Six Studies (Study-Variations) for piano Op56 (1969)

Virtuosity is a quality not normally associated with English piano music, which is admired more - when it is admired at all - for its poetic and pictorial virtues. Kenneth Leighton’s piano writing is gratifyingly exceptional in this respect, as an impressive array of concertos, sonatas, variations and other solo pieces indisputably confirms. The Six Studies Op56 is not only, as Stephen Hough has remarked, “an important and inexplicably neglected example of English piano music at its best” but also an outstanding work of its kind in any company. Written between 1968 and 1969, shortly before the composer’s appointment as Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, it was first performed by Colin Kingsley in the Freemason’s Hall, Edinburgh, in January 1972.

Neither Leighton’s academic distinction nor his eminence as a composer of church music offers much of a clue to the character of the Six Studies. Both aspects are there if you look for them but it would be more helpful to think in terms of the Ravel left-hand Concerto and Gaspard de la Nuit, Messiaen’s Vingt Regards, the Bartòk Sonata and Prokofiev’s Seventh. There is also a kind of serialism here, not in the Schoenbergian twelve-note sense but in the way the harmonic material of the opening Adagio molto informs the following five studies (or “study-variations” as the subtitle has it). The dramatic opening gestures are of prime importance in the long term. So too, although it might seem merely decorative at first, is the descending figure rumbling in the left hand under the quietly arpeggiated chords in the right and then sounding simultaneously in both hands four octaves apart while the chordal theme is sustained in the middle. It is the descending figure that motivates the following Allegro molto e secco, an ingenious study for a nimble right hand and a heavy left in irregularly stressed, ever more fiercely articulated rhythms.

The third study offers a complete contrast. Moving slowly through the repeated notes and narrow intervals of its chant-like melodic line, it accumulates not only expressive intensity but also, as it accelerates after its central climax, a textural complexity so dynamic that it explodes into a still more strident protest. After that, the Allegro leggiero e capriccioso is a timely scherzo. It revolves for the most part round one figure presented in ever changing metres and different rhythmic shapes before it disintegrates in dislocated fragments at the end. The Allegro molto, nervoso is a fleeting study in quiet legato thirds and sixths in the outer sections and snapping staccato seconds and thirds in the middle. At once a recapitulation, recalling the harmonic material of the opening Adagio molto, and a sustained expression of rhythmic aggression, the Presto con bravura is the culmination of the work in every structural and technical sense.