MUSICWEB (1):
I have had the great pleasure of knowing Laurence Crane and his music for twenty years and it has pleased me listening to each new piece and enjoying the way that his music has blossomed, his style has grown and matured and his language has ripened. Underneath a façade of seeming simplicity lies music of great beauty, emotion and originality, written with sincerity in a language of timeless freshness. Crane is one of the few composers who will never use two notes when one is more than enough.
 
Starting with a celebration of the chord, 20 th Century Music is a short meditation on the kind of subversive music Crane, Skempton, Chris Newman, John White and many others have been writing, surprising and delighting us with for the past thirty years. Beauty is its point.
 
The Three Preludes is harder music. The tunes are angular, but not unnecessarily so, and there is true tragedy and grief in the third Prelude which you wouldn't expect from the tone of the first two. This short work shows the full range of Crane's expression. Blue Blue Blue is typical Crane – slowly progressing chords, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, simply suspended in the air, speaking volumes as we listen to the slow changes in the bass as the music makes its inevitable way forwards. The two Kierkegaard pieces are similar and yet totally different. Written for a theatre production, these pieces, like Blue Blue Blue simply hang in the air, going their own special way, never deviating from the path the composer has stepped on at the start of the piece. With Birthday Piece for Michael Finnissy we return to the utmost simplicity of 20 th Century Music – three chords repeat and repeat. They hover, they repeat, they stop. Gorgeous!
 
The four Jacques Derrida pieces derive from a theatre piece. Using his repeated chord method, thus making us listen to all the overtones and associated sounds connected to the music, Crane takes us into a very special hypnotic world. Subtle, seeming to be without ambition or goal, strange things happen. The second piece has movement, but it is the last piece which is most striking – Crane builds a fine climax out of his material and there is a real feeling of deep passion, which is disturbed several times by two dissonant chords. Subversive? I'll say it is!
 
Gorm Busk is the name of a Scandinavian musicologist Crane discovered whilst working in the office of the New Grove. He never met the man but loved his name hence this small dedication. Crane did a similar thing in 1989. Whilst watching Going for Gold – a lunchtime TV game show – he saw a contestant named Jürgen Hip and was so taken with that name that he immediately wrote a piece for cello and piano duet using the man's name. It's a lovely piece and one we should hear more often.
 
Three pieces dedicated to friends follow. There's a depth of feeling here, as befits tributes to friends, as can also be found in the Chorale for Howard Skempton . The Three Pieces for James Clapperton come as a shock. Clapperton is a true virtuoso so here are three pieces testing his powers of interpretation in music of tenderness and straightforwardness without an hint of a showpiece.
 
Crane's art is too important and too beautiful to miss. This is a most important issue, produced with marvelous, clear, sound, very sympathetic performances, fine notes and a lovely reproduction of Liz Arnold's Mythic Heaven on the cover of the booklet. Buy it and enjoy!  
Bob Briggs

MUSICWEB (2):
The Divine Art/Metier website describes Laurence Crane's music as “thoroughly contemporary ... His music can be described as super-minimalist, but that would ignore the incredibly fine transitions of harmony and time embedded in his works. Ultimately this is music for the post-modernist age ...” The term minimalist here doesn't imply ostinato-style writing in the manner of Steve Reich. Crane embraces the ‘less is more' principle in most of these works, paring the notes down so that, while each work has its own substance and atmosphere, the complications of virtuoso pianism, atonality, alternative modern piano techniques or the pressing need for some kind of avant-garde originality are all elegantly sidestepped. 

In this way, piano buffs who already know and like the work of Erik Satie or G.I Gurdjieff are on fairly safe ground here. Some pieces are simple almost to the point of a kind of naivety. The last of the Three Preludes for instance develops a disarmingly childlike melodic shape, but only takes it on a very short walk, hands held the whole time. This is immediately followed by Blue Blue Blue , which extends a fairly straightforward but nonetheless potent ‘jazz' progression over its entire seven-minute length. Once you have overcome the empty intervals in Kierkegaard his prelude you should have an idea as to whether 80 minutes of this kind of music is going to inspire you, or drive you completely up the wall. 

For me, Crane is at his best where at his quietest and most restrained – by which I mean not always in terms of sheer volume of sound. The simplicity of line and integrity of structure in a piece such as the Birthday Piece for Michael Finnissy is priceless. I had come across Laurence Crane's music as part of the Spectrum series, and the short Chorale for Howard Skempton was written for its second volume, being another miniature masterpiece. This is of course a matter of taste, but I am less enamoured of the ‘pounding' repetitions in the entire Jacques Derrida series and other pieces – not that the repeating notes ‘pound' in the same way as a Michael Nyman, but when you have a similar repeated pattern going on long enough it tends to drill little holes in your brain. Taken in isolation the pieces are fine, and placed in context – a theatrical presentation with texts and a diversity of media – these would no doubt work very well indeed. After a while I'd had enough however, especially as several of the pieces which follow: James Duke son of John Duke , Looking for Michael Bracewell , and the last of the Three Pieces for James Clapperton use similar repeated chord patterns. 

