Missa Parodia I

This highly virtuosic 15-minute work from 1967 is based on Smalley’s own Missa Brevis. Material from that earlier work is deliberately pulverised and disintegrated, before being, in the composer’s on words ‘reformed into something altogether more expressionistic and violent’. The work unfolds in 10 highly differentiated sections, including a series of highly decorated retrograde canons and quotations from Webern’s Cantata No. 2 op. 31 and Smalley’s own Piano Pieces I-V. Despite this intricate web of allusion and tight structural framework, however, the overall impression is that of a free flowing fantasia. 

In Smalley’s figuration, the patterns are never the expected ones. Blurs resolve ino single notes; the overtones of heavily struck bass notes serve as a background for hectic treble flurries. The work ends positively and dramatically with a marvellously effective sequence of ‘’brutal’’ chords, separated by long silences, which show Smalley to have the dramatic as we as the harmonic sense of the first rate composer.’

The Guardian (Hugo Cole), 20 October 1967

‘Its highly ornamented thematic workmanship in no way conceals the fundamental directness of thought, which carries it logically and compellingly to its conclusion. And the use of the piano as an instrument whose many registers can be harnessed to increase or diminish tension is in itself something of a technical triumph.’

The Observer (Stephen Walsh), 15 October 1967