Piano Booklets

Frank Bridge-Complete Music for PianoPeter Jacobs piano, Volume 1

1. Capriccio No 1 2.522. Capriccio No 2 6.253. A Sea Idyl 5.074. Arabesque 2.215. Fairy Tale Suite 10.46

The Princess 2.44The Ogre 1.19The Spell 3.49The Prince 2.54

6. In Autumn 7.00Retrospect 4.43Through the Eaves 2.17

7. Miniature Pastorals, Set 1 6.29Allegretto con moto 1.49Tempo di Valse 2.00Allegretto ben moderato 2.40

8. Hidden Fires 2.199. Winter Pastoral 3.4110. Miniature Pastorals, Set 2 8.09

Allegro giusto 1.51Andante con moto 3.15Allegro ma non troppo 3.03

11. Three Improvisations for the left hand 9.33At Dawn 4.40A Vigil 2.47A Revel 2.06

12. A Dedication 4.2013. Cargoyle 3.22


1. Etude Rhapsodique 2.082. Berceuse 3.243. Dramatic Fantasia 11.45

Three Poems 10.524. Sunset 3.225. Solitude 3.146. Ecstasy 4.07

Three Piano Pieces 8.477. Columbine 2.288. Minuet 2.069. Romance 4.04

Four Characteristic Pieces 10.0210. Water Nymphs 2.1211. Fragrance 3.3512. Bittersweet 2.0313. Fireflies 2.0014. Lament 5.1915. Canzonetta 2.3816. Pensee Fugitive 3.3517. Scherzettino 3.5018. Moderato 3.11

Vignettes de Marseille 11.3019. Carmelita 3.1820. Nicolette 3.1021. Zoraida 2.5822. En Fête 1.53


Three Sketches 8.001. April 2.202. Rosemary 3.573. Valse Capricieuse 1.34

The Hour Glass 12.274. Dusk 4.445. The Dew Fairy 3.196. The Midnight Tide 4.157. Graziella 3.39

Miniature Pastorals, Set 3 5.378. No.l 2.449. No.2 1.1910. No.3 1.29

Miniature Suite 6.4911. Chorale 2.4612. Impromptu 1.5613. Caprice 0.5114. March 1.06

Three Lyrics 6.0815. Heart's Ease 1.5616. Dainty Rogue 1.3217. The Hedgerow 2.3218. Bach: Come Sweet Death 3.05

Sonata 31.2519. 1st movement 14.0820. 2nd movement 8.2321. 3rd movement 8.53

FRANKBRIDGEComplete Musicfor piano

Volume 1

PETERJACOBS

FRANKBRIDGEComplete musicfor piano

Volume 1

PETER JACOBS

Recorded in St James's, Clerkenwell Green, London Photo of Peter Jacobs by Charles Tyler Front cover drawing of Bridge by John Minnion Recorded in association with the Frank Bridge Trust ©1990 C.L. Continuum Ltd

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CCD 1016

FRANK BRIDGE PIANO WORKS VOL I

CONTINUUM CCD 1016

1. Capriccio No 1 (2.52)2. Capriccio No 2 (6.25)3. A Sea Idyl (5.07)4. Arabesque (2.21)5. Fairy Tale Suite

The Princess (2.44)The Ogre (1.19) (10.46)The Spell (3.49)The Prince (2.54)

6. In AutumnRetrospect (4.43)

(7.00)Through the Eaves (2.17)

7. Miniature Pastorals, Set 1Allegretto con moto (1.49)Tempo di Valse (2.00) (6.29)Allegretto ben moderato (2.40)

8. Hidden Fires (2.19)9. Winter Pastoral (3.41)10. Miniature Pastorals, Set 2

Allegro giusto (1.51)Andante con moto (3.15) (8.09)Allegro ma non troppo (3.03)

11. Three Improvisations for the left handAt Dawn (4.40)A Vigil (2.47) (9.33)A Revel (2.06)

12. A Dedication (4.20)13. Cargoyle (3.22)

Frank BridgeIt is scarcely 20 years since the revival of interest in the music of Frank Bridge began to get under way. As recently as the late 1960s his music, save for a few short and mainly uncharacteristic works, lay virtually unplayed, and such performances as did take place often seemed actuated by the wish to accord him a minimum acknowledgement as the teacher of Benjamin Britten. The standard history of the period dismissed him in a few damning paragraphs as a man who had done violence to his own gifts by attempting to assimilate alien musical developments from the Continent, and daring to ‘uglify’ his style in imitation of freakish eccentrics such as Alban Berg.

That profoundly philistine verdict has already taken its place among history’s classic examples of critical idiocy. Bridge’s music is now regularly performed; nearly all his major works are available on record; and his pioneering spirit and lively awareness of his European contemporaries are at last accounted to him for righteousness and the basis for radically revised critical estimation. He is the archetypal example - in the sense that his achievement is, at last, clearly grasped - of that most talented generation of British composers which also included such diverse figures as Holst, Havergal Brian, John Foulds, Cyril Scott, and Francis George Scott. All of them, in their different ways, successfully made the difficult transition to a truly 20th-century musical sensibility, beyond Romanticism and in directions that ran counter to Neo-Classicism-even if their creative personalities continued to develop Romantic traits.

