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Contents:
DDD Total Time = 71:46 - Recorded at Hillesden Church, Hillesden 1997 This work had an unusually long gestation. Wishing to compose something in memory of my father, who had died from cancer in 1983, I made repeated attempts at the exercise for some years. Sharing Gerald Finzi’s belief that compositional problems are solved less by will power than by time, and feeling my first efforts to be -in Molière’s phrase- "bon à mettre au cabinet", in the course of intermittent onslaughts I advanced no further than the end of the first movement by 1994. Meanwhile other works passed by. The overall plan of the Sonata and its thematic matter had existed in essence since 1984 and my slowness resulted not from a lack of urgency, but from a sense that I had yet to acquire the requisite ‘language’. Nonetheless the style is unrepentantly romantic in its essentials, as befits a work whose more objective frame of reference is the ‘cello’s mainstream antecedence of Brahms, Rakhmaninov, Elgar and others. As such it may be taken or left by listeners who respectively accept what it is not trying to do or expect all music to put its back into advancing the frontiers of modernism. The scherzo was written relatively quickly during 1994, but in early 1995 I was as stuck as ever with the predominantly slow finale. In March that year my mother died, suddenly and in my absence. Full of life, humour and an almost alarming energy, she had seemed years younger than her threescore-and-ten. I make no apology for paying tribute here to a human being whose kindness was legend; the memory of whose joyous eccentricities, earthy humour and famously irrational intolerances called forth laughter even during her funeral address. The last movement of the Sonata fought its own way out, in exceptionally unpromising practical circumstances, during April and May. In emotional terms it is thus the product of sharper memory than what precedes it, despite fulfilling a preconceived overall plan. Some observations on content are in order. There are many obvious aspects of cyclic form (wherein themes recur in old or changed guises in successive movements). The simple consonant chords which open the work suggest the area of B minor but do not permit clear tonal orientation. After a withdrawn and abstracted first statement by the ‘cello a faster tempo is established. A theme derived from the opening articulates a crucial tritonal relationship before a substantial transition passage leads to a broad first climax and thence to a second subject precariously anchored to F minor. The tritonal key relationship of the two main themes reflects the outline of the first and also a general ambivalence of governing tonality which persists until the end of the work. In the course of an extensive development section a new motif assumes progressive significance; this consists of a rising semitone, perfect fifth and further semitone followed by a descending whole tone. Exploration of these themes brings about a central climax. A varied recapitulation presents the principal subjects in reverse order while also finding ways to blur the distinction between them by superimposition. The exposition’s climax is echoed briefly but recedes into a retrospective glimpse of the work’s opening. The dynamic level is given little space in which to subside, and this -together with a tonally inconclusive ending in D minor -aims to suggest unfinished argument. As a whole the movement owes something to the ‘Cello Sonata by Frank Bridge, a transitional work which prefigures that composer’s astringent music of the late nineteen twenties and early ‘thirties. The scherzo is a compound of many influences. Its dimensions acknowledge the precedent of Beethoven’s great A major Sonata opus 69, while the energy of the main theme may recall Shostakovich. After a piano solo introduction it is composed of four sections of more or less equal length, the second and fourth being succeeded by slower material amounting to alternative ‘trio’ passages. Both trio sections lead to impassioned climaxes. After the second a return of the principal material engenders a ferocious further climax which abruptly dissipates in a retrospective coda marked ‘sognando’ (dreaming). The ending is abrupt and elusive. The first three of the four main fast paragraphs are clearly punctuated by related endings in the same cadence formula followed by a momentary silence and a rhythmically identical ‘attack’ thereafter; the fourth leads straight into the reprise of the trio. Sections three and four amount to a varied recapitulation of one and two. An avowedly eclectic composer may find himself at times ‘borrowing’, or at least owing, rather more than he had intended or previously noticed. Here I was struck quite late in the day by a fairly obvious superficial resemblance to the scherzo in Elgar’s Second Symphony, not merely in the use of pounding chords but also in many more incidental rhythmic ambiguities. Discovery of this is duly ‘recorded’ in a fleeting but deliberate rhythmic quotation from the opening bars of Elgar’s scherzo. A lengthy unaccompanied ‘cello cadenza follows. Past themes are revisited and, thanks to the piano’s silence, subsumed ultimately into an introspective stillness which lays the ground for the finale ‘proper’ (launched by the piano’s reawakening). This begins as an Adagio. In the Ms score appear these lines by the Second World War poet Alun Lewis: Out of the depths of the sea The music unfolds in a rhapsodically songful fashion without losing sight of the principal motifs already mentioned, including references to scherzo material, now sometimes in inverted form. An accompanying rhythm like a funereal drumbeat emerges as well, eventually forming the background to an increasingly restless restatement of the opening theme. This is abruptly cut off and an acceleration leads to an Allegro characterised by driving rhythms and extensive reference to the thematic forms of the first movement. At the climax of this section a theme from the preceding slow music is heard fortissimo in the upper register of the ‘cello. The movement thus far has attempted a consistently escalating dramatic curve. It now broadens into the principal climax of the movement and of the entire work, a prolonged lament. This inhabits the tonal area of B minor, the first sound heard in the work. The climax subsides at length into an Epilogue where the repeated chord device from the work’s opening is at last re-established, all passion spent, beneath a ‘cello cantilena. A valedictory reference to the trio music of the Scherzo is heard. Just when the music seems doomed to final extinction it flickers back to life in a distant echo of the Allegro before an ending of enigmatic