The fifth volume of James Dillon's The Book of Elements won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2002 award for chamber-scale composition last month. It was written for the pianist Nicolas Hodges, and he opened his recital at Kettle's Yard, the last in the current series of Sunday coffee concerts there, with it.
In the previous volumes in the Elements series Dillon has created a large-scale form out of multiple movements in the manner of a keyboard suite, but in this fifth and last instalment everything is fused into a single 18-minute span.
The opening juxtaposes torrential downward scales with brusque, clumping chords, as the piece takes off on a vertiginous, compelling ride, sometimes fastening on a brief rhetorical idea and exploring it from all perspectives, before moving on. The white-hot intensity of Dillon's invention binds everything together all together, creating its own form as it goes.
Because Hodges regularly performs a whole range of music by contemporary composers that audiences here otherwise get little chance to hear, he is a vital personality in the British new music scene, and in this programme he interleaved recent British and Italian works.
The British element was represented by the Dillon of course, and also by James Clarke's Sonata in Two Movements, components of a projected much larger work. If the first of Clarke's movements, Island, seems to become progressively more diffuse as it ramifies in all directions from its starting material, the ideas of the second, Landscape with Belltower, are much more striking, alternating tintinnabulating melodies with passages of repeated chords that built into swirls of slowly decaying sounds.
Resonance is the raison d'etre of the first of Salvatore Sciarrino's two Nocturnes as well, as Hodge's right hand played pattering figuration at the top end of the keyboard, while his left held down silent chords, filling the acoustical space with sympathetic vibrations; the second piece is more straightforward, a dialogue between opposite ends of the keyboard that conjures up some ravishing sounds.
By contrast Gilberto Capelli's Espressivo is built out of a series of massive gestures which try to squeeze the last drop of intensity out of every sound, as if the rhetoric of Liszt or Rachmaninov had been put through the post-serial mincer; if not a piece one would want to hear every day; it's certainly striking and Hodges, typically, played it for all it was worth.