Bridge wrote piano music for most of his creative life. Although that genre included, in the Piano Sonata (1923-4), one of his most important works, by no means all of his other piano pieces exhibit him in his more ‘significant’, progressive persona. Largely they are comparative miniatures, characteristic genre-pieces; they provide a balancing reminder of his firm grounding in sheer traditional craftsmanship and musicality, as a practical workaday composer who produced many enjoyable pieces for public consumption. This was the kind of music by which Bridge was best known in his lifetime, and which had the

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widest circulation at the hands of amateur and professional performers alike. Many of the pieces also illustrate his debt to the keyboard manners of his French contemporaries, especially perhaps Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, whose own distinctive palette of piano colour is often transmuted in Bridge’s music by an underwash of deeply English background tones.

The first three pieces in the current selection date from 1905, a year in which Bridge was just beginning to establish a reputation in musical life and which was among his most productive in the sheer number of works he composed. It was in April of this year that he wrote the Capriccio No 1, in A minor, as an entry for a competition sponsored by the pianist Mark Hambourg. Out of the very respectable total of 96 entrants, the 26-year-old Bridge was the outright winner, and Hambourg premiered his piece at the Queen’s Hall on 20 May. Shortly afterwards Bridge went on to write a pair of solo piano pieces - A Sea Idyll and Capriccio No 2 - which he dedicated to Harold Samuel, who almost immediately gave them both a highly successful first performance at the Bechstein Hall. A Sea Idyll, dated ‘June 1905’, is a lush and possibly rather Mediterranean piece in E major with a straightforward ternary form, the outer sections barcarolle-like, with a persistent lapping ’wave-pattern' in the left hand, and a more agitated and chromatic middle section. The opening passage is varied on its return, leading to a brief Sostenuto coda. The two Capriccios, by contrast, are bravura display pieces which demand excellent technique and plenty of panache from the executant. No 1 is the more delicate of the two, gossamer-textured, with a certain measure of sardonic wit, especially in its deft prestissimo coda. No 2, in F sharp minor, is a more ambitious conception, on a larger scale, and firmly in the Chopin/Liszt tradition of keyboard virtuosity. It features an extended middle section, con tenerezza, whose sinuous melody and sighing chromatic cadences faintly foreshadow Bridge’s late Phantasm of 1931, and nicely offset the barnstorming prestidigitation of the outer portions. Equally ‘capricious’ in rhythmic pattern and figuration, the scherzo-like Arabesque dates from April 1914, and was conceived at first as the last of a set of Four Characteristic Pieces; however, Bridge eventually decided it was better to let it stand on its own (the other pieces were issued as Three Poems). A rather Slavic tune in sonorous octaves burgeons smoothly

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from the rippling textures of the opening, which return to produce a skittishly downbeat ending.

Bridge’s first set of Miniature Pastorais (he wrote three sets in all - the last was posthumously collected by Paul Hindmarsh from unpublished pieces) dates from July 1917: a triptych of children’s pieces, originally published with line-drawings by Margaret Kemp-Welch. The first movement, a spritely, march-like Allegretto con moto in F sharp minor, shows at once that notwithstanding a necessary simplification of melodic material and texture, Bridge could write for young players with no hint of indulgence or patronization. The sad little D minor waltz which follows is a perfect miniature: and the last movement, in D major and marked Allegret to ben moderato, is a gem, contrasting an oft-repeated ‘birdsong’ figure (the accompanying drawing shows two children staring up a tree) with a broad, gentle ‘English pastoral’ tune in slow jig time.

The Fairy Tale Suite, which Bridge wrote immediately afterwards, in September- October 1917, also looks at the world of childhood: however, they are not ‘children’s pieces’ but rather a grown-up reminiscence of childhood themes in the manner of Debussy’s La Boite a Joujoux or Ravel’s La Mere l’Oye (which may well have served as an immediate model). Of the four incisively-characterized movements. The Princess is a fragrant and delicate little waltz, while The Ogre is a grotesque miniature scherzo with a growly bass figure that strongly recalls Ravel’s treatment of Beauty and the Beast. The Spell is by contrast a calm, pellucidly diatonic slow movement, featuring evocatively harp-like chordal writing, The Prince forms an exuberant and comparatively extended finale, full of cheerful flourishes of knightly virtuosity.

