Giles Swayne: Music for cello and piano

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Giles Swayne Music for cello and piano

DCD34073

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Robert Irvine cello Fali Pavri piano

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Music for cello and piano by Giles Swayne (b. 1946) Robert Irvine cello; Fali Pavri piano

1 2 3 4

Four Lyrical Pieces, Op. 6 (1970) Tempo rubato, espressivo Scherzando Molto lento Vivace

[3.35] [1.16] [3.50] [3.30]

Suite no. 1 for solo cello, Op. 111 (2007) Prologos: Flexible Choros I: Masculine 7 Choros II: Feminine 8 Serenata: Amorous 9 Strophe: Masculine 10 Antistrophe: Feminine 11 Choros III: Contented

[2.58] [1.32] [2.08] [2.37] [1.43] [1.25] [2.15]

5 6

12

Canto for cello, Op. 31 (1981)

[13.11]

Sonata for cello and piano, Op. 103 (2006) Turbulence 14 Rest 15 Child’s Play 16 Threnody

[15.32] [2.32] [2.06] [9.52]

Total playing time

[70.00]

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All world premiere recordings except Canto Recorded 11 June 2007 in Gartmore Parish Church, Scotland and 22-23 August 2007 in the Concert Hall, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow.

Producer: Paul Baxter Engineer: Adam Binks

24-Bit digital editing: Adam Binks 24-Bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Cover image: Stephanie Rose Irvine Design: Drew Padrutt Photograph editing: Dr Raymond Parks Photography © Delphian Records

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk Produced with financial assistance from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, and Beryl Calver-Jones and Gerry Mattock. With thanks to Gordon Ferries, Prof.

John Wallace and Sam Wilcock.

Knight Errant: Solo music for trumpet Mark O’Keeffe, trumpet (DCD34049) In medieval times a knight errant would wander the land in search of adventures and noble exploits. Here, Mark O’Keeffe takes a journey around the virtuoso repertory for modern trumpet, including several selfcommissioned works, and wins his spurs in this stunning debut recital. ‘… sizzlingly hot. O’Keeffe is a player in a million’ – The Scotsman, April 2007

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Sacred Choral Works The Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh Matthew Owens, conductor; Michael Bonaventure, solo organ Simon Nieminski, organ accompaniment RSAMD Ensemble (DCD34037) In the 1960s few would have predicted that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies would eventually write a set of Evening Canticles; yet religious texts have always been of fundamental importance to the composer as this disc vividly demonstrates by bringing together sacred masterworks from both ends of his career.

‘The Edinburgh chorister’s, well trained by Matthew Owens, make light of the music’s demands’ – Gramophone, October 2006

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Notes on the music

New Music on Delphian Giles Swayne: Convocation The National Youth Choir of Great Britain Laudibus Mike Brewer, conductor; Michael Bonaventure, organ Stephen Wallace, counter-tenor (DCD34033) When a powerful team of new music exponents come together, magic will happen; when the music is by Giles Swayne, a composer whose light shines brilliantly in its own unique direction, the results will entrance.

This disc offers a bracing sonic experience – vividly communicative music performed with rare verve, passion, and youthful vibrancy.

‘Swayne is undoubtedly the finest choral composer writing today’ – The Times, October 2006 Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano Nancy Ruffer, flute and piccolo Abigail James, guitar Dominic Saunders, piano (DCD34029) Over the past 40 years, Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award Winner and Creative Scotland Award Winner, has developed a compositional style that is as diverse as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments, flute, guitar, and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad folk influences. At once bold and playful, the listener cannot help be drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world.

‘Colourful and imaginative … an excellent introduction to one of the most accessible of contemporary composers’ – Editor’s Choice, Gramophone, October 2006

Giles Swayne is the possessor of one of into the mainstream of social life. Later, in the the most distinctive, communicative and 1990s, he lived for several years in a village in impassioned voices in contemporary British eastern Ghana. He now lives in north London, music. Born in Hertfordshire in June 1946, teaching at the University of Cambridge but he spent his early childhood in Singapore and otherwise supporting himself as a composer.

Australia, before returning to Britain to live in Liverpool and later Yorkshire. He played the Swayne is probably best known for his choral piano from an early age, and also began writing music – not only CRY but also its darker successor with ensemble HAVOC (1999), the music, encouraged by his composer cousin unaccompanied Stabat mater (2004), and many Elizabeth Maconchy. He studied at Trinity smaller works including the popular Magnificat College, Cambridge, at the Royal Academy I (1982). (A cross-section of his choral output of Music in London with Harrison Birtwistle, has been recorded on Delphian DCD34033.) He Alan Bush and Nicholas Maw, and later in has composed several landmark works for large Olivier Messiaen’s composition class in Paris.

