Michael Finnissy - Beat Generation Ballads; First Political Agenda

The Guardian 80

Philip Thomas
(Huddersfield Contemporary Records)

For anyone who wants to get a sense of the range and density of the teeming output of Michael Finnissy, 70 this year, his piano music is as a good place as any to start. It’s music that can be overwhelmingly complex and forbidding, tenderly sentimental, or frankly autobiographical. And it is strewn with allusions and references to a range of other periods and styles.

Those characteristics and qualities are on display in the two large-scale works on Philip Thomas’s thoughtful and superbly played disc. First Political Agenda consists of three pieces composed between 1989 and 2006. The Benedictus from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is quoted in the second movement, Is There Any Future for New Music?, while the third, You Know What Kind of Sense Mrs Thatcher Made, is based upon Parry’s Jerusalem, and its serene, almost Feldman-like meditation ends by quoting the opening motif of Beethoven’s Les Adieux Sonata. Beat Generation Ballads (2014) spreads its allusive net wider still, with four short movements in which there are references to Allen Ginsberg, Beethoven’s Op 74 quartet, an Irish republican song and Bill Evans’s My Foolish Heart, prefacing a huge set of variations based on their material. As ever with Finnissy, nothing is quoted for its own sake – all are facets of the vast musical mythology that informs his work on every level.