Belfast pianist Michael McHale’s new album has a very clear rationale. He offers two of Beethoven’s greatest and most popular sonatas, the Moonlight (nicknamed after an association dreamed up by the poet Rellstab in 1832, five years after the composer’s death) and the Appassionata (given that title by a publisher in 1838). They are each preceded by a prelude specially commissioned from an Irish composer. It is, if you’ll forgive the word, a subfusc kind of enterprise, muted, tilted and peculiarly hidebound.
Linda Buckley’s Solas na Gealaí, the better of the two new pieces, aims for time-stilling atmosphere. Áine Mallon’s Raindrop Prelude is like a time-travelling visit to the world of 19th-century salon music. Both lose rather than gain for insisting on such clear Beethoven references.
McHale is a skilled and versatile player, but his approach to the Moonlight Sonata is hampered by a kid-gloves tentativeness and uneven dynamics in the ever-present, slow-rippling arpeggiation of the first movement. He’s not helped by the lack of brightness in the recorded piano tone, which has a filtered, cramped, sometimes claustrophobic air about it. His best playing comes in the central movement of the Appassionata, a set of variations in which he unwinds more successfully than elsewhere. A disappointing issue.
