CHAN 20274 – PATH TO THE MOON

Path to the Moon

Debussy: Cello Sonata

The programme on this disc is anchored by three important twentieth-century cello sonatas, by composers from France, the United States, and England, written between 1915 and 1961. The earliest of these is the Cello Sonata by Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918), who once asked:

Where is French music? Where are the old harpsichordists who had so much true music?

It was thoughts such as this that prompted him to embark on a series of sonatas at the start of World War One. Weakened by cancer, he only lived to complete three of the planned set of six. The cello sonata was the first to be finished, in the summer of 1915, and it was originally going to have a title: ‘Pierrot angry with the moon.’ As well as having links to a vanished past, the sonata is indebted to more recent music, including works that use a cyclic theme. Debussy, who borrowed this device from César Franck, had used it in his early String Quartet but in the cello sonata there is greater refinement and delicacy in the way in which he handles the theme. The first movement, ‘Prologue’, opens with a gesture that introduces the motif that unites many of the musical ideas in the work (and which recalls baroque ornamentation). The second movement is a ghostly ‘Sérénade’ full of enigmatic harmonies, and this leads to a more flowing and animated ‘Finale’ that seems reluctant to settle until the closing D minor chords. The first known public performance of the work was given not in France, but at the Aeolian Hall, in London, on 4 March 1916, where it was played by the cellist Warwick Evans and pianist Ethel Hobday. The work was not heard in Paris until 24 March 1917, when the performers were Joseph Salmon and Debussy himself.

Walker: Cello Sonata

George Walker (1922 – 2018) once said that his musical heroes included Debussy, Hindemith, and Stravinsky, and though hints of all three can be heard in his Cello Sonata, from 1957, it is a work of considerable originality, its tonal language inflected not only by European composers but also by elements drawn from Walker’s African-American heritage, including spirituals and jazz. The mystery is why this piece – first published in 1972 – should have remained relatively unknown until recently. Walker studied at the Curtis Institute of Music where his teachers included Rudolf Serkin (piano), William Primrose and Gregor Piatigorsky (chamber music), and Samuel Barber (composition). Before embarking on his long and distinguished teaching career, Walker took a doctorate at the Eastman School of Music and studied in France, at the American Academy in Fontainebleau, with Nadia Boulanger. The sonata dates from these formative years, as Walker was coming to the end of his studies and emerging as a new creative voice in American music. Its first public performance was given in New York in 1964 by Paul Olefsky, a fellow Curtis graduate of Walker’s, who served as principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and, later, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Walker himself played the piano. Subsequently, the sonata was taken up by Janos Starker who included it in a New York concert on 16 October 1976 alongside sonatas by Delius, MartinÅ¯, and Shostakovich. Peter G. Davis, in the New York Times, described the ‘neoclassical design and gentle tonal contours’ of the music of Walker, adding that the composer himself ‘was on hand to introduce his work with a few comments’. Evidently, the performance was an impressive one: ‘all told, the twentieth-century cello sonata was in the best of hands.’ The first recording was published by Serenus Records, in 1979, in which the sonata was played by Italo Babini and Walker, but it is only in the last few years that the work has been taken up by more performers.

Walker’s own note on the work is matter-of-fact, but it provides a useful route map to the sonata:

The principal theme of the first movement emerges from the ostinato figure in the piano accompaniment. Double stops in the cello part introduce the lyrical second theme. A vigorous closing section follows. A development section precedes a recapitulation of the expository material. The coda completes the classical sonata form evident in this movement. The slow second movement is structured in three sections. The second part contains a canonic dialogue between the piano and the cello. In the third movement, the fugal exposition gives way to a jazz-like section that uses syncopated figures over an ostinato bass in the piano. The final statement of the fugal subject consists of note values one half of those used in previous statements. This precipitancy leads to a brief, but exciting coda.

To this we might add that the first movement (Allegro passionato) is tightly organised, hard-driven, and rather austere, while the second (Sostenuto) offers a beautiful moment of repose, the cello melody supported by sustained piano chords. The cellist Astrid Schween recalled that when she played the sonata for Walker, he described the finale as having a ‘boogie-woogie rhythm’, but its considerable energy derives from Walker’s delight in lopsided rhythms, changes of metre, and clever use of syncopation.

