James Raphael and the Hatikvah Variations

I suppose you could have too many Beethoven sonata sets. Possibly

Classical piano fans, a group which includes myself, have loads of favourites, prejudices, quirky tastes and so forth. For example, I can’t be bothered with critics’ darlings like Paul Lewis, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Richard Goode and others. I love Glenn Gould (reviled in numerous editions of the Penguin guide), I like Lang Lang and the way he upsets the self-appointed cognoscenti, I find the mighty Maurizio Pollini anything but cold, hard and austere. We can probably all agree on one thing – Sviatoslav Richter was a genius.

The trouble is that both in the music industry as a whole, and in our prized CD (and record) collections, much of it revolves around different artists performing the same repertoire. Really brilliant new works are rare as anything, and most recent works require you to have a distant relationship with melody, and a taste for atonality and chromaticism. This has been going on for the best part of the last 70 years.

So along comes the occasionally acerbic and highly knowledgeable Damian Thompson with a surprising recommendation: Michael Finnissy’s ‘History of Photography in Sound’, a recentish British composition, all five and a half hours of it. Finnissy is indeed a difficult listen, but worth a try – see also his Concerti for Piano Solo.

Thompson’s piece is well worth reading, and raises the question: what is there coming up, outwith the usual diet of Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Schumann etc – all wonderful, but even with Beethoven you sometimes need a break. The Knife is a bit of an Alkan obsessive, but even though he’s regarded as a little bit left field, it was all written well over a hundred years ago, and there’s been an upsurge in new recordings, he’s no longer hard to find. So what else is new?

Well, a couple of years ago in Edinburgh I was browsing the bargain bin in one of the few remaining classical CD shops, McAlister Matheson, and came across a piano CD with a cheesy cover by a guy called James Raphael. The immediate attraction was that he’d recorded stuff by Nino Rota, based on the Godfather theme no less, and excellent it is. The eye opener though was a magnificent piece by Raphael himself, a theme and variations on the Israeli national anthem, Ha-Tikva (‘The Hope’). If you appreciate piano variations, from the Goldbergs to Rzewski via the Festin d’Aesop, then this is definitely the business.

Raphael is something of a maverick. A wealthy jeweller, he competed in the Van Cliburn competition, and performed for Golda Meir, at the Vatican and similar prestigious stuff, whilst remaining an amateur. This posting tells you all you need to know about the work, and about Raphael. The problem is getting to hear it. There’s some Raphael on YouTube from the Cliburn competition, but Hatikvah isn’t there, though it’s usually somewhere on Amazon.

So, to promote a terrific pianist, and as it turns out, composer, with something new, brilliant and tonal, here, via SoundCloud, are James Raphael’s Hatikvah Variations.