In the Three Improvisiations for left hand only we again find Bridge effortlessly transcending imposed technical limitations and for the first time we can detect hints of his emerging musical radicalism - a development that was undoubtedly affected by the experience of the war. In fact he wrote the pieces, in May-July 1918, at the request of the pianist Douglas Fox, who had lost his right arm in the fighting. Accordingly the first of them, At Dawn, is no lyrical aubade but a sombre meditation, tonally wayward, though

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centred around a very approximate E major. The left hand accompanies its own brooding melody with arpeggio patterns that tend to span the keyboard with the severe, ‘modern’ sonorities of stacked perfect fifths and fourths, enveloped from time to time in drifting chromatic mists. There is more than a hint of anguish at the climax, when the melody returns intensified in octaves. A Vigil (equally approximately in G) seems a further refinement of Bridge’s developing harmonic procedures: its dragging, uneasy melody is subordinated to the pull of shifting chords, and again bare open fifths resound in the bass, this time as a resonant foil to the acid, cluster-like seconds accompanying the tune. The final number, A Revel, is more conservative harmonically, in that its chromaticisms are still used to cast odd shafts of colour onto its basically diatonic material. It is closer to the traditional conception of a bravura study or exercise , the single hand ceaselessly busy up and down the keyboard in a continuous stream of triplet semiquavers, with a beautifully witty will-o’-the-wisp ending.

The second set of Miniature Pastorals (February and March 1921) is as gracefully tailored to its twin purposes of teaching and entertainment as was the first, yet even into this unpretentious music a certain spareness and ambiguity have entered. The first of the three movements, an A major Allegro giusto, is a delightful miniature march with big bass-drum beats and high piping tune, with an intrusive B flat bugle-call to add a spice of bitonality. The central Andante con moto is, on the face of it, a warm and dreamy lullaby; yet it equivocates between E flat and G minor, and subtle harmonic half-lights shadow its apparent simplicity. The final tuneful Allegro non troppo in A is a kind of jig (the Kemp-Welch drawing shows children playing on their way home from a country school) that gives the impression of being enwrapped, not indeed in nostalgia, but in imperceptibly receding memory - there is an almost ghostly frisson at the start of the coda, with the main tune thin and distant over a rumbling bass pedal.

In March 1924 Bridge completed his epic, war-torn Piano Sonata, a crucial work in his development; the next month he produced Retrospect, the first of the two pieces that make up a short suite entitled In Autumn. Retrospect indeed seems an extension of the troubled creative impulse that had produced the Sonata: it has similar quality of

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intensity and anguish, and is cast in the same chromatically-saturated harmonic idiom, clouded in tonality, and subjecting its material to a much greater degree of restless transformation than in Bridge’s earlier works. The other movement of the suite, Through the Eaves, is similarly uncompromising, though lighter in texture. Essentially it consists of a single gesture, a V-shaped arpeggio fluttering down and up the keyboard, that is continually metamorphosed in fluid, iridescent harmonic colourings.

After Autumn, Winter: the lovely Winter Pastoral is a product of December 1925, and though it scrupulously avoids the painful dissonance of Retrospect it shows Bridge approaching his latest manner in terms of refinement and economy of gesture, its single dolce tune wending its way through a bare and frosty harmonic landscape, open fifths hanging in the air like puffs of condensing breath. No piece of Bridge is more clearly influenced in its layout by the eloquent spareness of some of the Debussy Preludes, yet the actual expression is very English, and all his own.

The enigmatically-titled A Dedication (it carries no dedication) was written in September 1926 at Bridge’s Sussex retreat of Friston Field. Despite the A major key- signature there is little hint of tonal stability anywhere in this piece - one of his most powerful miniatures, whose uncanny mood is one of deep feeling barely suppressed, hesitant on the edge of full expression. Its harmonic complexity probably reflects the experience of the Third String Quartet, which Bridge had completed in its first version (only to have it rejected for performance by his patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge) a few months before. Hidden Fires probably dates from around the same time, and was published in 1927. In contrast to the languors of A Dedication this is a turbulent, toccata-like piece of inexorable rhythmic drive. Perhaps the influence of late Scriabin, in works such as Vers la Flamme, comes close to the surface here, but it remains a splendidly effective recital item.

Finally, Gargoyle. This astonishing, eldritch, sardonically witty piece was composed at Friston in July 1928, and is the most ‘advanced’ of all Bridge’s piano works, with its spiky, angular melodic material, bitonal harmonies, frequent biting dissonance and

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stark, uncompromising textures. The title was only provisional - it is followed by a query on the manuscript - but the music could indeed be a brilliantly vivid impression of some scuttling, sarcastic, impish being. It had to wait nearly 50 years to become available for performance, in an edition by Paul Hindmarsh. Bridge had sent the piece, on completion, to the same publishers who for the past 18 years had accepted and printed his every short instrumental piece without question. But this one was evidently too strong for them - or too unlikely to be ‘a good seller’: it was rejected and returned to the composer. Bridge’s feelings can only be guessed at; all we know is that he stuck Gargoyle into an envelope and never wrote a piano piece again.