This is a fine piano recording, and Michael Finnissy's peerless playing is of course unsurpassed in this kind of material. I admire Laurence Crane's expressive mission and musical honesty, and am delighted to have been allowed a good long look into his output for solo piano. For me it was a little like peering into a coral reef in a glass-bottom boat – full of timeless beauty. Maybe it's an effect of Post-Modernist Composer Global Warming: I only found it a shame that nothing really surprising popped out from behind any of those wonderful shapes.
Dominy Clements

MusicWeb (3) :
The music on this new CD from the adventurous Metier label is very quiet and very simple. These two adjectives are not often used in relation to much recent piano music; volatile textures, fractured forms and extreme dissonance are the norm. Crane's music might be part of a trend in contemporary composition that would certainly include Howard Skempton, a composer who has a piece dedicated to him on this recording. The performer, the composer/pianist Michael Finnissy, has also written music of a ‘new simplicity' as well as ‘new complexity'. The progenitor of Crane's cool, unelaborated chords is surly Erik Satie. Also, Crane has a taste for whimsical titles not unlike the French master although they are titles that seem to commemorate friendships rather than assume an overtly satirical stance. Compared to Satie and Skempton, Crane's musical language is even more pared down. He sets up a chord sequence, often with just two chords in oscillation, yet the listener waits in vain for a Gymnopodie-like tune to weave its spell. As each piece progresses (or rather doesn't so to speak!) the listener becomes aware of a peculiar tension and culminative momentum. Often the chords are simple; the kind that would behave functionally in a traditional context. Crane's chords deny their function however as if admiring themselves like harmonic Narcissi. The effect is gently disturbing, even perplexing. This is perhaps precisely the point of this music. In the plastic arts it might appear as a slowly turning mobile or a Calder sculpture.

This recording presents all of Crane's piano output between the years 1985-1999. Two of the pieces are derived from Crane's theatre music written for productions directed by Andrew Renton; the 2 Kierkegaards and the set of 4 Derridas. Although I saw neither production I can well imagine their effectiveness as stage incidental music. They transform well as concert pieces. The longest single piece on the disc is Blue Blue Blue. Here the tension created by the slowly reiterated chords is heard to good effect. Most of the pieces follow a similar course although some introduce mild dissonance.

The performances by Michael Finnissy seem just right; he doesn't seek to make any dramatic points in the music. In a sense he allows the music to play itself, to make its own statement. Yet the emotional and technical difficulties should not be underestimated; Finnissy's control throughout this long disc is admirable. The recording engineers are to be praised as well for they have not been tempted to swamp the music in an ambient soup; the fairly close intimate recording suits the music better, as if eavesdropping.

Is it Minimalism? Is it Post Modernism? Is it English School of Whimsy? It doesn't matter; this quietly insistent music exists on its own terms.
David Hackbridge Johnson

MIDWEST RECORD:
Post modern minimalist piano music by a contemporary classical composer as played by a piano man that seems to be in synch with the composer.  It wouldn't hurt if you come to this by way of an appreciation of John Cage and Steve Reich, this almost feels like classical music for high tech minds.
Chris Spector

LA FOLIA:
Spanning 1985 to 1999, Crane's solo piano works cultivate a consistent style, easily pigeon-holed as minimal, but more like rambling ruminations on Satie's left-hand accompaniments. Crane supplies repeated chords in sequences with plain diatonic melodies, or sometimes none at all. The opening 20th Century Music recalls a music-school gag: playing the examples in a music theory textbook. While within a given example chords resolve properly, a subsequent example in a jarringly different key assaults the ear. (This reminds me of a set of throwaway pieces I based on Brahms waltz excerpts stripped of accidentals.) Clearly, Crane takes pleasure in his titles: Jacques Derrida goes to the supermarket might not provoke giggles, but it certainly suggests a kind of plateau: Imagine deconstruction's beleaguered parent at a nightclub, in a massage parlor, buying groceries, or on a beach. Crane, who never met music historian Gorm Busk, fancied the sound of his name. Most pieces portray friends and colleagues. Expanses of evenly voiced chords offer opportunities for subtlety, as with Prelude No. 3 's fade-away and the momentarily quickening pace in Blue Blue Blue.
Grant Chu Covell