suddenness which ultimately confirms B minor as sovereign key. Elgar may again come to mind, -this time through his ‘Cello Concerto’s final pages. This Sonata is a long work: as such, fair game for adverse reaction particularly from any out of sympathy with its conservative aesthetic. While this much is freely acknowledged, the length has arisen less from emotional incontinence than from inherent risks in the structure, -these increasing wherever sonata-based motivic development is allied to a natural leaning towards contrapuntal possibilities. A design justified on grounds of logic may not of itself result in a perfect solution of dramatic problems. These considerations have jostled one another for a long time, however. Like Vaughan Williams of his Fourth Symphony, I can now say only that " I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant at the time". The Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano was given its world première performance by David Watkin and Howard Moody at the Wigmore Hall, London, in July 1996. Piano solo pieces: Hunt’s Bay (1994) and Farewell to Hirta (1985) These two pieces, like almost everything else I have written for piano, are associated with the sea, a source of unending fascination. They have little else in common except, intermittently, a descending motif of a semitone, major third and whole tone. This has appeared elsewhere in my output. Hunt’s Bay was commissioned by Southern Arts. It takes as its title that of a poem by Vernon Watkins (1906-67). This in turn alludes to a stretch of Welsh coast on the Gower Peninsula. Watkins is too often remembered solely for a long correspondence with his friend Dylan Thomas (who improvidently lost all Watkins’ contributions while Watkins lovingly saved those of Thomas for posterity). The Watkins muse, scarcely less exuberant than that of Thomas (though more inclined to divine some purpose in literal meaning), addressed the mystic ideal of an imperishable poetic and historic Myth perpetually re-enacted by the elemental forces which surround us. His elegiac verse in memory of Thomas forms a natural and moving extension of this. The following lines preface the Hunt’s Bay music: Hurled, hollow darkness, hungry caves ... Light tapers in the tombs After a peremptory spread chord the piece launches into a restless Allegro where violence yields often to fitfully eerie sounds (the latter extract above) or to brief moments of calmer introspection. This persists through a slower central section. Momentary silences occur which listeners familiar with Ravel’s macabre Scarbo may ascribe to similar general intentions. After a jagged series of rhythmic cross-currents welling up from the bass regions a varied recapitulation of the opening section occurs. This builds to a ferocious climax. The volume subsides but the momentum survives, leading into an extended epilogue. I recall that at the time the following was repeating itself in my head: Out in the bay the waves pursue their indifferent dances. This seemed perfectly to suggest the treacherous dissembling innocence with which the sea may obliterate a storm. I later traced it back to George Mackay Brown, and quote it here in tribute to that great Orcadian, who died in 1996. Ultimately the work’s opening chord is heard again, now stilled and mysterious, and soon thereafter the music briefly flickers into life - again Scarbo-like -before final extinction. Farewell to Hirta (1985) Hirta is not a person, but an island; more properly several. The archipelago of St Kilda (Hirta in Gaelic) lies some fifty miles west of the Outer Hebrides. Beyond lies only Rockall. On the main island of this otherwise ultima thule lived for centuries a uniquely interbred and self-supporting community of seldom more than two hundred. St Kilda boasts the highest sea cliffs in Great Britain, its summit rising fourteen hundred feet sheer out of the Atlantic. The islands present one of the most awesome sights in the world when approached in rough weather, and form a fitting backdrop to the human tragedy with which they are linked. With the encroachment of ocean-going tourism in the late nineteenth century the islanders experienced humiliation by creatures from another world. They succumbed mortally to the newly imported common cold, they discovered the meaning of material wealth, and with it envy, they lost their dignity and innocence, and their young began to leave for the mainland and beyond. Survival had depended upon an astoundingly perilous harvesting of seabirds from the vertiginous cliffs using primitive abseiling techniques. As the able bodied began to set their faces towards the wider world beyond, so gradually died a ‘perfect’ microcosm society of a kind which our generation may possibly ignore at its peril. In 1930, with infinite sorrow but at their own request, the remaining thirty-six islanders were evacuated to the Scottish mainland, where, with a pragmatism entirely typical of remote, centralised British government, these people who had never before met a tree were mostly given employment in the Forestry Department. Since 1957 a small army presence on St. Kilda has monitored missile firing from Benbecula. The roofless stone houses of the solitary village, kept by the National Trust for Scotland, stand as a memorial to a time that is gone. In 1930, as the islands faded behind the horizon for the last time, one of those departing was heard to murmur "may God forgive those that have taken us from St. Kilda", and at this point the islanders finally gave way to tears. On such a fine August evening, as it then was and I have since seen, the vision of the sun setting at one’s back, away behind Boreray, the precipitous, uninhabitable north island, is such as to imprint itself upon the mind for life. Farewell to Hirta was written two years before my own visit, in response to no less haunting photographic images seen in a television documentary. Subsequent first hand experience presented no reasons to revise it. Despite its chronology of events the music is and always was an attempt to capture the impressions described above, and to honour the feelings of that small group who had made their final journey away a half century earlier, one of whom was to recall, "To me it was peace living in St. Kilda and to me it was happiness, dear happiness. It was a far better place". The style of this quite brief piece is unapologetically romantic in every way, - perhaps even Schubertian in its simple aim to conjure sorrow in the major key. Its dedication is to my mother, who was fond of it and whose death might be thought to add another layer of meaning: music, one would like to imagine, for a far better place?... Ó Francis Pott, 1997 Page revised 30.03.06 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
