them all. His account of the Concerto, ably supported by Martyn Brabbins's command of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, has all the ecstatic power that Ogdon brought to the first movement, and a like rhythmic ebullience in the finale, but negotiates the contrapuntal thickets of the slow movement with greater delicacy and feeling. He's helped by Hyperion's detailed recording … the Fourth is by far the longest of the sonatas and has previously been the hardest to assimilate. Even so, Osborne's wonderfully elegant unwinding of the contrapuntal lines in the first movement, and his powerful, deeply elegiac reading of the finale, illuminate this fascinating work … more clearly than any version I've previously encountered. This is a very important release’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘Released just in time to mark the 10th anniversary of Michael Tippett's death comes this magnificent set of the composer's complete music for piano played by the musician who must surely be regarded as one of his most resourceful interpreters, Steven Osborne. He has just the range of touch to bring out the tonal richness of the Piano Concerto (superbly partnered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins), the muscularity of the Beethovenian elements in the First Piano Sonata and the almost Messiaenic sense of fantasy required for the Fourth’ (The Daily Telegraph)

‘Steven Osborne is a young pianist who seems completely at home in this wide-ranging and challenging music … the best case for the music I’ve ever heard’ (American Record Guide)

‘Osborne's readings on this new recording from Hyperion undoubtedly triumph … Osborne wins through on grounds of spontaneity and bitterness … Hyperion's new release, delightfully crisp and immediate, brings together all of Tippett's piano music under one roof, a feat not hitherto attempted. It succeeds in honouring the music's volatility while salvaging from it the composer's temperate if idiosyncratic sense of Song. Osborne's reflections complement full and illuminating booklet notes by Ian Kemp, who first brought Tippett's piano music to the pianist's attention while studying at Manchester University. This is a set that certainly deserves our warmest embrace’ (International Record Review)

‘Steven Osborne's accounts of the four Tippett sonatas in recitals at the Wigmore Hall were one of the highlights of the Tippett centenary celebrations in 2005, and his recordings of them, together with equally exceptional accounts of the Piano Concerto and the early Fantasia on a theme of Handel have been well worth waiting for … Osborne is superb at delineating the characters of the four sonatas and underlining how, in their very different ways, they relate to the piano tradition … under his fingers the Second Sonata emerges as a gritty and uncompromising masterpiece … his account of the Piano Concerto with Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony is similarly charged’ (The Guardian)

‘The Scottish pianist demonstrates the driving energy behind Tippett's solo piano music. The four sonatas dance nimbly over the keys … nothing beats the hungry Vivace of the Piano Concerto, however, for sheer palpitating excitement’ (The Times)

‘This double album is a monumental achievement. Tippett's writing for piano is as demanding as it is cliché-resistant. No body of music for the instrument since Messiaen's is as distinctive as his and it is wonderful to have the oeuvre together on disc. The concerto is realised with a precision and vigour, both soloistic and orchestral, that leave one marvelling anew at its inventiveness. The account of the brief, early, concerted Fantasia on a theme of Handel makes me revise my opinion of the work sharply upwards. In Osborne's account of the four sonatas, each a big statement, radiance and virtuosity go hand in hand’ (The Sunday Times)

‘This double-disc set from Hyperion is a monumental justifcation for his efforts. In all four sonatas, Osborne reveals a sense of composure that reflects his total absorption in the music … the most exciting revelations are his illuminating accounts of the Third and Fourth Sonatas. Osborne hits the button on all levels. In terms of stature, he pours out Tippett's edifices with radiant vision. But within all that there is a galaxy of detail that hits you with intoxicating freshness and dynamism … these are award-winning performances’ (The Scotsman)

‘I applaud Steven Osborne for his dedication to Tippett's music. He has worked long and hard on it and found his own way; furthermore, he had the opportunity to include the sonatas in recitals before recording them … Steven Osborne brings deep commitment to the music, making it alive, vivid, and communicative through musical and technical virtues of the highest order … he really is inside Tippett's continually fascinating output’ (Fanfare, USA)

