The best known of the 20th-century piano concertos composed for the left hand only – works by Ravel, Prokofiev, Britten, Martinů and Janáček, among others – were commissioned by pianists who had lost the use of their right hand. But, as Hans Abrahamsen puts it, his Left, Alone, first performed in 2016, was not written for a pianist with only one hand, but by “a composer who can only play with one hand”. Abrahamsen was born with restricted use of his right hand, and, though he played the piano from childhood, that limitation gave him “an alternative focus on the whole piano literature”.
His long-held idea of writing a left-hand concerto came to fruition in Left, Alone. Formally, it’s made up of a typical Abrahamsen sequence of short movements, six in all, which fall into two groups of three. The solo writing is largely melodic – there are few of the massive chords that Ravel conjures up in his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, for instance – as the piano threads its lonely way through the typically glittering orchestral textures, almost oblivious to what surrounds it. The result is both beguiling and mysterious, and, in this recording, quite thrilling; Tamara Stefanovich is a fabulously involved and involving soloist, making the recording by Alexandre Tharaud, for whom the work was written, seem almost detached.
Left, Alone is paired on the Winter & Winter disc with Ten Sinfonias, Abrahamsen’s 2010 reworking of his first string quartet, which dates back to 1973. It’s another sequence of jewel-like miniatures ranging from the explosive to the becalmed, which accumulate into something much more substantial, and using a baroque-style orchestra combining modern strings and woodwind with natural brass and timpani so that, as so often in Abrahamsen’s music, the sound world seems wonderfully rootless and strange.
This week’s other pick
The latest release in NMC’s Debut Discs series is The Last Time I Died, featuring chamber and instrumental works by the Irish composer and writer Ailís Ní Ríain. There are solos for toy piano, “altered” piano and guitar, duos for bass clarinet and recorder, bass clarinet and flute, and cimbalom and guitar, as well as a couple of ensemble pieces – the one that gives the disc its title, and Revelling/Reckoning, written for percussionist Evelyn Glennie and the New London Chamber Ensemble. The sounds are bright, fresh, and inventive, the extra-musical ideas behind them wide-ranging and often provocative, suggesting that Ní Ríain’s larger-scale music would be well worth exploring, too.
