Jessy Reason (1878-1938)
Asterisks
Three Poems
Five Landscapes (1917)
Piano Sonata (1916)
Piece for solo piano
Duncan Honeybourne (piano), Leora Cohen (violin, Poems)
rec. 2023, St Elizabeth’s Church, Ashley, UK
Prima Facie PFCD231 [78]

The world is full of unjustly neglected composers, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to modern performers and producers who furnish us with the means of becoming acquainted with works which we may only know by reputation. And then beyond that there are composers who seem to have fallen off the radar totally, and the survival of whose music is almost a matter of total serendipity. We know neither of their existence or of their merits, if any. Such a composer is clearly Jessy Lillian Wolton, born into a family of impoverished Victorian gentry, who married in 1902 and thereafter penned some seventy manuscripts under the name of “J L Reason,” none of which were ever published and only one of which – a solitary song – was ever seemingly given a public performance in her lifetime. After the death of her son in 1987, two massive bundles of handwritten music were deposited in a Leicester junk shop where they were purchased five years later by the writer Alan Poulton, who took a further 28 years before managing to put any of the material into performable condition. Some of the results are included on this CD, which seems to consist entirely of music being given its world première performances and recordings.

One might expect that Jessy Reason would have conformed to expectations from her background, writing music suitable for the salon and amateur performers at home – possibly for herself to play on the piano for family and friends. Such expectations would be entirely misplaced. She had clearly immersed herself in compositional trends from the most notable sources on the Continent – although it does not appear that she ever undertook any formal training apart from some lessons with Eugene Goossens, who was some fifteen years younger than herself. The immediate influence which is apparent is that of Debussy and the French impressionists, possibly reflected through the lens of Cyril Scott, but of the expected post-romantic style of Brahms, Parry and their generation there is no perceptible sign at all. It is difficult, given the fact that the date of writing of so much of this music is unknown, to ascertain whether the influences of her studies with Goossens produced much – if any – effect on her actual style. What is clear is that much of the music derives from poetic models, with the three Asterisks based on lines from an unfinished poem by Rupert Brooke, and the Three Poems for violin and piano based on verses by the sexually ambiguous Fiona MacLeod (the female alter ego of the writer William Sharp). Not precisely the models that might be expected for a respectable married lady of the late Edwardian and Georgian eras.

The three pieces for violin and piano, based on the MacLeod poems, are particularly interesting since they also seem to pre-echo the music of that other late-impressionist maverick Szymanowski. One gets the impression that the composer might have been listening closely to works such as The Fountain of Arethusa, when the solo violin line steals almost imperceptibly into the consciousness at the opening of the poem “I know a pale place, a haunted valley of defeated dreams.” Reason’s treatment of MacLeod’s words seems to be closer to that of transatlantic composers such as Griffes than the more chiselled chilly barbaric innocence of Rutland Boughton in The Immortal Hour; and the violin double-stopping in “The Rainbow, rising with vast unbroken sweep” has a harshness that is quite foreign to any suggestion of the fey Celtic twilight. Reason’s ability to combine the sounds of violin and piano – enhanced by the resonant acoustic of the recording as well as the superbly controlled and judged playing of Leora Cohen – whets one’s appetite for her larger-scale works; we are told in the booklet that there are full orchestral and choral compositions, including a massive ‘fantasy’ for soprano, chorus and chamber orchestra to words by Rabindranath Tagore entitled Malini which gained the especial approbation of Goossens.

The impressionist pieces for piano solo – the undated Asterisks after Brooke and the 1917 Landscapes – are superbly conceived miniatures (all of them under five minutes) which would make excellent encores for enterprising pianists in recitals and concerts. Particularly attractive are Dewdrops, the third of the Landscapes, with a scintillating filigree that rivals Ravel in its charm, and The sunlit stream, the last of the same suite, with a delicate coda that enchants the ear even as it fades into the distance. The Piano Sonata from a year earlier is by comparison rather an oddity, a single-movement piece seeming to consist almost entirely of a meditation on a single rising and falling theme which sounds eerily like a smoothed-down version of Gershwin’s I got rhythm – not written for another decade or more. It is quite a technical tour de force, and like all the music here it presupposes a pretty stupendous technique from the pianist. Duncan Honeybourne is of course able to supply this in full measure, and his handling of the 1922 period Bösendorfer instrument lends exactly the right kind of period resonance to the rich sounds of the music itself. The microphones, both in the solo piano items and in those with violin, are sensibly kept at a reasonable distance from the players to allow the church ambience its proper measure; this is music that could easily be destroyed by too close, or too dry, an acoustic. My only criticism of the disc is that the Piano Sonata begins too quickly after the inconclusive end of The sunlit stream; it almost sounds like a continuation of the music.

One thing that is particularly noticeable about all of these compositions is that there is strangely no evidence of the expected influence of English folk-song, which seems to have been ubiquitous in much of the music penned by other British composers during this period (even those such as Delius or Scott who were most subject to ‘foreign’ influences). That is, until the final track, when the untitled and undated ‘piece for solo piano’ introduces a melody that has some of the hallmarks and snap of folk material. But the pastoral style is soon abandoned, as Reason returns to her impressionistic and chromatic treatment of the theme, and the piece itself concludes with an air of some indecision. One would like to know more about the origins of the work; it certainly seems to demand a title of some sort to explain its rhapsodic content. But presumably the whole matter is buried in obscurity, and the booklet is of necessity silent on the question.

The booklet does find room to quote a modern opinion on Reason’s music by Stephen Banfield, who refers to six of her songs as “worth reviving.” I suspect that there may well be further discoveries to be made among her vocal works, and her espousal of Tagore (of whom she apparently made many settings apart from the choral Malini) certainly arouses interest. The writer of the anonymous booklet note describes Jessy Rason as “a sophisticated musical brain and a cultured intellect.” I would go further; if this music is a sample of her oeuvre, there is a seriously important composer awaiting discovery here; and we should be grateful to the Francis Routh Trust for supporting this issue. The recording and performance of this well-filled CD deserves every success, but I do hope that there will be further instalments to follow.

Paul Corfield Godfrey