What does a dream sound like?

a review by Julia Meredith

On Thursday night at St James, we had a chance to find out.

The Morpheus Piano Trio was created from the shared vision of Guernsey-born pianist Tom Hicks and two of his colleagues at Whitman College, Washington State:  Amy Dodds, violinist, and Sally Singer Tuttle, cellist. All international performers of critical acclaim, they named the ensemble after Rebecca Clarke’s viola piece ‘Morpheus’, honoring the Greek god of dreams.

As a trio, they have performed in the Albert and Wigmore Halls, Glinka Hall in St Petersburg, Notre Dame de Paris and the Alice Tully Hall in New York, amongst others, and have earned glowing reviews from the foremost serious music magazines, besides winning several shelf-fuls of prizes in various chamber music competitions.  And now here they were, to play for us for the first time, in the hall where Tom experienced some of his earliest successes.  I hope to hear him as a solo pianist often again; but this collaboration with other stimulating fellow musicians felt like the perfect challenge for a maturing talent.

Significantly, all three composers in this all-British programme were students of Charles Villiers Stanford.  Bearing in mind that he also taught Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge and Arthur Bliss, Stanford must have been an inspirational teacher, in that he furthered such diverse talents without imposing his own sound or style on his students… as we were about to hear.

The first work was Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Five Negro Melodies for Piano Trio.  What immediately shone out in these pieces, well known or less so, was how the trio’s familiarity with one another released the voice in these vocal melodies: all the intonation of songs, without words.

Samuel Coleridge Taylor, shaped as he was by Western musical teaching, is clearly heartfelt in his need to express his African origins, and it results in an emotional and textural weaving of the two influences.

Listening to ‘They Will Not Lend Me a Child’, with its poignant sense of an individual truth, I was struck by the notion of the story being the most potent link with the Afro American tradition:  from Ragtime to HipHop, that oral tradition (even when it is instrumental!) has been the channel for mourning, for protest, for celebration … essentially the means of triumphing over adversity, even by simply expressing  ‘I will not be ignored – I exist’.  This is music that appears simple, but eats away at our curiosity: what were the circumstances that prompted such an outpouring?  The Morpheus give this personal truth-telling a focused urgency via their performing intimacy: they speak with one coherent voice.

We now came on to John Ireland.  He was born in Manchester, which was also where Tom and Sally studied music – and for a while he lived in Guernsey (in Blanche Pierre Lane, as it happened), escaping on the last boat to the British mainland before the German occupation.  For me, it did feel as if some empathy influenced the way they played his work.

It’s a soaringly romantic piece, swooping in and swapping the lyrical tunes between piano, violin and cello with perfect coordination. It suggested most clearly that what brought the Morpheus together was a mutual ability to predict each other’s intentions, and converge seamlessly into a single voice. It felt as if they could finish one another’s sentences.

The result is a generous, fulsome sound that never becomes florid or self-indulgent. It was, for so complex a piece, simply beautiful.

After interval I was eager to hear the composer whose work inspired the Morpheus Piano Trio’s title.   Rebecca Clarke was, as I mentioned, a pupil of Stanford, who encouraged her to shift from violin to viola, as she would then be ‘right in the middle of the sound, and can tell how it’s all done’. In my view it was a constructive suggestion;  her focus goes beyond a melodic line to focus equally on all the voices; no instrument is merely accompanying the tune.

The Moderato ma appassionata launches into an atmospheric landscape of uneasy, restless music that hurtles forth and then withdraws, the rhapsodic piano passages providing a serene framework for the strings’ edgy forays. This feels like a consciously modern work, intent on breaking with tradition;  the unsettling harmonies and air of disturbance may also reflect Clarke’s own response to WW1, as the daughter of an American businessman and German mother.

All three musicians have to be entirely confident in their interdependence.  Each leaps in with an unequivocal assertion which leaves nowhere to hide: it demonstrated to me their complete, almost unthinking trust in one another’s response.

The second movement, Andante molto semplice, wound out in a gently melancholy stream, almost Impressionist in style.  It rippled delicately on with an air of private musings, conceivably a lullaby, a daydream, inward thoughts too tender to bear explanation.  The Trio’s control of pauses is masterful; never over, nor under … just right.

In the finale, Allegro Vigoroso, the drama returned in a flurry of notes , fusing into a purposeful journey. The piano’s assured structure provided the solid underpinning the strings needed to counteract their wild excursions;  Tom showed he had both the power and sensitivity to hold firm as the strings whirled infectiously about him … and then to recede to no more than sonorous individual notes to accent the more reflective passages.

The work closed in a burst of rhythmic urgency and virtuosic playing, emphasizing Rebecca Clarke’s commitment to the modern world’s exciting unpredictability.  It was a thrilling climax to an unforgettable evening.

We are grateful to Guernsey Arts and The Swallow 2018 Charitable Trust for bringing a brilliant new constellation into Guernsey musical firmament.

Julia Meredith