De Profundis Clamavi: English Piano Music played by Duncan Honeybourne

I am beholden to Duncan Honeybourne’s wise and informative liner notes for details of most of these pieces. Several other hands have contributed useful composer biographies to the booklet. 

Johannes Brahms seems to underly the post-romantic breadth of Christopher Edmunds’s powerful and impassioned Piano Sonata in B minor. And not only Brahms. He has absorbed the romantic pyrotechnics of Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninoff. It may be regarded by some as a little “retro” in style, but who really cares.  I loved the introspective slow movement which is such a contrast to the “extrovert” opening movement. It builds up to a considerable, but largely lugubrious climax. The finale is typically vivacious but balanced by some quieter and more thoughtful moments. The movement ends with a convincing and dramatic peroration.

This is a magnificent Sonata which ought to be in the repertoire of all British pianists and not a few from other nationalities as well.  It was dedicated to the pianist Tom Bromley (1904-85) and was first performed in the summer of 1938.

Edgar Bainton had his fling on CD a few years ago with some important symphonic works issued on the Chandos and the Dutton Epoch labels. A few odds and ends have appeared since, including several songs from Naxos.  The present Variations and Fugue in B minor, op.1 (1898) dates from Bainton’s years as a student at the Royal College of Music. Seemingly, it was his first acknowledged opus.  I was amazed at the technical demand of this piece. There is nothing here that indicates the tyro. The entire work unfolds from a “melody of wistful nobility” which is developed into nine engaging variations. The final fugue is a surprising triumph. Equally remarkable is that a work of such vision and technical achievement lay in a drawer for over 120 years until Duncan Honeybourne unearthed it for this CD.  What does it sound like? Brahms is in there, and unsurprisingly Stanford. But the listener will be conscious of an individual voice emerging.

When I first inspected the track listing for this album, I imagined that Cecil Armstrong Gibb’s Essex Rhapsody (1921) would be something in the line of Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody or maybe Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody. In other words, a medley of folk tunes, or based on an original tune with rustic pretensions. How wrong can one be? Despite ostensibly being a paean of praise to his native county, this music is overblown, romantic, full of Listzian clichés. If RKO Radio Pictures had made a film called Ipswich Moonlight, (instead of a Dangerous one) this optimistic score would have been ideal. 

On the other hand, Gibbs’s significant Ballade in D flat is full angst and passion. It was composed during the Second World War, when the composer was staying in Windemere.  His house in Danbury, Essex had been requisitioned as a military hospital, he was displaced from his beloved county, and his son David was on active service. David would later be killed near Monte Cassino. The music is fraught, menacing and dramatic. It is hard to tell what the narrative of this Ballade is, but it is a story of fear and unsettling change.

Richard Pantcheff’s Nocturnus V Wind oor die Branders (Wind on the Waves) was completed in 2015. It describes well “impending blustery weather on the sea” before the storm arrives and then subsides. I hope the composer will not be offended if I suggest the hand of Claude Debussy lies behind this watery music. It is quite beautiful in its impact.

I can never hear enough of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s Shulbrede Tunes. Apart from Jerusalem, it was the first piece of his music that I got to know. It dates from 1914, just before the start of the First World War. Parry was staying with his eldest daughter Dorothea, at Shulbrede Priory in West Sussex. The collection is a set of character sketches portraying individuals who were staying there, as well as some aspects of the building itself. The opening hymn of praise of to Shulbrede itself is a wonderful bit of romantic pianism. The second number is a depiction of Parry’s granddaughter Elizabeth. She must have been a bewitching wee lassie. There are two portrayals of Dorothea - Dolly No.1 and Dolly No.2, presumably as a mother and a daughter.  Rather haunting is the Bogies and Sprites that Gambol by Night. This is followed by Matthew, the composer’s grandson who may have been a little precocious for his age. It is a touch serious. The Prior’s Chamber by Midnight is suitably descriptive. This is followed by the scherzo Children’s Pranks, which seems to include the entire family. The penultimate piece is In the Garden with the Dew on the Grass. This is a pastoral that evokes an idyllic summer’s day.   The finale, the broadly played Father Playmate illustrates the composer’s son-in-law. Parry wrote “‘Father Playmate’ is all sorts of delightful things - a great companion to the children as well as a great politician and deeply interested in Art and Music as well.”

Shulbrede Tunes is perfectly charming. But the listener cannot help thinking that this serene world of Edwardian family life was about to disappear forever as the cataclysmic War approached. They remain a perfect testament of a loving father and grandfather to his family.

The second CD opens with Edgar Bainton’s “sensitive” tone poem Willows, written in 1927. This music here is a little spartan in places. Despite its title, it owes nothing to the pastoralism of its time. Later Frank Bridge is one exemplar. Yet, Bainton has made this beautiful work all his own. It is a remarkable discovery. Equally impressive is his ravishing The Making of the Nightingale. This was meant to been one of a collection of three pieces. Only two were completed. Hopefully, Duncan Honeybourne will record the eloquently named Gardens of the Sea soon.

