Beyond Twilight: Music for cello & piano by female composers

BEYOND TWILIGHT Music for cello & piano by female composers

Alexandra Mackenzie cello Ingrid Sawers piano

BEYOND TWILIGHT Music for cello & piano by female composers Alexandra Mackenzie cello Ingrid Sawers piano 1

Amy E. Horrocks (1867–1919)

Twilight (Rêverie)

[2:03]

14

Annie Maria Grimson (1870–1949)

2

(Gwendolen) Avril Coleridge-Taylor (1903–1998)

Who knows? *

[2:12]

15

Harriett Claiborne Dixon (1879–1928) Andante Religioso *

3

Margaret Jacobsohn (1875–1971)

Romanza *

[3:28]

16

Christabel Baxendale (1886–1950)

Suite I. Prelude: Conversation II. Dance III. Elegy

17

Ethel Barns (1873–1948)

[1:55] [1:57] [5:56]

Isobel Dunlop (1901–1975) 4 5 6

Marie Dare 18

7

(Gwendolen) Avril Coleridge-Taylor

Can sorrow find me?

[3:53]

19

8

Marie Dare (1902–1976)

Le Lac *

[3:58]

20

9

Marie Dare

Romance *

[4:34]

10

Marie Dare

The Spanish Shawl *

[5:02]

Ivy Parkin (1886–c.1963) 11 12 13

Recorded on 17-19 October 2022 in St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Three Pieces * I. Aria [2:36] II. Cradle Song [1:46] III. Chanson espagnole [1:48]

Design: Drew Padrutt Booklet editor: Henry Howard Cover image: Robert Bereny, Woman Playing Cello, 1928; photo © A. Dagli Orti / © NPL - DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman Images Session photography : foxbrushfilms.com Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

21 22 23

Nocturne *

[7:13]

Plaintive Melody *

[1:43]

Idylle

[3:09]

Hebridean Suite Isle Of Jura (Two Impressions): I. Summer Sea [4:28] II. The Paps Of Jura [2:25] The Blue Lochan [2:04] A Day Dream [1:36] Shieling Song [1:59] A Fisherman’s Song [1:51]

Total playing time * premiere recordings

[4:49]

[62:39]

Beyond Twilight Ingrid and I have always been interested in performing new and lesser-known pieces and, when our concerts were cancelled in lockdown, we decided to spend some time repertoire hunting. I was able to request music from the library at the Royal Academy of Music so I ordered every single interestinglooking piece for cello and piano I could and lugged a large suitcaseful home with me.

One of the first pieces that I looked at was a beautiful miniature by A. E. Horrocks. It was published at the turn of the twentieth century and it seemed as if it had sat in the library ever since. There were no date stamps and no indication that it had ever been checked out.

I was even more stunned when I did some Googling and discovered that the composer was Amy Elise (or Elsie) Horrocks, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1880s. I suddenly realised that there might be more interesting female composers hidden behind bland initials. Continuing to research and trawling through thousands of entries

Notes on the music at the British Museum and Senate House unearthed a treasure trove of small pieces by female composers, dating from the 1880s to the 1950s. Through the Scottish Music Centre Ingrid discovered some beautiful manuscripts by the cellist Marie Dare. The British Library had another, once published, piece of hers that is not even mentioned in the only list of her works. I tried to locate two lost cello pieces by Gwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Memories and Reverie, searching under her pseudonyms, but to no avail. But in looking through her music I discovered two delightful songs, Can sorrow find me? and Who knows? that I decided would transcribe beautifully for cello and piano. All the pieces we chose for the recording are quietly powerful and intimate and are instantly accessible. These talented composers worked so hard to train and develop their skills and to have pieces published. They deserve to have their voices heard and to become a part of the core repertoire for cello and piano. © 2023 Alexandra Mackenzie

The composers on this recording all built their careers in a period of enormous upheaval and change for women’s rights. After decades of unsuccessful peaceful campaigning, the early twentieth century witnessed the rise of the militant suffrage movement. The Pankhursts founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 and deliberately sought arrest to raise publicity for women’s votes. It was a divisive strategy, but it made women’s suffrage front-page news and attracted the support of high-profile individuals including the composer Dame Ethel Smyth. Campaigns to improve women’s education led to women being able to study at the universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge (albeit in a qualified way; they could study, but Oxford and Cambridge would not award degrees to women until 1920 and 1948 respectively). And this was also the era of the ‘New Woman’ – the politically-minded, bicycle-riding individual who (as the woman who coined the term put it) rejected the idea that women should be ‘a dependent and a parasite from the cradle to the grave’.

whose music has yet to enjoy a renaissance.