©1989 by Calum MacDonald

Peter Jacobs has been an enthusiastic advocate for English piano music for several years, often playing pieces by composers whose neglect has been unjustified. His long list of recordings bears witness to this - four records of sonatas by Harold Truscott, the major works of John Foulds, Alan Bush (the 24 Preludes, etc.,), Balfour Gardiner, Thomas Wilson, Vaughan Williams, and others. One of his most successful records has been a recital of pieces by Billy Mayerl, and recently he has begun to explore the neglected French repertoire. His disc of the six sonatinas of Maurice Emmanuel has been critically acclaimed.

Peter Jacobs has always had a deep affection and respect for the music of Frank Bridge, and gave the first performance, in 1979, of his Dramatic Fantasia. He believes that Bridge’s body of piano music (more than 50 pieces, plus the Sonata) represents what is probably the finest achievement by any English composer in this field, and that Bridge’s deep musical and spiritual development is intimately reflected in these works.

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Volume 2

PETERJACOBS

FRANKBRIDGEComplete musicfor piano

Volume 2

PETER JACOBS

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Producer: John Bishop Recording engineer: Mike Skeet Tape editor: John TaylorRecording location: Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead, London Recorded in association with the Frank Bridge Trust Photograph of Peter Jacobs by Charles Tyler Front>cover drawing of Bridge by John Minnion

©1990 C.L.Continuum Ltd

Volume 1-CCD 1010 Volume 3-CCD 1019

1. Etude Rhapsodique (2.08)2. Berceuse (3.24)3. Dramatic Fantasia (11.45)

Three Poems4. Sunset (3.22)5. Solitude (3.14) (10.52)6. Ecstasy (4.07)

Three Piano Pieces7. Columbine (2.28)8. Minuet (2.06) (8.47)9. Romance (4.04)

Four Characteristic Pieces10. Water Nymphs (2.12)11. Fragrance (3.35) (10.02)12. Bittersweet (2.03)13. Fireflies (2.00)14. Lament (5.19)15. Canzonetta (2.38)16. Pensee Fugitive (3.35)17. Scherzettino (3.50)18. Moderato (3.11)

Vignettes de Marseille19. Carmelita (3.18)20. Nicolette (3.10) (11.30)21. Zoraida (2.58)22. En Fête (1.53)

FRANK BRIDGE PIANO WORKS VOL 2

CONTINUUM CCD 1016

CCD 1018

Frank BridgeFrank Bridge wrote music for the piano for much of his creative life; yet although he contributed one of his most important works to the genre with his Piano Sonata (1923-4), by no means all of his other piano pieces exhibit him in his more ‘significant’, progressive persona. In general they are comparative miniatures, character-sketches, genre-pieces; they provide a balancing reminder of Bridge’s firm grounding in sheer traditional craftsmanship and musicality, as a practical workaday composer who produced many enjoyable pieces for public consumption. This was the kind of music by which he was best-known in his lifetime, and which received the widest circulation at the hands of amateur and professional performers alike. Many of the pieces also illustrate his debt to the keyboard manners of his French contemporaries, especially perhaps Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, whose own distinctive palette of piano colour is often transmuted in Bridge’s music by an underwash of deeply English background tones.

Yet this should not be taken as implying that the music is necessarily ‘minor’ or derivative. Even in the smaller pieces there is sometimes a flamboyance of gesture, or a disturbing intensity of expression, which may cast a revealing light on the painful personal development of a composer whose larger-scale achievements were generally in the spheres of orchestral and chamber music. Volume 2 of this first complete recording of Bridge’s piano music therefore spans the gamut between music for mere pleasant listening and works of a deeper, or more ambitious, kind. It also charts the development of the Bridge ‘salon’ piece into a genre as deeply personal as the Brahmsian intermezzo or the Fauréian nocturne.

Earliest and most unassuming of the pieces here recorded is the Berceuse, a miniature that Bridge wrote originally for small orchestra in August 1901. It seems to have been a firm favourite of his, for he not only published it in 1902 in versions for violin (or cello) and piano and for violin and strings, but subsequently (in 1929) made a different small-orchestra version and also the transcription for piano solo recorded

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here. As its title implies, it is a gentle, lulling tune (in B flat) with a slightly more anxious central section over a pedal G and a nagging triplet tremolo; the triplet rhythm stays to enliven the return of the main tune.

The latest discoveries to be added to the canon of Bridge’s piano music are three separate manuscript pieces which may be grouped together solely on account of their early date: a Pensée Fugitive in F minor dated ‘Summer 1902’, a Moderato in E minor, dated ‘Cardigan, Sept 5/'03’, and a Scherzettino in G minor which is probably the earliest of the lot: Paul Hindmarsh assigns it to the period 1901-2. Dedicated ‘to O.B.’ and marked Prestissimo, this is within its moderate compass a rather ambitious student piece and certainly tricky for the pianist, with quite a wide range of virtuoso textures in the outer sections and a skittish central trio in G major ending in a cadenza-like chromatic flourish. The Penseé Fugitive, more modest in its requirements, was probably envisaged as the first of a set of pieces (the title is actually given in the plural, and followed by the numeral T). It is built on a cello-like espressivo melody and a rapidly- rocking triplet texture that goes on chiming and thrumming in various registers throughout the length of the piece. The brief Moderato grows from two contrasted ideas, a song-like melody and a more dance-like staccato one; it rises to a climax, and then subsides with the song trailing away into the lower reaches of the left hand.