‘Osborne is at the top of his game in his unmistakable mix of liberated pianism and steel-tempered discipline … his playing, never better, is stamped with an immaculate sense of organisation and structure, married to a freewheeling joy at grappling with music he is committed to’ (The Herald)

‘I cannot imagine a finer recording of the emotionally restrained and stucturally tight Tippett Piano Concerto than from Steven Osborne … any older recording of this very important British piano concerto is safely ousted from the market. Osborne also does justice to Tippett's sontatas here’ (Pianist)

‘The English composer Michael Tippett left an idiosyncratic body of work shaped by keen intelligence and humanitarian spirit. But given the unorthodox demands and occasional technical shortcomings of his writing, his music has been best served by performers who approach it with sympathy and absolute commitment. The latest to do so is the Scottish pianist Steven Osborne, whose new collection of Tippett’s piano music is a revelatory achievement. The four sonatas span Tippett’s career, providing a concentrated overview of his restless style. The First, completed in 1938 and revised in 1942, responds to Europe’s darkening political climate with virtuoso fireworks and boisterous folk melodies. The Second Sonata, from 1962, shares the brittle, jagged sound Tippett fashioned for his second opera, King Priam, yet passages of gracious lyricism pop up throughout the single-movement span. Tippett’s musical language had become still more abrasive by the time he wrote the Third Sonata in 1973, but the icy stillness of the Lento movement and the explosive vitality of the finale speak clearly and directly. The Fourth, finished in 1984, is stuffed with enough material for a dozen pieces, including a quirky fugue, a gamboling fourth movement and a ghostly finale. Somehow Mr. Osborne makes it all stick. The Piano Concerto, from 1955, occupies the ravishing sound world Tippett created in his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage. The concerto is awkward but endearing, and Mr. Osborne is a compelling soloist. The conductor, Martyn Brabbins, draws a lively performance from the BBC Scottish players here and in the ostentatious Fantasia on a theme of Handel’ (The New York Times)
The first performance of the third sonata was given by Paul Crossley—who also gave the first performance, in 1985, of the Piano Sonata No 4, just after Tippett’s eightieth birthday. This sonata is indeed a ‘late’ work, a product of the last years of his composing career, when the rigorous dialectic of earlier works was giving way to a style more relaxed and harmonically opulent, if no less inventive. In writing the sonata Tippett was helped by Crossley to find new ways of creating piano resonances, particularly those concerning the use of the middle pedal, which accounts for an abundance of three-layered textures only possible through this ‘sostenuto’ pedal. Tippett was also stimulated by a visual image—of Glenn Gould’s flamboyant crossing-of-hands while playing Bach on television. Within a few bars of the opening movement both these features are in evidence. His original plan was for a collection of bagatelles, like Beethoven’s Op 126, held together by balancing contrasts of tempo, style and key. The pithy miniature was however never a natural mode of expression for him. It was only when he accepted that the imposing opening sounds of his Symphony No 4 would not stop clamouring at the gates of his imagination until he had, so to speak, let them in again that they now became the source of the new work and the reason why it changed from bagatelles to sonata.

The opening bars of the symphony had already launched one work and could hardly serve the same function again. Tippett put them in the centre of the sonata—adapted as the core of a five-movement design which by its nature was more sectional than the organic processes of a classical sonata and so a reflection of his original idea of bagatelles.

The first movement is a form of prelude, a huge improvisation uncovering sections of starkly contrasted character, another reflection of the original idea. In the second movement Tippett returns to a favourite form of his earlier music, the fugue, when its concentration on a single theme was often used as a foil to movements with several themes, as it is here—even though it does not really sound like a fugue. After the ‘exposition’ there is a ‘counter exposition’, the theme in progressively longer notes with extended episodes between its three appearances. The last of these is in extremely long notes in the bass, thus setting up the central movement whose opening section is built on another set of long pedal notes, and the quotation from the fourth symphony. This movement, like the whole sonata, is in five sections, here a mirror shape ABCBA. The C section is again based on a sequence of pedal notes (the same in fact as had appeared at the very beginning of the sonata) while the tuneful lines of the B sections provide relief from their neighbours’ eruptions and hammerings. There follows a scherzo and trio, the scherzo reminiscent in its fierce appropriation of the extreme ends of the piano in the third sonata and also, unexpectedly, of Chopin.

