Don Kay: Bird Chants

Recorded in late 2009, Bird Chants is a compilation of various works for solo piano written by the notable Tasmanian composer Don Kay, performed by Sydney-based pianist/teacher Vanessa Sharman.

The album opens with Kay’s Sonata 1 for Piano and closes with his fifth contribution to the piano sonata repertory. Written ten years apart, both works consist of three movements involving a fast-slow-fast temporal structure, and involve elements of “folk” or “work” songs: Kay indicates in the liner-notes that the first sonata includes elements of Irish and Scottish ballads, while the fifth incorporates a quotation from a harvest hymn.

Each piece on the album is characterised by strong rhythmic and melodic themes. Vibrant, playful sections provide effective contrasts against more lyrical and languorous music and ballad-like melodies are juxtaposed against modernist, dissonant flourishes. Kay’s musical language is clearly steeped in the Western art-music tradition, but he also professes an enchantment with the sounds of nature. Kay manages to integrate these two seemingly disparate influences into his compositional approach, and mentions that “weather and landscape, for example, have inspired asymmetrical patterning with short recurring motifs involving subtle shifts and changes.”

On this recording, the influence of nature on Kay’s musical thinking is, of course, also relevant to the piece Bird Chants, a homage to Olivier Messiaen.

Intended to musically evoke the sounds of birdsong, this piece was composed specifically with Sharman, who studied in France with Messiaen’s widow, the renowned piano pedagogue Yvonne Loriod, in mind.

While Sharman’s performances are generally superb – in particular, her rendition of the hauntingly beautiful two-movement piece Different Worlds – some of the slower works, such as the elegiac In Memoriam, Malcolm Williamson, suffer from a slight “clunkiness” which somewhat inhibits the lyrical musical intentions. Furthermore, while the performances are often effective, I can’t help but wonder whether more extreme contrasts in terms of touch, technique and dynamics may also have been fitting in order to highlight the eclectic nature of the music itself.

Having been previously (and shamefully) unfamiliar with the piano music of Don Kay, I have become thoroughly enamoured by his musical language, which is rhythmically infectious, melodically intriguing, and, most importantly, extremely beautiful.

Don Kay was born at Smithton in 1933 and studied composition in London with Malcolm Williamson from 1959 to 1964. He has produced a large body of work for solo instrumental, chamber, vocal, choral, orchestral and concerto forms. This disc presents much of the piano music he composed between 1995 and 2008. Two piano sonatas – Nos 1 (1998) and 5 Full Circle (2008) frame four other pieces. Don Kay's musical language is accessible and often poetic. Sometimes he is abstractly experimenting with sound and texture (Different Worlds), at other times responding to the sounds of nature as in his tribute to Olivier Messiaen (Bird Chants). His In Memoriam, Malcolm Williamson is particularly memorable and poignant.