Composer Lyell Cresswell: truth, lies and a brilliant Piano Concerto

Composer Lyell Cresswell 

Photo credit:  Piero Casadei 

The last message pianist Stephen De Pledge received from his friend, composer Lyell Cresswell, was a text. “Great!”, it said, simply.  Cresswell, gravely ill, was responding to the news that the NZSO had confirmed it would premiere his 3rd Piano Concerto, written, like his 1st, for De Pledge.  It was March, 2022, and the Edinburgh-based New Zealand composer died at home just a few days later of cancer, complicated by COVID-19.

Now, marking Cresswell’s 80th birthday this year, the 3rd Piano Concerto will receive its first performances in four New Zealand cities, performed by the NZSO conducted by Gemma New, with De Pledge as soloist. These premieres of a work De Pledge has described as “bloody difficult” will be, he says, “bittersweet performances in Lyell’s memory, rather than in his presence.”  
De Pledge had a long friendship with Cresswell, dating back to when the pianist was 15 and playing in the viola section in our National Youth Orchestra. “I was just fanboying him,” he says now. “We were playing his work Salm, the first music without a tonal centre I’d heard, let alone played. I was blown away by the sheer unusualness of not knowing where the music was going; and sitting in the middle of the orchestra and rehearsing it over and over, it was really intense. I felt it was a bit transgressive, a bit naughty – and I loved it!”

Pianist Stephen De Pledge

“… the new Cresswell Concerto is a tour de force for both orchestra and pianist.”

Photo: Supplied

Fast forward to the late 1990’s, when De Pledge was living in London. The pianist’s career was launched in 1996 when he won the prestigious annual Gold Medal from the Guildhall School of Music, where he had studied with Joan Havill. Preparing for his Wigmore Hall debut in 1999, he wrote to Cresswell.

“That was when our friendship really began,” he tells me. “I asked him to send me some piano pieces, which he did straight away. By return of post came scores, which I still have, and at that recital I played Aquarello and Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, two of a series of ‘painting’ pieces that Lyell wrote over many years.”

De Pledge has played many of Cresswell’s works since, in both Britain and New Zealand. In 2010, Cresswell wrote his first Concerto for Piano for him, and it was premiered by the NZSO in 2011 and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2012.

“Lyell didn’t write many concertos,” says De Pledge. “And they mostly tend to be for unconventional instruments.” The Auckland Philharmonia presented the New Zealand premiere of his accordion concerto Dragspil with Scottish accordionist James Crabb last year.

“I think,” says De Pledge, “that he was a bit wary of the conventionality of the form. He doesn’t treat them like concertos, but like extended orchestral pieces that come from a single instrument - that instrument sets the concerto in motion.”

In this video you can experience that “setting in motion” in a performance of Cresswell’s first Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Northey with De Pledge as soloist.

The technical difficulties of the first Concerto are huge, and no other pianist has performed it. After the work’s Glasgow performance, critic Michael Tumelty wrote, in The Herald in Scotland, "Stars of the night were Lyell Cresswell, for his volcanic, volatile Piano Concerto, and pianist Stephen De Pledge for his powerhouse delivery, with its sledgehammer force and shockingly steel-like clarity in the poignant, reflective moments."

Now, preparing for the premiere of Cresswell’s Piano Concerto No.3, De Pledge thinks Cresswell may have dialled back just a little on some of the technical demands. “It’s a little tamer than the first one. I think he’s taken some of my tongue-in-cheek criticisms to heart,” he laughs, referring to Cresswell’s “bloody-mindedness” about refusing to repeat things. “I’d say, ‘why do you write page after page of chords with no discernible pattern, no chord repeating, an absolute nightmare to learn?’ - and this time there’s a very pointed section where the same 7-note pattern repeats about 6 times, as if he’s saying, ‘there you go!’”

The 3rd Concerto is in five linked movements, titled Intrada, Calmo, Ostinato, Toccata and Cavatina. De Pledge thinks it’s “typical” Cresswell.  “It has his humour and an extreme variety of orchestral colour, unusual timbres that have you leaning forward and wondering which instrument is playing. He had such a keen ear for orchestral colour. And then these outbursts of crazy violence which his pieces often have.”