This richly complex sonata was not Tippett’s last work, though at the end of it, when its finale’s theme returns home after four distant variations, it is difficult not to think of it as a poignant farewell.

from notes by Ian Kemp © 2007

La création de la troisième sonate fut assurée par Paul Crossley, qui créa aussi la suivante, en 1985, juste après le quatre-vingtième anniversaire de Tippett. Car cette Sonate no 4 est une œuvre «tardive», née dans les dernières années de la carrière compositionnelle de Tippett, au moment où la rigoureuse dialectique des pièces passées cédait la place à un style plus détendu, harmoniquement opulent, mais non moins inventif. Dans l’écriture de cette sonate, Crossley aida Tippett à élaborer de nouvelles manières de forger des résonances pianistiques, surtout avec la pédale centrale—ce qui explique l’abondance des textures à trois étages, possibles grâce à cette seule pédale «sostenuto». Tippett fut également stimulé par une image, celle du flamboyant croisement de mains de Glenn Gould interprétant Bach à la télévision. Après quelques mesures du mouvement d’ouverture, ces deux éléments sont présents. Au départ, Tippett envisageait un recueil de bagatelles, comme l’op. 126 de Beethoven, liées par des contrastes compensatoires de tempo, de style et de tonalité. La miniature lapidaire ne lui fut cependant jamais un mode d’expression naturel. Et ce fut seulement lorsqu’il admit que les imposantes sonorités liminaires de sa Symphonie no 4 n’arrêteraient pas de tambouriner aux portes de son imagination tant qu’il ne les aurait pas, pour ainsi dire, laissées rentrer que ces sonorités-là devinrent la source de la nouvelle œuvre et qu’elles le firent changer les bagatelles en sonate.

Les premières mesures de cette symphonie avaient déjà inauguré une pièce et elles ne pouvaient guère recommencer. Aussi Tippett les plaça-t-il au cœur de la sonate, ajustées pour servir de noyau au plan en cinq mouvements—lequel était, par nature, davantage sectionné que les procédés organiques d’une sonate classique, reflétant ainsi l’idée première des bagatelles.

Le premier mouvement est une forme de prélude, une immense improvisation révélant des sections au caractère bien tranché, reflets, elles aussi, de l’idée originale. Dans le mouvement suivant, Tippett renoue avec une de ses formes musicales préférées, la fugue, dont la concentration sur un seul thème servit souvent de repoussoir aux mouvements plurithématiques, ce qu’elle fait ici, même si elle ne ressemble pas vraiment à une fugue. L’«exposition» est suivie d’une «contre-exposition», un thème en notes de plus en plus longues dont les trois apparitions sont séparées par des épisodes prolongés. La dernière des trois se fait en notes extrêmement longues à la contrebasse, installant ainsi le mouvement central, dont la section inaugurale repose sur une autre série de longues notes pédales et sur la citation empruntée à la quatrième symphonie. Ce mouvement, comme toute la sonate, compte cinq sections, mais disposées en miroir: ABCBA. La section C se fonde de nouveau sur une séquence de notes pédales (celle-là même, en fait, qui était apparue en tout début de sonate), cependant que les lignes mélodieuses des sections B apaisent les éruptions et les martèlements de leurs voisines. S’ensuivent un scherzo et un trio, le scherzo rappelant par sa farouche appropriation des extrémités du piano la troisième sonate mais aussi, étonnamment, Chopin.