Much has been written about Frank Bridge’s monumental Piano Sonata. Duncan Honeybourne is correct in regarding it as “among the towering masterpieces of English piano music.” Pianist and musicologist Maurice Hinson (Guide to the Pianists Repertoire, Indiana University Press, 2000) remarked that it “is one of the most ambitious British piano compositions of its period.”

Many commentators note the decisive break between Bridge’s pre-war piano music and this sonata.  One of the half-truths is that was written in the composer’s ‘Dissonant Contemporary’ period. I worry a little about this classification. To be sure there are definite echoes of Alban Berg’s atonalism here. Scriabin’s “shifting tonalities” are obvious. Yet the formal structure looks back as far as Liszt.  Here and there, moments of Bridge’s earlier romanticism and even pastoralism reveal themselves amongst the “avant-garde angularity.”

Bridge’s Sonata is long, lasting for more than 35 minutes. The three movements are played without a break. Often the mood is one of great profundity and an uncompromising sense of despair and anger. Yet, occasionally, a sense of optimism appears almost from nowhere. The job of the pianist is to hold the stylistic elements of this massive construct together, as well as coping with highly challenging writing. I think that Duncan Honeybourne has made a splendid job in achieving all these aims. There are several other excellent readings of this sonata available, including those by Mark Bebbington, Peter Jacobs and Malcolm Binns.

Benjamin Britten’s poignant Night Piece (Notturno) is one of very few works for solo piano that he wrote. It was composed as a test piece for the first Leeds Piano Competition in 1963. It had been commissioned by the legendary Fanny Waterman for the occasion. The liner notes state that Duncan Honeybourne had the “privilege” of studying this work with her. The music muses on many aspects of the night: creeping things, birdsong, dreams and perhaps something a little darker in the human soul.

The inspiration behind Richard Pantcheff’s Piano Sonata (2017) seems to be “disquieting political and social events in the UK” during 2017. I can only think this must refer to the Brexit legislation, as this was the dominating political news of that year. The composer has written that its aim was to express “the greatest possible tumult, and on occasion, desolation.” A Remainer Sonata? But there is a deeper programme to this work. The composer has taken several snippets from the Greek Nobel Laureate Odysseus Elytis’s The Axion Esti (1959) and appended them to the score.  This is a long poem in which the author explores his own personality, as well as that of his country and its people.  The poem has been described “as a secular oratorio, reflecting the Greek heritage, and the country's revolutionary spirit, and also as a kind of autobiography, in which the spiritual roots of the poet's very individual sensibility are set in the wider philosophical context of the Greek tradition.”  Seemingly, (I have not read it) this poem examines the Eternal Greece, the horrors suffered during the Second World War and its aftermath. The poem concludes with a “celebration of human life.”

I certainly found Richard Pantcheff’s Sonata desolate and full of tumult. There is no optimism here. The musical language seems to me to be a concatenation of styles including Bridge, sometimes Debussy, and maybe even Messiaen. For me the slow movement is the highlight.  I did not enjoy this Sonata, but I respect and appreciate it.

This is an excellent CD with an adventurous and imaginative programme. Except for the Parry, the Bridge and the Britten, each work is a “World Premiere Recording.” It goes without saying that Duncan Honeybourne’s playing is superb throughout. He has rapidly become the Dean of British Piano Music. I have mentioned the excellent liner notes above.

Let us hope that there are many more CDs of British Piano Music “on the stocks” at EM Records and undiscovered music in Duncan’s piano stool.

Track Listing:
CD 1
Christopher EDMUNDS (1899-1990)
Piano Sonata in B minor (1938)
Edgar BAINTON (1880-1956)
Variations and Fugue in B minor, op.1 (1898)
Cecil Armstrong GIBBS (1889-1960)
An Essex Rhapsody, op.36 (1921); Ballade in D flat (1940)
Richard PANTCHEFF (b.1939)
Nocturnus V Wind oor die Branders (2015)
Charles Hubert Hastings PARRY (1848-1918)
Shulbrede Tunes (1914)
CD 2
Edgar BAINTON
Willows (1927); The Making of the Nightengale (1921
Frank BRIDGE (1879-1941)
Piano Sonata (1921-24)
Benjamin BRITTEN (1913-76)
Night Piece (Notturno) (1963)
Richard PANTCHEFF
Piano Sonata (2017)
Duncan Honeybourne (piano)
Rec. 20-21 August 2020, Potton Hall, Westleton Hall, Suffolk.
EM RECORDS EMR CD070-71

With thanks to MusicWeb International where this review was first published.