There are swathes of impressionism, pieces built on Chinese or Japanese scales, explorations of colour and sonority in the piano and of mood from jazzy wit to lonely melancholy and musical references to landscape and nature. The collection of styles here is not only eclectic, but is also highly cosmopolitan. Not having the score to hand I can only raise the occasional eyebrow at what sounds like a splashy moment here and there during some of the more technically extreme pieces, but the effect of the whole is far more significant than one or two mildly suspect notes. Geoffrey Poole’s pianism is remarkable, and it is of course significant to hear a composer playing their own music. Poole’s expressive palette is an eclectic one, and there is a wide variety of ‘happening’ throughout this monumental undertaking.
These pieces evolved over a 15 year period, and some of them have already been performed at venues such as the Purcell Room in London. In many of these pieces the musical language is readily approachable, yet the outcome can be surprising. Change (Transformation through Time), is of course the essential condition of Music, but by composing a short character-piece to each one of the I Ching’s 64 states of being, Poole has pressed his imagination into concepts and feelings unfamiliar to Western minds and ears. The I Ching or ‘Book of Changes’ is an ancient Chinese divination text “in which every situation is regarded as a further stepping stone in our developing consciousness. These are grouped into 8 Zones of 8 movements, each Zone being organised as a suite of more or less related pieces. Taken as a single three-hour composition, A Pianist’s I Ching has the outward appearance of something as daunting as something by Sorabji, but we are encouraged to “Start Anywhere – at random, with any title that appeals – just as you might open a book of sonnets, or recipes.” There is no grand scheme, each title being one of 64 relatively concise character pieces. Now retired from his professorship at Bristol University, he is able to devote time to freelance composing and piano playing, as well as a number of administrative posts. Geoffrey Poole is one of those musicians who, as Damon Runyon might have put it, is “always around and about”, but usually somewhere under the mainstream radar. January-March 2019, Cardiff Millennium Studios, and February 2020, Kings’ School Macclesfield. Support us financially by purchasing from