De Pledge talks about the audience experiencing the work like the opening of a toy box or dress up box. “It’s a cornucopia of ideas. He plays the orchestra like a big instrument, a kind of music box played by a sorcerer or puppet master. You’re taken by surprise, and every sound, every moment has something new.”

The sheer virtuosity of this work, like the first Concerto, is likely to thrill the audience. “It will be pretty impressive to watch; it’s a tour de force for both orchestra and pianist, and that’s exciting to be part of,” says the apparently undaunted De Pledge. “It’s hugely demanding to play, up and down the keyboard. I have to be match-fit on the day, like an athlete - and have the right amount of muscle memory, because you can’t physically read the notes that fast.”

I see from the score that the ending is quieter, with the gentleness of the cavatina. I wonder aloud whether there’s something autobiographical about the work, which Cresswell finished almost literally on his Deathbed. De Pledge reminds me that Cresswell wrote the first Concerto “in memorium” for a close friend who died before it was finished, and that maybe this one is his own “in memorium”? “Though his pieces often start from nothing,” De Pledge points out, “go crazy, and then return to nothingness.”

Cresswell’s “autobiography”, published this month by Te Herenga Waka University Press, will be launched at pre-concert talks before the upcoming NZSO concerts (called ‘Jupiter’, after Mozart’s Symphony No 41, programmed for the second half).

Lyell Cresswell’s quirky autobiography

“…as funny, absurdist and multi-faceted as the man himself.”

In 2016, when he became an Arts Foundation Laureate, Cresswell said, “I find it impossible to tell lies when I’m writing music. I tell my story and give my view of the world.”

He had no such problems with the truth - or lack of it - in his autobiography, which is as funny, as absurdist and as multi-faceted as the man himself. Called Divagations, Doodlings and Downright Lies, it includes multiple and often hilariously different versions of his life events and the people he encountered along the way.

It’s true that a Commonwealth Scholarship took Cresswell to Toronto in 1969 to study composition. But alongside more factual accounts of this period, he includes this fanciful description: “I loitered my way across America through a succession of free-spirited communities to Toronto’s Yorkville Village – a centre of hippiedom and a haven for American draft-dodgers. There I flourished in the city’s musical underworld and even appeared briefly, clutching my trumpet, in the definitive rock movie Woodstock. But a nasty disagreement with Bud Hill – a trombone player, who also happened to control the local drug traffic – made me flee the country in fear of my life.”

All is not “downright lies”, however. Cresswell was not a pianist, but could get around the keyboard. Writing about the composition of his first Concerto for Piano in 2010, he said: “For a long time I felt uncomfortable writing for the piano – what to do with all those fingers? Now I am fascinated by the lyrical and percussive sound world the instrument offers. Always when I am writing for it I make sure that, one way or another, I can get my fingers around all the notes I have written.”

Of the final piano concerto he wrote: “The various moods and feelings aroused by the extraordinary circumstances of Covid-19 and the lockdown of 2020 are reflected in the third piano concerto. I began work on it that year in the beautiful surroundings of Whatamango Bay in the Marlborough Sounds and completed it in Edinburgh in September 2021.”

It is no lie to say that Lyell Cresswell is one of the greatest composers New Zealand has produced. It seems splendidly appropriate that Cresswell’s last creative works, the Concerto and the autobiography, will be premiered and launched together this month. Both promise to be superbly enlightening and entertaining, works of genius by a lovable, quirky, and utterly individual man.

The autobiography tells the story of how De Pledge wrote to Cresswell when the composer  suggested a third piano concerto: “I would be so overjoyed. I’d be there with bells and whistles on!”

I’m getting my bells and whistles ready too!

You can read my personal tribute to Lyell Cresswell, written after his death in 2022, here, and my obituary for him here.

NZSO ‘Jupiter’ conducted by Gemma New and including the premiere of Lyell Cresswell’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with soloist Stephen De Pledge. Wellington (19 September), Hastings (20 September), Auckland (21 September), Christchurch (27 September). More information and tickets here

Divagations, Doodlings and Downright Lies by Lyell Cresswell, edited for publication by Dame Gillian Whitehead and Scilla Askew, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2024 and launched at the concerts listed above. More information and orders here