It is not commonplace for a composer to successfully manage putting together two full-fledged albums in a year in the mysterious stewing-in-its-own-juice world of new music, where monetary and production resources aren't abundant while demand for exceptionally good stuff is high. But in the case of Tim Parkinson, 2022 was certainly a fruitful year. After his music had been released on the UK-based label Another Timbre in July, packing a mixture of chamber works written in the last 20 years, eager listeners were able to further satisfy their appetite for Parkinson's tunes when his newest album Piano Trio 2020 was released at the end of November 2022. The titles of his pieces are often straightforward and Feldman-esque; they do not beat around the bush and communicate just enough to understand the instrumentation and when it was written. And so, as the name suggests, Piano Trio 2020 offers a delightful exploration of the composer's more recent chamber endeavours by Plus Minus Ensemble, which consists of Mira Benjamin on violin, Alice Purton on cello and Mark Knoop on piano.
Self-released albums sometimes produce less of an impact, but let this expectation not fool you: the composer's willingness to share the music as soon as possible and not have to deal with the unnecessary bureaucracies of record labels definitely deserves an hour of your life. Piano Trio 2020, being the namesake to the album, is the sole 52-minute-long piece on this recording. It is scored for violin, cello and piano and, by a curious stretch of the composer's imagination, it consists of 25 short kaleidoscopic movements, the longest of which clocks in at exactly four minutes. Working in what could be best described, for a lack of a better term, as a post-tonal idiom, Parkinson manages to conjure up diverse and vivid musical imagery. Some of the movements are melancholic, even solemn; others are upbeat and loud. While there is no apparent lynchpin linking the pieces together, and while the movements are different in their character, as a whole they still manage to maintain a uniform identity and a sense of coherence. A fascinating quirk, accentuating this coherent yet diverse maelstrom of musical ideas, is the titles of the movements. The composer resorts to all kinds of semantic tricks: classic Italian designators, such as ‘Molto espressivo ma non troppo’ and ‘Allegro vivace e con brio’; whimsically absurd titles, such as ‘Slowly carefully testing a list of 100 notes’ and ‘Zombie Paradise’; and plain signifiers, such as ‘Rich’ and ‘Staggering’. They are there to perplex you and, by doing so, win your interest.
In an unexpected turn of events, while listening to the album, I found myself witnessing a fascinating and honest dialogue with the musical tradition and pondering whether this had been a conscious intention on the composer's side. The music achieves great success in bringing freshness to the melodies, harmonies and rhythms, which are not particularly uncommon; it is on the constant brink of reinventing itself. There were bits of Bach, Stravinsky and of course Parkinson himself: tunes resembling old Baroque dances alongside more maverick and adventurous bits, such as the deliciously parallel ‘Digital’, which made me think of the overabundance of digital information in our lives.
It also reminded me of Valentin Silvestrov's concept of ‘meta-music’, which draws heavily on musical tradition while simultaneously transcending it. One might hear similar reverberations from Piano Trio 2020, where the fleeting material not only sparks interest in what is coming next, but also simply feels appealing without being pretentious about its creative genesis. The deliberate strategy of intertwining a number of seemingly disparate brisker elements into one larger composition allows the album to showcase Parkinson's multifaceted writing in a number of musical contexts, while never losing its essence. This release is superb and has given me sheer joy, which I will definitely revisit in the warmer coming months.
