<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    LISZTIAN SPARKLE

'The sixth and last movement of the Symphony (Allegro non troppo -- lento mesto) is a return to B minor essentially, it's a kind of large scale rondo, with three or four episodes, the third of which is essentially a summary of the whole piece, rather as if someone who has died has this feeling of resuscitation. It culminates in a Fugue, and then a quiet ending -- it's something I didn't plan for, it's sort of modelled, I admit, on the Liszt B minor Sonata, it's essentially tonal, but I felt -- for no reason I could put my finger on -- that I had to do something quiet at the very close; so it consists of these kind of tolling, exploratory chords, very quiet, mystic, transcendental even.'

From this, one might think Small a natural candidate for playing Scriabin? 'Well, that's an interesting thought. At the moment I've not explored him. But I've thought of him. For some reason his early stuff attracts me -- not so much the big Sonatas, the black magic stuff and so on. On the surface, I agree with you, it should fit what I'm interested in, and I may yet get into a Scriabin period!'

Would he term himself an Impressionistic composer? (The critic Bernard Holland wrote in the New York Times, 'The French style of 60 years ago permeates Mr Small's music, but his particular combination of atmospheric sonorities, satire and whimsy speaks a wider, more "liberated" harmonic language than either Debussy or Ravel.' [I might go further, and hazard Roussel, Schmitt -- and surely Antheil -- as composers Small might find some affinity with]). 'Probably that's a fair statement. Certainly a French sensitivity is something I really appreciate -- I don't know if my music is "Impressionist" in the sense of a Debussy-Ravel style as such; rather, it has something to do with the lightness, and also the sensuousness, of the sound itself.'

Many of Haskell Small's own works -- which the Washington Post's Joseph McLellan has wisely characterised as 'highly original without being self-consciously modernistic,' are for keyboard : four Sonatas, 15 Preludes, several sets of Variations (one based on the popular tune 'The Little Drummer Boy'), Etudes ('Three Etudes in Sound', and the Symphony. One is entitled '60 Second Puzzle' : doesn't that sound a bit quizzical? Is Small something of a Satieesque miniaturist, perhaps a satirist and caricaturist too?

'Well, you may have noticed that on one of my CDs -- not the piano disc [Albany Troy 413 [listen -- 467kB MP3 format], which includes the Symphony for Solo Piano, Sonata 3 and a clutch of other works] but on the chamber music disc entitled The Twisted Pine Branch [4TAY Records 4020; the title work is a cycle of five songs on Chinese poems for soprano, french horn and piano] -- a piece called Twelve Snippets? Writing that was, for me, kind of by way of an antidote to having finished the Second Sonata, a fairly huge piece : I spotted a notice of a Festival in the south of France (called "2000 for 2000", organised by something called the "Association Decadanse"), inviting composers from around the world to submit up to fifteen ten-second long pieces. Given my own name, I thought it obligatory to offer a few contributions!

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