Many of the pieces here are recording premieres. Together, they shine a light on the wealth of women’s music-making in the early twentieth century.

There were many musicians among those women striving to create professional and creative identities for themselves. Some are, by now, if not well known then at least relatively well recorded: most of Rebecca Clarke’s works have been recorded in recent years, for example. This album, however, focuses on the numerous composers

Who knows? by Gwendolen Coleridge-Taylor is another adaptation of a song, originally with a text by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Gwendolen was surely introduced to Dunbar’s poetry by her father, the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was friends with the poet and had also set his words to music. Gwendolen doted on her father, even though she grew up somewhat

For British women, the primary institutions for professional tuition were the Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music. Accordingly, nearly all of the women featured here studied at one of them.

Amy E. Horrocks studied both composition and piano at the Academy, where she excelled in her cohort and won both the Potter Exhibition and Bennett Prize for composition. She went on to have several pieces performed at the Proms. Horrocks was best known as a song writer, and the published score for Twilight (Rêverie) suggests that it was adapted from a song. It sounds very much like an aria for the cello, with its unbroken melodic lines and simple accompaniment. Published in 1901, it is similar in sound world to Edvard Grieg and Modest Mussorgsky.

Notes on the music in his shadow. When she was starting out her career as a soprano, recitalist and composer, she was billed as the ‘daughter of the composer’. His influence is certainly present in Who knows?, both textually and musically.

But Gwendolen had her own individual voice. She wrote most of her early songs for herself to sing, and she gave the premiere of this song in Croydon. Its style is in keeping with the sentimental songs that she loved to perform – and indeed Who knows? was written by a woman in love. It was composed in July 1922 when she was engaged to the flautist Joseph Slater, for whom she wrote her early flute and piano works. After two years of betrothal they were still waiting for permission from Gwendolen’s mother to marry; possibly the wistful yearning of this song has an autobiographical origin, wondering when she will finally be able to wed.

with a ‘Prelude: Conversation’, with an alternating dialogue between cello and piano.

There are definitely moments of disagreement here! But an amicable solution is eventually found. The opening statement is brought back, slightly altered, to close the short movement – perhaps the conversation has resulted in a slight change of opinion. The second movement is a rollicking ‘Dance’. Dunlop foregrounds the pianist, sending the cellist flying through scales and pizzicato passages, giving both performers very few opportunities to rest. She concludes the suite with an ‘Elegy’, passionate yet restrained, showing the composer at her most eloquent. Dunlop was one of the more versatile composers showcased on this recording, writing works from songs through string quartets to opera, and her breadth is demonstrated in the range of moods she presents in this Suite.

The composer of the Romanza is something of an enigma. Margaret Jacobsohn is the only American composer on this disc. She was the daughter of the famous violinist Simon Eberhardt Jacobsohn and published two works (the Romanza and a Mazurka for violin and piano), but beyond that very little is known about her. Her vision of romance is hopeful, concluding optimistically in the tonic C major.

By the time Coleridge-Taylor came to write Can sorrow find me? in 1938, she was quite a different composer to the one she had been in 1922. Ultimately her mother had forbidden her marriage to Slater. So she married another man, Harold Dashwood, and had a child with him. But by 1938 they were divorced, and Coleridge-Taylor had undergone a significant personal transformation. She reinvented herself privately and professionally, adopting her middle name to become Avril Coleridge-Taylor. It was under this name that she composed most of her major works, including her orchestral suite

Isobel Dunlop embraced ‘modern’ directions of twentieth century music while remaining rooted in a tonal language. Her Suite opens

Sussex Landscape and her Piano Concerto, built a career as a conductor, and established both the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra and the New World Singers. Can sorrow find me? was also originally a song (with text by Minnie Aumonier), and although it shares with Who knows? a melancholic, wistful tone, it also has elements of Coleridge-Taylor’s later style. Her approach is more expansive and rhapsodic, and the conclusion decidedly ambiguous. The song seems to end triumphantly in C major, on the text ‘Today I will be young and glad again.’ But Coleridge-Taylor then brings back an altered version of the introduction and opening lines so the piece stops but does not end, closing with a question.

Marie Dare became the principal cellist of the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh, and the majority of her works are written for her own instrument. In Le Lac (1927) she evokes the changing scenery of a lake, the cello melody floating over a rocking piano accompaniment.

