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Yessonata: Hearing Rick Wakeman playing a grand piano, the mastery and majesty is all too clear / At The Barrier

Posted: November 6, 2024

At The Barrier's Mike Ainscoe writes…..After the extravaganza of his London Palladium release and an appearance at Cropredy, Rick is back to basics. Perhaps basics is the wrong word, but like Richard Thompson armed with an acoustic guitar, seeing and hearing Rick Wakeman playing a grand piano, the mastery and majesty is all too clear. Forget the flurries of notes from the minimoog or the short-lived birotron or the massive church organ from Awaken or Close To The Edge. Rick and a piano has to be the desert island choice.

Not for the first time on solo piano by a long chalk, the latest outing is of two long form pieces which are both created from larger works. Both are played on Rick’s favourite Steinway Model D Concert Grand, owned by Andrew Giller, at The Old Granary in Suffolk.

i’ll name that snippet…
We’re told that on the new Yessonata, there are allegedly more than 30 musical fragments of Yes music of which Rick was a part, plus The Meeting from the ABWH. That’s ‘sort of’ Yes – Yesmusic plus it was called at the time – but couldn’t possibly be ignored. That’s quite some ask and like a fellow reviewer elsewhere, I got as far as seventeen sections (some from the same track) I could identify.

Starting off with the immediately recognizable intro to Awaken, the feel is of a performance of elegiac quality. Awaken is revisited a couple of times, providing the strong spine and there are a couple of trips to Close To The Edge (you can seek out a fuller performance on the Youtoob). It’s hard not to join in with a burst of “I awoke this morning, love laid me down by the river,” at one point and on a couple of occasions, where the tempos take a jolt, you feel that were Jools Holland at the keys, parts of Yessonata might turn into a boogie woogie passage. Fortunately, Rick reins in any real temptation to radically re-imagine.

gone are the days of the knights
As an encore, flip the record over from a similar piece that cherry picks from The Myths & Legends Of King Arthur and The Knights Of The Round Table, fortunately re-titled as The King Arthur Piano Suite. Again, main themes are highlighted and it possibly sits more comfortably with the ‘medley’ being taken from a two sided album rather than a body of work like the Yes piece.

Within a couple of seconds, the main theme makes its mark and we’re off once more into a ride through the pageantry and legend that plays out. Regular bouts of ‘dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, daaaah!’ over the first few minutes remind us where we are. Guinevere sets off a section that sits easily in the elegiac category before Merlin bursts into life. The final quarter is a journey of fleet fingered pleasures that can, and does, end on the only way it could.

Some might argue that Rick could probably play these piece sin his sleep. Even that he could knock them off in a couple of afternoons. The key is simply to reinforce what an exceptional composer and musician Wakeman is; his contributions as session player and band member are plain but he’ll go down in history as a pianist of unquestionable skill and taste.


Rick Wakeman on solo piano – arguably his best format.

Release Date: 8th November 2024

Label: Cherry Red Records

Format: CD / digital / LP


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