The first of two volumes devoted to Robert Helps’ complete piano music inaugurates a project that many listeners will consider long overdue. Helps’ aesthetic is hard to pigeonhole. It draws upon the craggy, post-war serial aesthetic that many American academic composers embraced, plus the contrapuntal rigor of Roger Sessions, with whom Helps studied. At the same time Helps’ splendid ear for textural refinement and linear elegance can be traced to his love for Fauré and Ravel, as well as his lifelong interest in Romantic-era pianists such as Ignaz Friedman and Josef Hofmann.
While a fastidious sense of logic and formal balance governs Helps’ note choices, chord voicings, and register deployment, he often leaves dynamics, tempos, and phrasing to the performer’s discretion. What most impresses me most about Naomi Niskala’s solid, intelligent, and caring virtuosity is that she is fully attuned to the substance and spirit of these works, yet does not feel compelled to emulate Helps’ own performances.
I often heard Helps in private and in concert, and I can attest to his internalized sense of rhythm, geared toward long phrases. While Niskala certainly is a colorist, she focuses more on details and rhythmic momentum. For example, the central climax of Shall We Dance attains greater urgency and compactness as Niskala propels the music ahead, whereas Helps takes more time and employs more pedal in his live performance released by Naxos. She also plays up the Nocturne’s thorny mood swings more overtly than in Alan Feinberg’s equally authoritative yet more darkly lit traversal on an out-of-print Argo recital.
Valse Mirage, Helps’ contribution to C. F. Peters’ The Waltz Project, doesn’t sound quite so hazy and dreamlike as its feathery passagework implies, yet the so-called “New Romanticism” movement had not yet arrived when Helps penned his then-unfashionably tonal (and drop-dead gorgeous) Three Hommages, arguably his most accessible piano opus. Although Niskala’s scrupulous account of the Fauré homage doesn’t match the shimmering overtones and soaring freedom Helps brought to his performances (and his 1989 CRI recording), she shapes the Ravel Hommage’s delicate stepwise descending phrases with jewel-like beauty and precision. And whereas Naxos’ Daniel Blumenthal takes 10 minutes over his protracted, weighty, gothic treatment of Radiance, Niskala’s faster, more line-oriented interpretation clocks in at a little more than five minutes, and sounds like an altogether different piece.
The recital concludes with four ravishing examples of Helps the transcriber in Chabrier’s Chanson pour Jeanne, Duparc’s Testament, Mendelssohn’s Schilied, and Ireland’s Love is a Sickness Full of Woes. Whenever possible, the booklet notes offer Helps’ own commentaries about each work, framed by a splendid introductory essay by Niskala herself. Needless to say, I look forward to Volume 2. [7/9/2007]