Her Romance (1921) is predominantly a sorrowful one, despite moments of respite – Rachmaninoff is a definite influence. The Spanish Shawl (1935) combines the lyricism of her earlier works with musical exoticism, basing the central section on a habanera.

Ivy Parkin was another performer-composer, best known as a pianist. She was the soloist for Grieg’s Piano Concerto at the Proms in 1911, and often performed with her sister, the

singer Valerie Parkin. The Queen called Ivy a pianist ‘of no mean powers’ in 1909, and at the sisters’ debut performance at Bechstein Hall, they were judged to ‘possess feeling and power of expression’ as a duo (East Anglian Daily Times). Parkin dedicated her Three Pieces to the cellist Herbert Walenn, a professor at the Royal Academy; quite possibly she had performed them with him. The plaintive ‘Aria’ is built on a leading-note motif, while the gentle ‘Cradle Song’ has a short melody played through twice. The ‘Chanson espagnole’ is less sultry than Dare’s Spanish offering, Parkin using an energetic scalic theme with a mordent as the basis for the piece.

The pianist Annie Maria Grimson came from a family of distinguished musicians. Her father Samuel was a violinist, and all Annie’s six siblings became performers and/or composers.

Perhaps the most notable was the violinist Jessie who, alongside the violist Rebecca Clarke, became one of the first women employed in a professional UK orchestra when Henry Wood hired six women into the strings section of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1913. Annie might perhaps have written her Nocturne with her cellist sister Amy in mind – they performed her later Canzona together at the South Place Concerts at Conway Hall.

It seems that Annie was a composer of some considerable merit. She wrote a symphony while in her teens which is now, sadly, thought lost. However the Nocturne, published in

Notes on the music 1892, gives a good sense of her compositional voice. The piece is lyrical without ever being overwrought, Grimson crafting a restrained melody that blossoms into a free-flowing central section.

Despite her relatively shorter life, Harriett Claiborne Dixon left far more professional traces than many of the women on this disc. Educated at the Royal Academy, she went on to have a career as a pianist, cellist, composer, conductor and organist, becoming an Associate of the Academy in 1898. In the late nineteenth century it was still considered unusual for women to be professional organists, so her appearances often elicited comment from journalists. Her training as a church organist is evident in her Andante Religioso (pub. 1910) – the piano part is written as a chorale, and would be easily transferred to the organ. Among the pieces on this disc, the Andante Religioso is on the grander end of the scale. It begins like a hymn but develops into an extended, rhapsodic work suggesting the influence of composers like Brahms.

Like Grimson, Christabel Baxendale was a composer-performer from a musical family.

She was a violinist and often appeared with her sisters Kathleen and Constance (both singers) and Ruth (an elocutionist). The South London Press had ‘the rosiest expectations’ for Christabel’s artistic future in 1911, but like so many of the women represented here, Christabel’s compositional career petered out

after the publication of a few works in the early twentieth century. The Plaintive Melody was originally written for the violin – presumably Baxendale would have played it herself – and is here transcribed for the cello. The desolate line drives to a dramatic apotheosis, piano and solo instrument playing in unison for the piece’s climax.

The Idylle by Ethel Barns provides a graceful contrast to Baxendale’s work. She has both the cello and piano playing in their upper registers for much of the piece, creating the sensation of floating on still water or a gentle summer breeze. Barns was best known in her lifetime as a violinist. She had a formidable profile as a performer in both the US and the UK, where she premiered her own Violin Concerto No. 2 at the Proms. She was also on the council of the Society of Women Musicians, founded in 1911 to help women build the professional networks that were so vital for success, especially when they found their work sidelined by established institutions and ensembles. The celebrated cellist May Mukle was also involved with the SWM in its early days and frequently helped other women to make their way up the musical career ladder, in Barns’ case recording her Idylle in 1915.

This collection closes with Marie Dare’s Hebridean Suite. It was originally in two movements, with the title Isla of Jura: Two Impressions for Cello and Piano, composed

after a summer visit to Jura in 1947. Dare later revised the suite, incorporating four more movements in 1951. ‘Summer Sea’ has the performance making ‘Lazy, warm’, and Dare’s lilting accompaniment and chromatic main motif perfectly evoke the ebb and flow of gentle waves. The water is not without its turbulence, but Dare brings the piece to a tranquil close, pianissimo. The second movement is inspired by the three mountains that sit on the western side of the island, known as the ‘Paps of Jura’. Dare’s movement is marked ‘With solemn tread’. Perhaps it was prompted by a tiring climb up the mountains, or possibly its sombre mood is a response to being faced with the magnitude of such an ancient landmark.

