Mary Dullea, piano & Darragh Morgan, violin

James Weeks: Wie soll ich meine Seele halten (wp)

Diana Burrell: Songs for Harvey

Morgan Hayes: Lucky’s Speech I (ukp)

Miguel Azguime: Soit Seul Dur de Son (ukp)

Agustín Fernández: Munirando II (wp)

Bauer and Hieber, Great Marlborough Street, London, 5 February 2009

They’re not terribly well-advertised, but the occasional recitals held at Bauer and Hieber (what used to be Schott’s) are well worth looking out for. The basement recital room is tiny, but there’s always a chance of catching a rarity or two.

I turned up a little late, so missed the beginning of James Weeks’s piece. This was a double shame, as what I did hear sounded ravishing. In unfolding an extremely sparse series of rocking intervals between the two instruments it recalled Feldman but – and this seems like an odd thing to say about Feldman’s music – with somehow less stodge.

Burrell’s Songs, originally written as a party piece for her to play on the viola, were also concise, but more conventionally lyrical. In contrast, Hayes’s Lucky’s Speech I (paradoxically a sequel to Lucky’s Speech) captured in prickly style the splintered rhythms and unending digressions of the Beckett text that inspired it.

The two pieces of the second half came from Portuguese composers with whom Darragh Morgan has built an association. Azguime’s was the more exploratory of the two, relating an expressive dialogue between intense sustained notes and more fleeting melodic material. The Fernandez, a longer work for piano and violin, was the most strongly metrical work of the concert, making great use of fast hocketing streams between the two instruments, which occasionally gave way to more lyrical passages.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson

This was the second of two recitals which celebrated Mary Dullea's recovery from dreadful injuries (mauled by pitbull dogs) which had kept her from the concert platform for some months. Mary & Darragh with Robin Michael (the Fidelio Trio) will give a recital of works by Messiaen, Sciarrino, Dusapin, Eötvös, Dai Fujikura and Rolf Hind at the second of two Ricordi - beyond 200 concerts at Kings Place, 24th February [Editor]