During the 1970s, he spent some time working orchestra, notably Pentecost Music (1977), The Song of Leviathan (1988), and recently his first as a répétiteur and as a teacher, but he also composed prolifically. He enjoyed great success full-scale Symphony (2007), subtitled a small world. However, he has also written a great with CRY, an epic ‘hymn to Creation’ for 28 voices, amplified and electronically treated, deal of chamber and instrumental music, for which was first performed in 1980. both professional and amateurs; and his concert works include several for the instrument which CRY draws on ideas from African music, but it is often described as most closely resembling was only in 1981/82 that Swayne made his first the human singing voice, the cello. visit to Africa, recording the music of the Jola people in Senegal and also visiting The Gambia. Indeed, one of the earliest compositions This experience not only had a profound Swayne still acknowledges is his Four Lyrical Pieces for cello and piano. He composed influence on his musical language, but also these in 1970, while he was still at the Royal aroused in him a lasting admiration for African Academy, and partnered the cellist Jonathan culture, not least its integration of music

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Williams in the first performance at the the West African harp known as the kora, and 1971 Aldeburgh Festival. The first piece is in particular the kora playing of the Gambian Romantically volatile in tempo and gesture. musician Amadu Bansang Jobaté. The The second, a very short scherzo with some composer describes it as ‘a re-interpretation … intricate syncopated rhythms, leads into the through European ears’ of an ancient piece of third, a slow cantilena over long-held chords. the Mande people called Lambango, originally a song in praise of music. It reflects the The last is for the most part tautly rhythmic, structure of the original piece in its structure but broadens and loosens at its climax. The of variations interspersed with refrains, and language is unsystematic and remarkably echoes the sound of the kora in its frequent flexible, with wide-spread chromatic chords use of pizzicato. The selection of pitches is alongside passages in dry perfect fourths and very restricted: initially a pentatonic scale occasional held minor triads. There are some on C, C–D–E–G–A, to which is soon added connections between pieces, in particular a falling quintuplet figure in the first which recurs the sharpened fifth F sharp, with the minor in the last. But what chiefly holds the sequence third E flat an occasional variant and the flattened seventh B flat a later addition, while together is the urgent continuity of the long singing line, shared by the cello and the piano’s the sharpened fifth G sharp makes a single right hand, which reflects the title of the work. climactic appearance. This simplification of pitch focuses attention on the work’s sophisticated rhythmic structures, with repeated patterns in The idea of singing is also inherent in the poetic term ‘canto’ which Swayne used as the constantly changing metres, including 5/8, 5/16 and 7/16 time, creating a mesmeric effect. title of a series of works for solo instruments in the 1970s and early ’80s – ending with the Canto for cello of November 1981. This was If the Canto is audibly African in conception, the Sonata for cello and piano which Swayne commissioned by the Park Lane Group for its annual Young Artists series at the Purcell Room composed in early 2006 belongs equally clearly to the European tradition. The composer says in London, and first performed by Tim Hugh that ‘it inhabits a world which Beethoven and in January 1982. The work is one of Swayne’s Brahms would recognise; but it does so, I most obviously ‘African’ pieces, inspired by

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Fali Pavri Fali Pavri enjoys a busy and varied career as soloist, chamber musician and teacher.

Born in Mumbai, India, he studied the piano at the Moscow Conservatoire with Professor Victor Merzhanov and at the Royal Academy of Music, London with Christopher Elton.

a Wigmore Hall concert with cellist Wolfgang Schmidt, a recital tour of South Africa with Naomi Boole-Masterson, concerts in Ireland with cellist, Robert Irvine and performances at the Sangat Music Festival in India and at the Langvad Festival in Denmark. At the 2006 Cheltenham International Festival he gave the world premiere of Giles Swayne’s cello sonata with Robert Irvine.

While still a student, he was invited by Mstislav Rostropovitch to be his pianist on an extensive concert tour of India. This was followed by his London debut at the Purcell Room and concerts in prestigious venues around the world. He has performed and collaborated with many eminent musicians including the Vellinger and Vertavo quartets, the Leopold Trio, Paragon Ensemble, Scottish Ensemble, clarinetist Andrew Marriner, cellist Wolfgang Schmidt, baritone Roderick Williams and composer Mauricio Kagel. Fali was, until recently, a member of the Pirasti Piano Trio and also has a successful duo with his wife, the cellist Naomi Boole-Masterson.

He has recorded two critically acclaimed discs with the cellist Timothy Gill on the Guild label, including world premieres of two works by the Indian composer, John Mayer (Prabhanda and Calcutta Nagar). Radio broadcasts include a recording with Mstislav Rostropovich for AllIndia-Radio, for CBC (the American premiere of La Trahison Orale by Mauricio Kagel) and regular appearances on BBC Radio 3.

Recent concert highlights include Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia at the Scottish Proms with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, concertos at the St Endellion Festival with Richard Hickox,

A committed and sought-after teacher with many prize-winning students, Fali Pavri is on the Piano Faculty at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and is also much in demand as an adjudicator and examiner, including recently at the Unisa International Piano Competition in Pretoria, South Africa and at the Feis Ceoil in Dublin.

hope, in my own voice.’ The personal element comes largely from the replacement of traditional tonality by a system of eight-note modes, devised to create ‘distinctive harmony and a sense of rightness’. The first movement emulates Brahms in particular by combining Romantic expressivity, and a pervasive use of cross-rhythms, with classical sonata form.