This would have been a rather morose end to the suite, which may be one reason

why Dare later added further movements, giving the collection a more upbeat ending and expanding its compositional scope. ‘The Blue Lochan’ reprises something of the atmosphere of the ‘Summer Sea’, while the serenity of ‘A Day Dream’ seems to pause time completely, just for the briefest of moments. The ‘Shieling Song’ (‘shieling’ being a hut in rural pastures) contributes drama to the suite, its simple melody moving to a tempestuous conclusion. Dare closes the suite with the upbeat ‘A Fisherman’s Song’, ending with a final chordal flourish. © 2023 Leah Broad Leah Broad is a music historian and the author of Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World (2023). She can be followed on Twitter @LeahBroad.

Biographies Alexandra Mackenzie is internationally recognised as an outstanding performer and educator.

After obtaining First Class honours from the Royal Academy of Music and Manhattan School of Music, she spent eight years performing and working in New York. Her extraordinary range as a performer is demonstrated by her work with the legendary S.E.M. Ensemble; playing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; touring with a ragtime band; recording for Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and the Wu Tan Clan. She has appeared at Carnegie, Weill and Alice Tully halls and played concerts in 43 of America’s 50 states. She has been a guest artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts, a Fellow at Tanglewood, and has participated in chamber music festivals across the globe. Live radio broadcasts include Radio 3, Classic FM, NPR and German National Radio. Alexandra has played with the English Chamber Orchestra for over a decade and is in frequent demand as a guest principal with orchestras across the UK. She has always been a champion of lesser-known and contemporary repertoire and is proud to have worked with and premiered pieces by composers such as Nicola Lefanu, Judith Weir, Sally Beamish, Joe Cutler, Anthony Gilbert, Roger Marsh and Geoffrey Poole.

Alexandra teaches at the Royal Academy of Music Junior Department. In May 2011 she was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music for her outstanding contribution to music.

She plays on a Matthew Hardie cello dated 1818.

A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, the accomplished pianist and chamber musician Ingrid Sawers is equally at home collaborating in instrumental and vocal repertoire, and has performed at both the Oxford Lieder Festival and the World Saxophone Congress, as well as numerous venues throughout the UK, Europe and in Canada. She has partnered many fine musicians either in concert or live BBC broadcast, including Nicky Spence, Lorna Anderson, Janis Kelly, Iestyn Davies and Nicholas Mulroy. She is a passionate advocate for new music, having premiered works by composers including Judith Bingham, Graham Fitkin, Martin Butler, and Thomas Adès, but equally delights in established repertoire and rediscovering pieces from archive research.

Her teachers included Roger Vignoles, Malcolm Martineau and Paul Hamburger and she now runs a thriving teaching and coaching studio, travels worldwide as an examiner and coaches at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Also available on Delphian Sola: music for viola by women composers Rosalind Ventris

Editor’s choice

Britten: Suites for Solo Cello Philip Higham

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Rosalind Ventris’s debut solo album features a selection of music for unaccompanied viola composed between 1930 (Imogen Holst’s impressive Suite for Viola) and the present day (a 2020 lockdown miniature by Thea Musgrave). The largely British and Irish programme allows Ventris to revive substantial works by important yet still often overlooked twentieth-century composers – not only Holst but also Lillian Fuchs, Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens and Grażyna Bacewicz – alongside more recent additions to the repertoire from Musgrave, Sally Beamish and Amanda Feery. With several of the composers themselves professional string players, this is, in Ventris’s words, ‘wonderful music – that just happens to be by women composers’.

Britten’s meeting with Mstislav Rostropovich in 1960 was a watershed, the great Russian cellist becoming the primary collaborator of his later years and inspiring a whole series of masterworks. Among them are these three suites for solo cello, written as a conscious homage to those of Bach (there were originally to have been six). Britten scholar Paul Kildea, author of the lucid and perceptive booklet essay, sees the first as a coda to the War Requiem, the second as a snapshot of a lifetime of musical obsessions, and the third as both reaching back to much earlier works and suffused with Russian melody.

Higham brings both vigour and a deep intelligence to this remarkable music.

