This is the first complete recording of Australian composer Carl Vine’s piano sonatas. Listening to it in one sitting is like taking a roller-coaster through an Escher theme park. It’s quite an experience. And one that you want to repeat almost immediately. Which says something about not just the music, but the playing.

Carl Vine

Vine possesses that rare gift of being able to write music, whether it be symphonic, chamber, instrumental or vocal – he’s done it all – that, from a listener’s perspective, is both attractive and difficult. (Which reminds me of a very non-pc joke about exes, but we won’t go there.)

Vine’s early work with Sydney Dance Company is often cited as a major influence on his subsequent composing career. And certainly, rhythmic and percussive vitality and dancelike gestures feature in all four sonatas. 

But along with extremes of register (Vine loves to range over all seven octaves of the piano’s available real estate) there are bare fourths, fifths and octaves; polyphony and polyrhythms; scintillating presto passages and pitch-black chordal storms; and kaleidoscopic motivic development and transformation.  There is Elliot Carter (Piano Sonata...