Another early piece, the Dramatic Fantasia, is by contrast among the most ambitious piano works Bridge ever wrote. Apparently composed in January 1906 for a Royal College of Music friend, the pianist Florence Smith, it remained entirely unknown in the composer’s lifetime and only came to light in 1978; the world premiere was given the following year at the Wigmore Hall by Peter Jacobs. The Dramatic Fantasia seems to have been Bridge’s first essay in the kind of ’phantasy arch-form’ (basically a sonata design with an interpolated slow movement) which he later employed with such success in his chamber music, and even in large-scale orchestral designs such as Phantasm. It appears that Bridge originally entitled it ‘Sonata’ - maybe, indeed, he intended it as the first part of a multi-movement Piano Sonata (perhaps with the slightly earlier Etude Rhapsodique forming the scherzo) - but eventually realized it was a self-sufficient

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structure on its own and gave it the present title. An Adagio introduction in E flat minor adumbrates the basic material, which gives rise to a striving Allegro moderato first subject in that key and a warmer, more chordal Ben sostenuto second group hovering around B flat major. Virtuosic arpeggio writing derived from the first theme closes the exposition and there follows a broadly melodious Lento ma non troppo slow movement in a wingly lyrical B major. The Allegro sets in once again in F major, the second subject reappearing now in E flat major - in which key the work comes to a conclusion of triumphant bravura.

The Etude Rhapsodique was written in November 1905 but, like the Dramatic Fantasia, it remained unpublished and unperformed among Bridge’s papers. Its world premiere took place as recently as 1986, in a BBC radio recital by John Gough. This brief but volatile and virtuosic movement - in a ‘C major’ that serves largely as the blank background for the imposition of a myriad chromatic colourations - has something of the coldly intoxicating, post-Chopinesque bravura we might associate with early Scriabin. The piece was eventually published in 1990

We move on in time to find Bridge the accomplished miniaturist represented by the Three Piano Pieces, which he published in 1913. The Minuet which forms the centrepiece of this set nevertheless dates from 1901, almost exactly contemporary with the Berceuse; but it was extensively revised for its publication with the other two numbers, which date from 1912. The first panel of the resulting triptych, Columbine, is a delicately-perfumed and rather capricious A flat major waltz in salon style. The trim little Minuet itself has a somewhat Ravelian air; one suspects its shiny successions of parallel fourths and sixths are products of its revision, and of acquaintance with the French composer’s recent work. The final Romance is a rather more personal utterance, its languorous opening section becoming agitato and producing a contrasting tune that drives to a maestoso climax before the music progressively calms towards a peaceful semplice close.

The Three Poems were composed in 1913-14 as part of a set originally entitled Four

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Characteristic Pieces (not to be confused with the actual suite of that title from 1917, also on this disc): the fourth piece was Arabesque, published separately (and recorded on Continum CCD 1016). The Poems chronicle an increasing sensitivity and subtlety of utterance, moving steadily away from the salon-music archetype - a development paralleled in his orchestral output by the tone-poem Summer, whose atmosphere of rapt nature-mysticism these Poems share. Sunset might be viewed as a study in spacing, in the evocative effects to be derived from the resonant placement of bare fourths and fifths and plangent false relations with a hint of a gentle berceuse rhythm and a gradual darkening of harmony and register. Solitude is a striking example of what can be achieved out of a single texture and gesture: a brooding, slowly descending tune whose every bar is undermined by an obsessive, upward-curling fragment of chromatic scale. Most remarkable (and substantial) of these pieces is Ecstasy, whose slowly-built- up opening harmonies and long-breathed, tonally ambiguous melody suggest a passing acquaintance with the op 11 Klavierstücke of Schoenberg. That impression is hardly sustained as the piece launches into a romantic, fluidly surging Allegro con moto - but this generates a considerable rhetorical force and virtuosity, and the piece evolves fantasia-like with a restless abandon, finally provoking a dissonant climax and a return of the Lento introduction to square the circle.

Though small in compass, the little Lament of 1915 must be accounted one of Bridge’s most significant works, if only because it is the archetypal demonstration of the possibilities for expressive intensity inherent even in what might appear an occasional miniature. It bears the poignant dedication: Catherine, aged 9, 'Lusitania' 1915 - and was inspired by the deaths of a family of friends (Catherine was the young daughter) among the 1,200 people drowned when the great Cunarder was sunk by a U-boat off the coast of Southern Ireland on 7 May 1915. Bridge’s own deep sense of shock at this outrange of total war is manifest in every bar of the brief but deeply troubled Lament, in which harmony of a severe, almost choked, chromatic complexity builds up over a tolling pedal E flat. The work was originally conceived for string orchestra, and has become fairly well known in that form in recent years - but Bridge’s own contemporary transcription for solo piano is a surprisingly effective alternative.

