Alun Hoddinott isn't a pianist himself, but he has written (so far) three concertos for the instrument and 11 sonatas. Something obviously draws him back to the piano again and again, and the value of a complete recording of his sonatas in chronological order, of which this is the first of two volumes, is that it demonstrates why. A continued fascination with the variety of the instrument's sonority, for a start. One might call it a quasi-orchestral use of the piano, except that his keyboard writing, though often taxing, is highly idiomatic, indeed pianistic. Dramatic contrasts of colour and texture have always been a feature of his style, and as these works follow each other you can hear ideas in one sonata prompting further explorations in the next. The Fourth Sonata, for example, followed the Third after only a brief interval, and you sense Hoddinott realizing that the contrasts within the first movement of the Third could be developed to the sequence of strikingly contrasted movements—a sort of five-movement sonata in rondo form, three toccatas enclosing an aria and a nocturne—of the Fourth. You can also hear him enjoying, as early as the First Sonata, the piano's propensity for crisply florid ornament and rhetorical gesture, and expanding on this, as his acquaintance with the instrument and its players grew, to a shrewd understanding of the musical uses of virtuosity: the Fifth Sonata sounds very like a portrait of the pianism of John Ogdon, who gave its first performance in 1968.
Other likeable features of these sonatas include the fact that such apparently recondite formal processes as palindrome always make perfect musical sense and (this will sound like a back-handed compliment, but it isn't intended so) a very precise knowledge of when to stop. Another composer, having invented the brilliantly agile central toccata of the Fourth Sonata, would have instinctively repeated it, hunting around for some contrasting idea to serve as trio section. Hoddinott knows, and you sense him using this knowledge with increasing assurance as the cycle progresses, that some ideas gain impact from compression rather than expansion. That's one reason, no doubt, why these five short sonatas (but not one of them is a sonatina) make such a satisfying programme. Jones's performances have just the sort of bold brilliance that they need, and the recording conveys this well.'