VoxCarnyx

Linlithgow Academy

ENCORES from the catalogues of jazz piano masters, often in his own transcriptions, have long been a feature of the practice of Linlithgow’s international classical piano star, Steven Osborne. In this recital that side of his musical personality was given free rein in a duo with the alto and soprano saxophones of Martin Kershaw.

The recital began, however, in more familiar solo piano mode, with a first half “based around the waltz” presented in informative and witty style for Osborne’s home crowd. That meant a very thorough explanation of the narrative of Schumann’s theatrical Papillons and a fascinating sequence that began with a plangent Gymnopedie No 3 by Eric Satie melding into Lily Boulanger’s D’un Jardin Clair.

The pianist’s mother, who lives in Linlithgow, cast a long shadow over the evening, her absence explained, if I understood correctly, because her philatelic expertise was required elsewhere. It was a jewellery box she owned that explained the young Osborne’s early enthusiasm for Anatoly Liadov’s A Musical Snuffbox, but more crucially her antipathy to jazz that partly prompted her son’s mission to explain it to a classical audience.

In his solo set it was Bill Evans’ Waltz for Debby and Osborne’s transcription of a live performance of Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy that introduced the music, before the rollercoaster-ride that is Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, a composition filled with socialist protest song anger that embraces industrial noise as readily as any recognisable style of music.

After the interval, Osborne was joined by jazz saxophonist and stalwart of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra Martin Kershaw for a duo set that, apart from Kershaw’s ballad reading of Someday My Prince Will Come, primarily featured arrangements by Osborne.

The pianist was at pains to stress how Kershaw had brought the required jazz sensibility to their rehearsals, but it was notable that Osborne was mostly playing from memory (as he had performed the first half) while it was the improvising saxophonist who had a music stand.

There was familiar ground in the music of Duke Ellington and Jerome Kern – the pair swapping 8-bar phrases in All The Things You Are – but esoteric choices as well, including a version of Will Stratton’s Tokens, the opening track on the American singer-songwriter’s acclaimed 2021 album The Changing Wilderness, and Scots saxophonist Rob Hall’s Across the Sound, from his 2005 set with pianist Chick Lyall, The Beaten Path.

If that tune is punningly titled, it was nothing to the rhythmic mayhem Osborne and Kershaw went on to create in a singular version of Gershwin’s perennial I Got Rhythm.

The bold choice of encore, on the day Ireland had thwarted the Scots at rugby, was another Osborne arrangement, of the altogether gentler Londonderry Air.

Keith Bruce

Steven Osborne and Martin Kershaw play in Dundee’s Marryat this evening and then tour to Peebles (Thursday) and Nairn (Saturday).

Portrait of Steven Osborne by Ben Ealovega