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With the Four Characteristic Pieces of April-May 1917 we find Bridge in complete command of a keyboard style which owes much to contemporary French idioms, but is rapidly evolving in a wholly individual direction. There is an almost casual virtuosity of gesture in the way Water Nymphs swathes its elegant tune in liquidly rippling arpeggio figuration. The Fragrance which gives the second piece its title is primarily an harmonic one: a haunting pedal figure and a chord that spans a major seventh. From these delicate materials grows a hesitant melody that gives rise to a movement of some emotional and textural complexity. Only at the close is the key revealed as an unequivocal E major, as the music evanesces in a return of the opening figure and a pppp whiff of tune. (Bridge dedicated this movement to his wife Ethel.) Bittersweet brings a fragrance of another kind, evolving at first a trellis-work of sinuous chromaticism. The emotional temperature rises unexpectedly high in a sudden outburst of con fuoco vigour and a swift cadenza-like Presto that gradually winds down to a paler, slimmer version of the opening music. Finally, Fireflies is a brilliant bitonal study in continuous flickering semiquaver motion, which could well have been inspired by such virtuoso conceptions as Debussy’s Mouvement or Poissons d’or.

In August 1925 Bridge and his wife were refreshed by a holiday touring in the Alps and along the Mediterranean coast in the company of his patroness, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Shortly afterwards he recaptured some of the carefree mood of that time in the piano suite Vignettes de Marseille - a serenade-like work, remarkable among his music of the mid-1920s for its comparative gaiety of spirit and bright, uncomplicated textures, all four movements hinting at ‘local colour’ and based on Mediterranean dance-rhythms. For some reason Bridge does not seem to have tried to get it published, though 13 years later he produced an orchestral version of the first three movements under the title Vignettes de danse. It was only in 1978 that the original piano suite received its first performance (in a broadcast on BBC Scotland by Kathleen Renilson) and was published in an edition by Paul Hindmarsh. It seems possible that Bridge’s intention was an affectionate parody of light-music conventions. The first three movements bear girls’ names, fictitious postcard beauties, in the manner of popular salon pieces, and Carmelita proves Spanish indeed with her vigorous habanera rhythm,

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while Zoraida, with her hints of oriental mystery and exotic fioriture, clearly has some Moorish blood. Between them Nicolette, obviously the French girl, displays a more formal grace in a rather more complex movement. Finally, En Fete, a cheerful rondo with hints of march and fanfare, provides an appropriately exuberant ending.

Written in 1926, the Canzonetta (Happy South) (of which Bridge also made an orchestral version) might almost be an appendix to the Vignettes de Marseille in its seemingly artless outpouring of florid melody in clear, sunlit keyboard textures.




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Volume 3

PETERJACOBS

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019 FRANK

BRIDGEComplete musicfor piano

Volume 3

PETER JACOBS

Producer: John Bishop Recording engineer: Mike Skeet Tape editor: John TaylorRecording location: Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead, London Recorded in association with the Frank Bridge Trust Photograph of Peter Jacobs by Charles Tyler Front>cover drawing of Bridge by John Minnion

©1990 C.L.Continuum Ltd

Three Sketches1. April (2.20)2. Rosemary (3.57) (8.00)3. Valse Capricieuse (1.34)

The Hour Glass4. Dusk (4.44)5. The Dew Fairy (3.19) (12.27)6. The Midnight Tide (4.15)7. Graziella (3.39)

Miniature Pastorals, Set 38. No.l (2.44) )9. No.2 (1.19) (5.37)

10. No.3 (1.29)Miniature Suite

11. Chorale (2.46)12. Impromptu (1.56) (6.49)13. Caprice (0.51)14. March (1.06)

Three Lyrics15. Heart's Ease (1.56)16. Dainty Rogue (1.32)

(6.08)17. The Hedgerow (2.32)18. Bach: Come Sweet Death (3.05)

Sonata19. 1st movement20. 2nd movement (8.23) (31.25)

21. 3rd movement (8.53)

Volume 1-CCD 1016Volume 3-CCD 1018

FRANK BRIDGE PIANO WORKS VOL 3

CONTINUUM CCD 1019

(14.08)

CCD 1019

Frank BridgeFrank Bridge wrote music for the piano for much of his creative life; yet although he contributed one of his most important works to the genre with his Piano Sonata (1923-4), by no means all of his other piano pieces exhibit him, as that does, in his more ‘significant’, progressive persona. The bulk of the compositions with which he enriched the medium are comparative miniatures, character-sketches, genre-pieces; they provide a balancing reminder of Bridge’s firm grounding in sheer traditional craftsmanship and musicality, as a practical workaday composer who produced many enjoyable pieces for public consumption. This was the kind of music by which he was best-known in his lifetime, and which received the widest circulation at the hands of amateur and professional performs alike. Many of the pieces also illustrate his debt to the keyboard manners of his French contemporaries, especially perhaps Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, whose own distinctive palette of piano colour is often transmuted in Bridge’s music by an underwash of deeply English background tones. One of the minor sensations of British keyboard music, however, is the steady development of the Bridge ‘salon’ piece into a genre as deeply personal as the Brahmsian intermezzo or the Fauréian nocturne.

