|
Leo Sowerby's piano compositions span the composer's entire creative life. His very first composition, written in 1905 at the early age of ten, was a piece now lost entitled The Dawn of Day. Sowerby's last important piece with piano is the Dialog for Organ and Piano, written within a year of the composer's death in 1968. Sowerby was a born pianist and in his early years he frequently performed his own music and the works of other composers as well. As Sowerby grew older, he appeared less frequently in public as a pianist and finally gave it up all together. The organ became Sowerby's primary instrument and he divided his time between composing, teaching and his work as a church musician. Dating from 1916 to 1929, the selections on this compact disc are products of the composer's youthful maturity. All these works were composed when Sowerby was in his twenties, except for the Florida Suite, which he wrote when he was thirty-four.
In 1916, Sowerby was still the busy performing pianist, appearing often in public to perform his own music. His Piano Concerto No. 1 in F was an important vehicle for the young pianist. He performed the work on numerous occasions with different orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with which he premiered both the original and revised versions of the concerto. Sowerby was a serious enough pianist to have advertised in the January 1921 issue of Musical America that he was booking a concert tour and invited inquiries to his agent. However, the plan for a concert tour was cut short when Sowerby was offered the opportunity to work in Rome for three years as the recipient of the first American Prix de Rome. Upon his return to America in 1924, Sowerby continued to perform as a pianist, though less and less frequently. In 1927, Sowerby made his last professional appearance as a pianist, performing his first piano concerto in Blue Island, Illinois. Thereafter, Sowerby's piano compositions were left to others to perform.
Almost all the works represented here were given first performances by the composer, and surviving accounts and programs suggest he played some of these works quite frequently. In order of composition, they include the Three Folk-Tunes from Somerset and The Irish Washerwoman (both written in 1916), Money Musk (1919), and three works written during the residency in Rome: Fisherman's Tune (1921), The Two Lovers (1922) and From the Northland Suite (1922). Written in 1929, Florida Suite was Sowerby's first solo piano piece after the Rome years, and the first solo piano piece the composer did not perform.
In the spring of 1915, Sowerby attended a concert at the Chicago Little Theatre, where he heard the three British folk-singers Dorothy, Rosalind and Cynthia Fuller. Sowerby was moved by their performance and continued to attend their programs whenever they performed in the Chicago area. He utilized four of their folk melodies in a work for small orchestra called Rhapsody on British Folk Tunes (1915). Not long after this initial foray into British folk music, he used three other tunes that he heard in the Fuller concerts for the Three Folk-tunes from Somerset (1916). Sowerby used these same Somerset tunes in an orchestral suite Homage to England's Country Folk, performed later in 1916. The program notes for one of these performances describe The Cuckoo as a tune of gentle melancholy, Lord Rendal as a ballad of unhappy love, and My Man John as a merry lilt in dialogue form. (The Cuckoo also exists in an unpublished arrangement from 1927 by Sowerby for cello and piano.)
In early 1916, Sowerby began a correspondence which developed into a friendship with the American-based Australian pianist and composer, Percy Grainger. Grainger's music was deeply rooted in the same English folk tradition as the Fuller Sisters'. In the summer of 1916, Sowerby went to New York to meet and study with Grainger, bringing his Rhapsody and Somerset settings, as well as the newly composed variations The Irish Washerwoman. Sowerby never studied composition with Grainger, but Grainger did introduce Sowerby to the music of Frederick Delius, whom the young composer came to admire and to whom Sowerby was compared by more than one critic in the decade to follow. (Grainger also arranged for the New York premiere a few years later of Sowerby's Piano Concerto in F.)
Both Florida and From the Northland were inspired by vacation trips. The composer wrote the descriptions for the movement of each suite, based on impressions of his travels. Florida contains some of Sowerby's most impressionistic and sensual sonorities. The suite was dedicated to George Edwin Henry, editor at Oxford University Press, which published the work in 1939. The American pianist Frank Mannheimer gave the first performance at the American Music Festival in Bad Homburg, Germany.
Florida Suite
River Night: The throb of the wavelets on St. John's River on a dark summer night. The perfumed air, the pulsing of the water narcissus urged onward by the warm wind. From over the far hills floats up the orange moon to glorify this night of quiet mystery.
St. Augustine: We invoke images of the pomp and splendour of Spain's military might; her dark dungeons seem to whisper to us cruel secrets. Ghosts of long-forgotten memories beckon to us and bid us pass by in silence.
Cypress Swamp: Here is all dank blackness; here is ooze and slime; here have horrible giants been changed into sprawling trees, whose arms, like tentacles, seem to draw me into the dark stillness where I hear only the cry of age-old Indian gods whose souls are chained in this abode of evil.
Sun-drenched Palms: The royal trees raise their plumed heads high over the glittering sands which border the great Atlantic. The sun beats down mercilessly, and huge black birds fly through the air. The sea thunders while the kingly palm stands sentinel in haughty grandeur.
Pines at Sunset: The pines stand mute against the horizon; all around is flat, waste, forgotten. The sun slips wearily to rest, and in the pale twilight the stark pines dream of a peace that is akin to death.