‘Ventris lavishes gorgeously full-bodied playing, weighty yet poised, on music by eight women. Highlights include … a wonderfully idiomatic 1930 Suite by Imogen Holst, taken out of her usual sidekick/daughter context for once and put deservedly in the spotlight’— The Guardian, February 2023 Stone, Salt & Sky: Beamish – Maconchy – Strachan – R Clarke GAIA Duo

Editor’s choice

‘There’s nowhere to hide in these three solo suites – but why hide a technique as assured, a musical imagination as finely attuned to Britten’s expression, or a Tecchler cello sound as burnished and wonderfully textured as this?’ — BBC Music Magazine, May 2013, INSTRUMENTAL CHOICE

Origines & départs: French music for clarinet and piano Maximiliano Martín clarinet, Scott Mitchell piano

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Formed in 2019, award-winning violin and cello duo GAIA have rapidly won plaudits for their pioneering programming and bold and daring performances.

Their debut album release features three works specially written for the duo, and also bears testimony to their championing of works by underrepresented and overlooked voices from classical music’s past. Elements of folk and jazz string-playing styles rub shoulders with traditional chamber-music imperatives in a programme that is full of women’s voices: those of the performers; of composers Sally Beamish, Rebecca Clarke and Elizabeth Maconchy; and of the singers of two Scottish folksongs, taped recordings of which frame Duncan Strachan’s hauntingly evocative Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

Born in the Canary Islands and resident for many years in Scotland, clarinettist Maximiliano Martín follows up his Delphian solo debut – a collection of concertante works recorded with the symphony orchestra of his native Tenerife – with a programme for clarinet and piano that similarly explores the ways in which music can express national character as well as tracking more personal life journeys.

New in April 2023

Maxi’s infectious personality is reflected in this deeply personal album, a joyous exploration of French repertoire (from the tenderness of Saint-Saëns’s clarinet sonata to the playfulness of Poulenc’s) that is supplemented by recent works from the two places he calls home: exquisite miniatures from the Scottish composer Eddie McGuire and the Tenerife-born Gustavo Trujillo.

‘The performances are strong, at times strikingly intense … large in gesture and scale’ — Gramophone, April 2022

Also available on Delphian Lutosławski / Penderecki: Complete Music for Violin and Piano Foyle–Štšura Duo DCD34217

Repression and censorship; optimism and freedom; renewed constraints.

If this sounds like a now all too familiar story of political progress achieved and then reversed, Michael Foyle and Maksim Štšura’s compelling survey of chamber works by two of Poland’s leading postwar composers attests that music was there to bear witness to each twist and turn of the tale. Journeying from the post-Stalin thaw of the 1950s and 1960s, through the triumphant re-establishment of democracy and on to the century’s ambivalent end, these vital utterances range from the exploded intensities of Penderecki’s Three Miniatures to the lean, focused expressive charge of Lutosławski’s Partita and the millennial anxieties of Penderecki’s Violin Sonata No 2.

‘The programme is illuminating in its contrasts and for what it reveals about these two very different figures … Foyle and Štšura handle it with commanding aplomb’ — BBC Music Magazine, April 2019

Robert Crawford: String Quartets 1–3 Edinburgh Quartet

Beau Soir: Debussy – Poulenc – Ravel – Satie Maciej Kułakowski cello, Jonathan Ware piano

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Delphian’s second disc of chamber music by Robert Crawford was released shortly before his death in January 2012, aged 86, and pays fitting tribute to a composer whose long friendship with the Edinburgh Quartet ultimately brought him back to composition after three decades’ silence.

Given here in characteristically vivid readings, these three fine works thus offer a fascinating overview of Crawford’s stylistic development; the second in particular, with its inspired wit and infectious musicality, deserves far greater renown.

Acclaimed young cellist Maciej Kułakowski (Lutosławski International Cello Competition 2015, First Prize; Queen Elisabeth Competition 2017, Laureate) is partnered by pianist Jonathan Ware in an all-French recital programme that mingles the familiar with the reimagined. Elements of ‘Spanish’ style, blues and jazz, and the ironic humour of the Parisian café, encountered in sonatas by Debussy, Poulenc and Ravel (Kułakowski’s cello rendering of the latter’s second violin sonata), are echoed in a brace of shorter works that includes several further transcriptions: of three short pieces by Debussy and of Satie’s Trois Gnossiennes.

‘Dedicated performances … a worthwhile release’ — Gramophone, February 2012

‘Cellist and pianist convey the meaning of every crescendo or change of tempo, however minimal, proving that tiny details can have huge effects … The “wackiness” of Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc has rarely been better demonstrated’ — BBC Music Magazine, December 2022, FIVE STARS

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