The concluding volume of this survey of Bridge’s complete piano output shows these contrasting approaches particularly clearly, as it counterposes the great Sonata with a cross-section of lighter pieces and occasional pieces from the composer’s still not fully explored and astonishingly diverse output.

Quintessential examples of Bridge’s early salon style may be found in the Three Sketches of 1906. At least one of them - Rosemary - retained a perennial popularity through the long decades, when Bridge’s more substantial music was neglected or forgotten. Yet they were not given their first performance until 1910 (by Eileen Edwards at the Bechstein Hall), and not published until 1915. The set opens with April, a capricious little scherzo, beginning in E minor but brightening to a confident and finally contended E major, its glistening streams of thirds and sixths evocative of the month of

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showers and sunshine. Rosemary delights with its charming and memorable main tune, yet the uncomplicated mood is darkened in the central section by brooding harmonies like a passing cloud, and by an unexpectedly passionate Allegro outburst. The third piece, a somewhat Chopinesque Valse Capricieuse in G minor, displays Bridge’s Edwardian drawing-room manner at its most elegantly balletic.

All the other music here dates from Bridge’s full maturity, although in the early 1920s he was still struggling completely to individuate his musical language. The suite The Hour Glass was written between September 1919 and April 1920. Although the titles of the individual movements might still suggest the salon piece, the harmonic language - while far short of the chromatic complexity and intensity which Bridge was discovering in his larger works - has developed with an austere refinement, bare octaves and fifths doing service for the more comfortable diatonic formulations of the early years. As a result, the pieces evoke a deeper level of response, not least in the rapt contemplation of Dusk, with its discreet decoration of a hauntingly repetitive, chant-like melody. The Dew Fairy is a little gem, a virtuoso arpeggio-study of the utmost delicacy with a piping melody on top. Lastly, The Midnight Tide, a resonant, sonorous study with an epic sweep and surge, perhaps traces its ancestry back to Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie (and indeed La Mer). But Bridge was already a poet of the sea, as his orchestral suite of that title had shown, and this dark invocation is one of the great English sea-pieces for piano, along with the likes of William Baines’s Goodnight to Flamboro’ or Greville Cooke’s Cormorant Crag.

The following year, 1921, was one of Bridge’s richest for piano music. As well as sketching the first movement of his Piano Sonata and the first of the Three Lyrics, he wrote a large number of children’s pieces: among them his second set of Miniature Pastorals (available on CCD 1016), the piano-duet ballet In the Shop, and at least seven other short pieces which lay unpublished during his lifetime and for many years after his death. In 1977, Paul Hindmarsh edited three of these to make a third set of Miniature Pastorals; like the two sets that Bridge himself published, these represent an elegant simplification of his mature idiom, though unlike those earlier sets they bear no titles or

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accompanying drawings to set the mind working in any programmatic direction. The opening piece, an Andante molto tranquillo, is a wistful tune in G minor; there follows a little buzzing B minor scherzo, Allegro con moto; while the final A minor Allegretto vivace has the character of a vigorous yet courtly minuet.

Bridge had made fair copies of these three pieces, but Paul Hindmarsh has recently discovered three more, in sketch form, among the many uncatalogued pages of Bridge material in the Frank Bridge Collection at the Royal College of Music in London. He has combined them with a march that Bridge seems to have sketched for the Miniature Pastorals, and has edited them (for publication in 1990 by Thames Publishing) under the title of Miniature Suite, christening the individual movements Chorale, Impromptu, Caprice and March. Although, like the Pastorals, they date from April 1921, they are technically more difficult than any of the three sets of children’s pieces (which may be why Bridge decided not to make use of them). The Chorale could also be seen as a sketch for a funeral march, since fanfare and drum-roll effects frame and punctuate its passages of quiet quasi-organum. The lifting Impromptu, marked Andante tranquillo, is closely related to the first piece of Miniature Pastorals Set 3 but barer and wispier in texture - perhaps a first attempt, or a parallel but alternative line of development of the same thought. The dexterous and skittish Caprice is perhaps the most interesting movement, adventurous enough in texture and harmony for a more ambitious piece - although Bridge in fact left this unfinished and Paul Hindmarsh has had to complete it (as a ‘fantasy arch-form’ incorporating music jotted down elsewhere on the manuscript). The truculent little March is rhythmically repetitive but spiky and angular, and quite inventive harmonically.