Britten: Cello Sonata

Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976) first met Mstislav Rostropovich at the British première of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, on 21 September 1960. After the concert, Rostropovich asked Britten for a new piece and Britten readily agreed. The arrangement they made was that Rostropovich would come to the following year’s Aldeburgh Festival to introduce the work and that it would be a sonata for cello and piano. Britten set to work almost at once and ideas flowed quickly: on 30 January 1961, Britten wrote to the cellist to say that the score was ready, and they ran it through for the first time, in London, on 5 March. Bolstered by several stiff drinks, it seems to have been a memorable encounter. According to Rostropovich,

I was so excited that I could not even tell how we played. I only noticed that we came to the end of the first movement at the same time. I jumped up, hopped over the cello, and rushed to the composer to embrace him in a burst of spontaneous gratefulness.

The première of the Sonata in C was given by Rostropovich and Britten at the Jubilee Hall, in Aldeburgh, on 7 July 1961 in a concert that also included Debussy’s Cello Sonata. Britten’s work was such a success that the fourth and fifth movements were immediately given encores. When he began to compose the sonata, Britten had admitted to Rostropovich that he was not a cellist himself, but inspired by what he called Rostropovich’s ‘gloriously uninhibited’ playing, Britten stretched the technical limits of the instrument with characteristic skill, including use of harmonics, quadruple-stopping, and the pizzicato effects in the second movement. The five-movement structure suggests something closer to a suite than a conventional sonata, and the musical language is by turns lean and athletic. It is probably not far-fetched to suggest, as William Mann did in his Times review of the première, that Britten intended the work

to reflect his own impressions of the player to whom it is dedicated... an astonishingly brilliant executant, but behind all these qualities, a searching musician with the mind of a philosopher.

Songs

The sound of the cello has long been compared to the human voice and in the 1840s, publishers started to issue arias from operas by Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, and others in transcriptions for cello and piano. In the 1860s, arias from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte appeared in similar arrangements, the same decade in which the firm of Johann André, in Offenbach am Main, launched Les Fleurs des Opéras, a long series of operatic selections for cello and piano. In a similar vein, from the 1840s onwards, cello transcriptions of Schubert’s most famous songs began to appear in print. In the early twentieth century, it is intriguing to find the Russian composer Alexander Grechaninov (1864 – 1956) making an effortlessly effective arrangement (probably in the 1920s, though the date is not certain) of the early song ‘Beau soir’ by Claude Debussy. A transcription for cello and piano of the same composer’s ‘Clair de lune’, from the Suite bergamasque, by Ferdinando Ronchini (1865 – 1938) was published in 1925. ‘Reflets’, which Lili Boulanger (1893 – 1918) composed in 1911, was originally a setting of a poem by Maurice Maeterlinck, and the vocal line is readily adapted to the cello here, as is the setting of ‘Clair de lune’ by Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924), an exquisite musical exploration of the ambiguities and half-lights of Verlaine’s poem. Benjamin Britten wrote his Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in 1940. This was his first cycle for Peter Pears and the Italian words offered a degree of cover for these love songs from the composer to Pears. ‘Sonetto XXX’, the third of the songs, sets a text which translates as ‘I see through your lovely eyes a sweet light’. The vocal line is played by the cello without alteration, transformed into a lyrical cantilena. Die stumme Serenade (The Silent Serenade) subtitled a ‘comedy in two acts’, is one of the last stage works of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897 – 1957), an operetta composed in 1946. By then, Korngold had lapsed into the neglect from which he has only been emerging relatively recently, so Die stumme Serenade never had the success it deserved (its first full-length recording was only made in 2009). ‘Schönste Nacht’ is a beguiling waltz-song for two of the protagonists, Silvia and Andrea. When Korngold was trying to interest opera companies in the work, this was one of the numbers he chose: a demo recording survives of him playing it on the piano and humming along.

The rediscovery of Florence Price (1887 – 1953) has revealed another composer whose neglect – with hindsight – seems incomprehensible. Her ‘Night’ is based on a poem by Louise Wallace (from Price’s home state of Arkansas). According to an article for The Crisis, published in 1926, Wallace was discovered by Price, who wrote,

She has never been to college, for she’s far too busy sending all the other brothers and sisters there,

adding that this young woman ‘shows ability, fineness of character and generosity’. The poised and beautiful musical setting of ‘Night’ demonstrates Price’s admiration for the words which inspired it. In the song ‘Will Tomorrow, I Wonder, Be Cloudy or Clear?’ Toru Takemitsu (1930 – 1996) sets his own words and its delicious cabaret-like qualities may well surprise anyone familiar with the composer’s more serious music. ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’ was released in 1965, sung by the composer, Jonathan King (b. 1944) – who performed it on Top of the Pops while still an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. The version by Nina Simone (1933 – 2003) appeared on her album Nina Simone and Piano! – a reminder, if any were needed, of her credentials as a pianist and sometime student at the Juilliard School – its release timed impeccably to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.