The opening exposition pits a long singing cello line against tumultuous piano figuration, before relaxing into a lighter-textured episode in quintuple time and a gigue-like codetta; there is an obligatory repeat, intended to encourage the performers to a varied interpretation. The development moves towards and away from a patch of stillness over a low piano ostinato; the recapitulation presents the same sequence of ideas as the exposition, but refracted through changes of mode.

The two central movements of the Sonata are short and linked – as in the Four Lyrical Pieces, but with the characters reversed. The second movement is a long-drawn-out cello cantilena, over a Brahmsian ostinato supported by tolling bell-strokes in the deep bass. The third movement is an airy scherzo, its triple time repeatedly overlaid by the four beats of a mocking figure familiar in school

playgrounds in many countries (and used by Swayne in several previous pieces); there is a contrasting trio in which the piano plays high, quiet double octaves (marked ‘on tiptoe’) over four-note cello pizzicato chords in a sevenbeat rhythm. The final ‘Threnody’ is a set of variations on two elements of the initial Theme, the angular recurring figure in the bass of the piano and the cello’s scalewise answers. Through a series of gear-changes, the variations become progressively faster – though Variation 5 feels like a slow interlude because of its sparser textures, with high piano chords like ‘a distant musical box’. The acceleration ends at Variation 7, roughly three times as fast the original Theme, and privately christened by the composer ‘Fugue macabre’. But then, in the manner of some of Beethoven’s sets of variations, the movement returns to the Theme in its original form, before a calm but questioning ending.

The Sonata is dedicated to Beryl Calver-Jones and Gerry Mattock, who commissioned it on behalf of the Cheltenham Music Festival; it was first performed at the Festival in July 2006 by Robert Irvine and Fali Pavri. The following May, Swayne composed the Suite no. 1 for solo cello, dedicated to the same two generous

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Robert Irvine patrons of new music, intended for the same opening section in gigue time, a middle section cellist, and performed for the first time on this in ‘Tempo di Tango’, during which wild glissandi represent the male dancer plunging the female recording. Its obvious model is the six Suites to the floor, and a reprise of the opening with for solo cello of Bach, both in many of its the hard-to-resist instruction ‘grinning broadly’. melodic shapes and string-crossing patterns, and in its formal outline of a free prelude Incidentally, Swayne has given the Suite the followed by a series of dances – with four of number 1 because he reckons to have material the movements, Nos. 3 to 6, in unchanging 3/4 time. Reflecting the fact that the work was for, if not a full set of six, certainly another one.

So, happily, his productive engagement with written during a holiday on the Greek island the cello seems likely to continue. of Paxos, the titles of the movements are borrowed from classical and modern Greek. © 2007 Anthony Burton The ‘Prologos’, or prologue, has the tempo marking ‘Flexible’ and frequently changing Anthony Burton spent fifteen years on the time-signatures. ‘Choros I’ and ‘Choros II’ production staff of BBC Radio 3 (where in 1980 (the word means ‘dance’) are respectively he was responsible for the commissioning and ‘Masculine’, in changing metres but always first performances of Giles Swayne’s CRY), before leaving in 1989 to be become a freelance writer and with a crotchet pulse, and ‘Feminine’, in quick minuet time. They are followed by a ‘Serenata’, broadcaster on a wide range of music. marked ‘Amorous’ and characterised by urgently expansive phrases ending in upward glissandi.

The same ‘pas de deux’ structure is followed in the last three movements. The ‘Strophe’ and ‘Antistrophe’ are again respectively ’Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’: the former entirely pizzicato and by turns ‘eager’ and ‘clumsy’; the latter a ‘coy’ mixture of arco and pizzicato. They are followed not by the ‘epode’ of classical verse but by a ‘Choros III’, marked ‘Contented’, with an

Robert Irvine was born in Glasgow, and at the age of 16 was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied with Christopher Bunting and Amaryllis Fleming. Whilst at the college he won most of the major prizes in chamber music and solo playing.

On leaving the Royal College, he went on to further studies with William Pleeth and Pierre Fournier before joining the Philharmonia as sub principal cello. He also worked extensively at Aldeburgh, forming the Brindisi String Quartet and working closely with Sir Peter Pears as continuo cellist and as principal cellist of the Britten Pears Orchestra. At this time he toured much of Europe with the Brindisi Quartet, making numerous festival appearances and broadcasts.

He left the Philharmonia in 1988 to take up the position of principal cello with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, touring all over the world.

In 1990, he returned to Scotland to take up the post of principal cellist with Scottish Opera, and with Sally Beamish and James MacMillan founded the Chamber Group of Scotland,

performing and broadcasting a wide range of music both chamber and solo.

He has recorded several CDs including the complete cello works of Sally Beamish for the Swedish label BIS, which received high critical acclaim, including CD of the month in the Gramophone magazine. Robert has also recorded Dallapiccola solo works, and the Rachmaninov and Schostakovitch sonatas for Delphian.

Robert is a senior professor of Cello and Chamber Music at the RSAMD in Glasgow and plays on a fine Venetian cello by Gofriller from 1720, kindly loaned to him by Renagour Rare Instruments.