Beyond Twilight
Music for cello and piano by female composers
Alexandra Mackenzie (cello)
Ingrid Sawers (piano)
rec. 2022, St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington, UK
Delphian DCD34306 [62]
Lockdown provided the impetus for some rare repertoire-hunting opportunities in the library of the Royal Academy of Music in London and here’s the result. It’s an unashamedly all-female recital of works largely composed during the first half of the twentieth-century and the only names that might be familiar are those of Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Marie Dare and Ethel Barns. Nine pieces are heard in première recordings.
The ethos of the music is songful lyricism. Amy Horrocks provides a template, as she studied composition and piano at the Academy, had some pieces performed at the Proms, and is represented by Twilight, a charmer of no pretensions. Songful brings to mind two transcriptions of songs by Avril Coleridge-Taylor, the aria-like Who knows? and the melancholy-reflective-intimate Can sorrow find me? Isobel Dunlop’s Suite is one of the most forward-looking – but not too modernistic – pieces, of which the final panel of three is the most harmonically exploratory. The central Dance offers some fast fingering opportunities for the dextrous cellist, and pianist too.
Marie Dare was a cellist who, after the Second World War, became principal cellist of the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh, whose conductor had been Donald Francis Tovey but by the time Dare joined was Sidney Newman. She also made recordings for the budget-price Aco label in the 1920s when she was at the height of her youthful powers – budget in price, maybe, but not in terms of quality. She contributes three genre pieces and a more extensive Hebridean Suite. Le Lac, of which this is the first recording, is a vaguely Gallic effusion but the Romance is deceptive in its cloud-darkening sense of reserve. The habanera yearning of The Spanish Shawl offers picture postcard pleasures. The Hebridean Suite composed between 1947 and 1951 is an expressive travelogue, atmospheric and pliant. Perhaps Ronald Stevenson was thinking of a work like this when he dedicated one of his pieces to her, praising her ear for ‘national intonations’. The Paps of Jura is perhaps the standout movement for its sense of stalking darkness but the finale offers a folksong to send the audience away with a spring in its step. Dare is an interesting composer-performer. I’m not aware that her Phantasy Quartets and Quintets of the 30s have been recorded.
There are other charmers here, though. Ivy Parkin’s Three Pieces include a rather beautiful Aria and a salon-style Cradle Song though the concluding Chanson espagnole is rather stylised. Annie Grimson’s surname may be vaguely familiar but if that’s the case it’s because of one of her sisters, Jessie, hired by Henry Wood in the first phalanx of women violinists in his 1913 Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Grimson’s Nocturne is a restful piece but if you’re looking for popular Edwardian piety turn to Harriett Dixon’s Andante Religioso. Christabel Baxendale’s Plaintive Melody is a very short and melancholy transcription from violin cast, in name at least, in the vogue of van Biene’s Broken Melody. The odd woman out is Margaret Jacobsohn, an American, whose very conventional Romanza is also making its first appearance on disc.
Alexandra Mackenzie and Ingrid Sawers prove to be just guides to this repertoire. They don’t inflate that which is not susceptible to inflation, remaining largely equable and gently expressive. The recording is good, the notes pertinent and the programme attractive.
Jonathan Woolf
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Contents
Amy Horrocks (1867-1919)
Twilight (pub 1901)
Avril Coleridge-Taylor (1903-1998)
Who knows? transc. cello and piano (1922)
Can sorrow find me? transc. cello and piano (1938)
Margaret Jacobsohn (1875-1971)
Romanza
Isobel Dunlop (1901-1975)
Suite
Marie Dare (1902-1976)
Le Lac (1927)
Romance (1921)
Hebridean Suite (1947-51)
Ivy Parkin (1886-c.1963)
Three Pieces
Annie Maria Grimson (1870-1949)
Nocturne (1892)
Harriett Claiborne Dixon (1879-1928)
Andante Religioso (1910)
Christabel Baxendale (1886-1950)
Plaintive Melody
Ethel Barns (1873-1948)
Idylle (1915)