From this same rich year of 1921 comes Heart’s Ease, published in 1922 together with Dainty Rogue (from that year) as the first two of Three Lyrics; the third number, The Hedgerow, did not follow until 1924. The Lyrics therefore framed the composition of the Piano Sonata, but one has to look very closely to catch any reflection of its anguished spirit (that is much more apparent in Retrospect, written two months before The Hedgerow, and recorded on CCD1016). The tiny Heart’s Ease (which Bridge also

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arranged for violin and piano) could be a miniature of much earlier than 1921 were it not for its extreme purity of expression - a serene, folk-like tune with the simplest of accompaniments, descending from the heights of the keyboard and vanishing up there again at the end. Dainty Rogue is more characteristic of his mature style in its chromatic side-slips, but remains a skittish, scurrying scherzo. The Hedgerow, composed in June 1924 after the Piano Sonata, is perhaps the deepest of these three pieces, and seems to play wistful games with that work’s harmonic toughness, using passing dissonance and chomatic alteration as a spice for what might otherwise be warmly diatonic thoughts. It certainly uses the widest range of textures, producing shadows and half-lights far removed from the pristine simplicity of Heart’s Ease.

Nevertheless, all these works are dwarfed (in scale, importance and intensity, if not in technique) by Bridge’s solitary Piano Sonata, a masterwork achieved with great pains ‘...every now and then I thought I’d give up the whole work and bum it’, he wrote to Elizabeth Coolidge just after its completion). Written at intervals between Easter 1921 and March 1924, it is dedicated to the memory of Bridge’s friend, the composer Ernest Farrar, killed in action in France in 1917. Myra Hess gave the first performances in London and New York in 1925-6; Mother important early advocate was Alan Bush, who even introduced the work in Berlin in 1931. A sustained dramatic outburst of anger and painful elegy, the Sonata represents the dark creative epiphany of all the progressive and radical forces that had gradually been re-shaping Bridge’s musical personality since almost the beginning of the Great War. It bitterly divided critical opinions on the significance of his ‘modernist’ stylistic evolution, and divided they stayed for the rest of his career.

Though it unquestionably derives from the pianistic traditions and rhetoric of the heroic 19th-century sonata (ultimately, perhaps, the Liszt B minor), what makes Bridge’s Sonata so remarkable is his determined and systematic attempt to forge an eloquent and coherent musical language out of harmonic and textured features he had previously treated more as available options for colour and contrast in music that still paid court to the conventions of tonality. The result is an expanded and dissonant harmonic idiom

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resembling that of Viennese Expressionism’ (as displayed in Berg’s exactly- contemporary Wozzeck). The basis of the idiom owes much to several obsessively- exploited features: melodic and harmonic use of seconds, sevenths, tritones and ninths, the superimposition of fourths and fifths, and the creation of complex chords by the combination of orthodox but tenuously-related triads. Perhaps the most characteristic example of the latter is the chord that results from superimposing a major triad over a minor one whose root is a whole tone lower: this creates a sonority that is immediately recognizable as Tate Bridge’. Such procedures can be regarded as ‘bitonal’, but the effect is not so much that of combined and opposed keys as a continual, painful refraction and distortion of the traditional elements of tonality. And the melodic language is similarly fractured, approaching that state which Schoenberg once defined as ‘musical prose’.

The three movements are played without a break. The first - in a species of Bridge’s favourite ‘fantasy arch’ form - is prefaced by a Lento ma non troppo introduction beginning with solemn, tolling G-sharps, and presently takes wing in a wiry, muscular, simmering Allegro energico. The G-sharps become an important motif in their own right, and development is seamlessly and complexly organic. The slow movement, Andante ben moderato, is a plangent elegy that seems to speak in highly personal terms of the composer’s grief and bitterness at the senselessness of war and the loss of his friend. After the briefest of slow introductions the finale, Allegro non troppo, develops as an acerbic yet aspiring march whose themes distantly recall those of the first movement, and actual first-movement material eventually reappears, leading to a stormy and bitter coda that transfigures and aggrandizes the Sonata’s very opening: a remarkable close to a remarkable work.

Graziella, dating from 1926, is a complex piece, elusive in mood, its elegant yet tonally wayward melody coloured by shifting harmonic half-lights. Despite the ‘salon’ character of the title, and a few apparent concessions to the conventions of the ‘character piece’, Bridge here totally transends his original salon style, to produce a statement at once highly personal and enigmatic, as if to hint at the manifold complexities underlying every human character.

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The arrangement of Bach’s Komm, susser Tod (from the Schemelli Gesangbuch) was made in June 1931 as Bridge’s contribution to that remarkable collaborative anthology of the best and worst in contemporary British ideas of piano transcription, A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen; it was first performed by her, along with the other contributions (which included Bach items by Bax, Vaughan Williams, Lambert, Berners, Walton and others), at the Wigmore Hall in October 1932. If the jewel of the book remains Vaughan Williams’s expansive, glowing Choral and Choral Prelude on Ach, bleib bei Uns, Bridge’s serene chorale-setting is one of the best of the others, relatively restrained and essentialized in its approach to Bach’s original, apart from the ’pianistic’ arpeggios of the central section. In 1936 he made a version of this transcription for string orchestra.




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Documents

Piano Booklets