Cette sonate richement complexe ne fut pas la dernière œuvre de Tippett, même si, à la fin, lorsque le thème du finale revient chez lui après quatre lointaines variations, on ne peut s’empêcher de voir un poignant adieu.

extrait des notes rédigées par Ian Kemp © 2007
Français: Hypérion

Die Uraufführung der dritten Sonate wurde von Paul Crossley gespielt, der 1985, kurz nach Tippetts 80. Geburtstag, auch die Klaviersonate Nr. 4 uraufführte. Diese Sonate ist ein wahres „Spät“-Werk, ein Produkt der letzten Jahre seiner Komponistenkarriere, als die strenge Dialektik seiner früheren Werke einem entspannteren, harmonisch üppigen aber keineswegs weniger phantasievollem Stil Platz machte. Als Tippett die Sonate schrieb, half Crossley ihm, neue Arten von Klavierresonanzen zu finden, besonders solche, die das Mittelpedal verwenden, was zu einer Vielfalt dreischichtiger Gefüge führte, die nur durch das „Sostenuto“-Pedal möglich sind. Tippett fand auch visuelle Stimulation von Glenn Goulds extravagantem Kreuzen der Hände, als er in einer Fernsehsendung Bach spielte. Beide Merkmale finden sich schon wenige Takte nach dem Beginn des ersten Satzes. Sein ursprünglicher Plan war eine Sammlung von Bagatellen gewesen, die wie Beethovens op. 126 durch einen ausgewogenen Kontrast von Tempo, Stil und Tonarten zusammengehalten werden. Kurze, bündige Miniaturen entsprachen jedoch nie Tippetts natürlichem Ausdrucksstil. Erst als er akzeptierte, dass die imposanten Klänge am Anfang seiner Symphonie Nr. 4 solange an die Pforten seiner Vorstellungskraft klopfen sollten bis er ihnen wieder Einlass gewährte, wurden sie nun zur Quelle des neuen Werkes und erklären, warum es sich aus Bagatellen zur Sonate verwandelte.

Die Anfangstakte der Symphonie hatten bereits ein Werk eingeführt und konnten daher nicht wieder die gleiche Aufgabe übernehmen. Tippett stellte sie also in den Mittelpunkt der Sonate—als Kernpunkt einer fünfsätzigen Anlage adaptiert, die von Natur aus mehr zergliedert war als der organische Prozess einer klassischen Sonate und somit eine Reflexion seiner Originalidee für Bagatellen darstellt.

Der erste Satz ist eine Art Präludium, eine gewaltige Improvisation, die Abschnitte von krass unterschiedlichem Charakter enthüllt, und wiederum eine Reflexion der Originalidee. Im zweiten Satz kehrt Tippett zu einer Lieblingsform in seiner früheren Musik zurück—der Fuge—in der die Konzentration auf ein einziges Thema oft, wie hier, zum Ausgleich für Sätze mit mehreren Themen ausgenutzt wird, auch wenn der Satz eigentlich nicht wie eine Fuge klingt. Nach der „Exposition“ folgt eine „Gegenexposition“, das Thema in zunehmend längeren Notenwerten mit ausgedehnten Episoden zwischen seinen drei Erscheinungen. Die letzte lässt das Thema in extrem langen Noten im Bass erklingen, und bereitet damit den Mittelsatz vor, dessen Anfangsabschnitt ebenfalls auf einer Reihe von langen Orgelpunkten aufgebaut wird und das Zitat aus der vierten Symphonie enthält. Dieser Satz ist, wie die ganze Sonate, in fünf Abschnitten, in einer Spiegelform ABCBA angelegt. Der C-Teil basiert wiederum auf Orgelpunkten (den gleichen, die bereits ganz am Anfang der Sonate zu hören waren), während die melodischen Linien der B-Teile Erleichterung von den Ausbrüchen und dem Hämmern ihrer Nachbarn bieten. Dann folgt ein Scherzo und Trio; das Scherzo erinnert mit seiner grimmigen Ausnutzung der extremen Enden des Klaviers an die dritte Sonate und unerwartet, an Chopin.

Diese hochkomplexe Sonate war zwar nicht Tippetts letztes Werk, aber am Ende, wenn das Thema des Finales nach vier weit entfernten Variationen zurückkehrt, ist es schwierig, sie nicht als wehmütigen Abschied zu verstehen.

aus dem Begleittext von Ian Kemp © 2007
Deutsch: Renate Wendel

Waiting for content to load...
Waiting for content to load...