From the Northland drew upon memories of a visit by the composer to a friend along the Canadian shoreline of Lake Superior, but was written later while Sowerby lived in Italy. A contemporary account quotes a remark Sowerby made to his Lake Superior host: `The whisperings, chuckles and thunderings of nature on your shores haunt me'. A later sojourn in the mountains of northern Italy reminded Sowerby of the Canadian wild country and his friend's suggestion that he set these sounds and impressions to music.
From the Northland Suite
Forest Voices: In the depth of the green, dark forest I hear not a sound, save the faint magic murmur of the great trees, which seem to chant a song, hushed and mysterious, which betimes surges and swells, and lapses again into primeval silence.
Cascades: The sparkling rivulet laughs its way over stones and pebbles, grinds through rapids, and dashes over a great rock in a cloud of scintillating foam. I should like to listen forever to this happy stream, though when I leave it to its play, it bids me no farewell, but runs carelessly on and on its way, caring not for me nor heeding me.
Burnt Rock Pool: In this pool — who knows how deep — there reigns a silence absolute, a tranquillity sweet and wonderful. I reflect on life, and wonder if this is not the great joy, the highest happiness, to be one with nature's self.
The Lonely Fiddle-Maker: Shall I ever recall the half-sad, half-gay tune the old hermit is playing on his own pitifully wailing violin? His tune is not always wistful, for he makes it tell of rough joy and gaiety. It speaks, as through a mist, of the long ago, when he fiddled and fiddled as the simple country folk danced the reel at time of harvest.
The Shining Big Sea-Water: The blinding light of the summer sun beats down upon the ever-restless Great Lake. The waves hurl themselves with a monotonous never-ceasing rhythm upon the rock wall of the shore. O my lake! in your every mood, pensive or fearful, you, of all nature, tell me most of joy, of youth, of power, of infinity!
Sowerby gave the first performance of the suite upon his return to America in 1924 at the Chickering Hall in New York. Sowerby orchestrated all movements except The Lonely Fiddle-Maker in 1924. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra directed by Fritz Reiner gave the first performance of the orchestrated suite in 1925. Both the piano and orchestral versions of Northland are dedicated to Walter Douglas Main, a friend and supporter of Sowerby's in Chicago. Main was a wealthy Chicago munitions manufacturer who organized an entire concert of Sowerby's music given by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1917. Sowerby dedicated the organ and orchestral versions of his popular Comes Autumn Time to Main's wife Alice. (Later, Alice Main divorced Walter Douglas Main to marry Eric DeLamarter, the assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and also a close friend of Sowerby's.)
Money Musk is an old American fiddler's tune that Sowerby set for piano in 1919. Sowerby arranged the folk-tune for orchestra in 1924, and for string quartet in 1929. The jaunty, humorous variations preserve the character of an old time barn dance.
Fisherman's Tune was composed in 1921 and also based on an original tune written by Sowerby in the summer of 1920. This work is dedicated to Walter Douglas Main. Sowerby also arranged the work in 1931 for two pianos. This arrangement was premiered the following year at Town Hall by the duo-pianists Stell Anderson and Silvio Scionti. The work has the flavor of the folk-tune settings, though Sowerby uses more outlandish dissonances.
The Irish Washerwoman is the name of a jig originally composed by Walter (“Piper”) Jackson, the most celebrated Irish piper of the eighteenth century. The tune also goes by the name of “Jackson's delight” or “The Irishwoman.” Sowerby wrote the variations on the country dance tune in 1916 and also dedicated it to Walter Douglas Main. The work became Sowerby's first published composition. It was issued in an edition of a thousand copies by Sowerby and his composition teacher Arthur Olaf Anderson. The work was also the first by Sowerby to be recorded, the composer having been contracted to produce it as a piano roll for Ampico Company. He recorded the work in early May of 1925 and it was released the following September. A transcription for orchestra from the piano original was published by the Boston Music Company and enjoyed tremendous popularity nationwide as an audience-pleasing novelty.
Sowerby related an amusing story about the origin of The Irish Washerwoman. Sowerby lived at the house of his guardian, Jessie Nolton, where an Irish maid named Frances (“Fannie”) Regan was employed. Listening day in and day out to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Sowerby persistently played on the living room piano, led her to ask in exasperation, “Why don't you play something decent?” When Sowerby asked what that might be, she answered, “Faith, and a good tune is the Irish Washerwoman.” Immediately, Sowerby set to work to produce his variations on the lively country dance. Sowerby had also just received his first correspondence from Percy Grainger and the flush of excitement at the letter from the famous pianist certainly inspired Sowerby to write the variations as companion pieces to his Rhapsody and Somerset folk-settings.
The Two Lovers is a piano setting of a Milanese popular song introduced to Sowerby by the Italian composer and conductor Antonio Pedrotti. Sowerby was godfather to one of Pedrotti's sons and composed the piece while living in Italy in 1922. Though the song deals with the unhappy love of Paolo and Virginia, the tune has a very cheerful lilt. Pedrotti later orchestrated the work.
Notes by Malcolm Halliday, based largely on the unfinished biography of Sowerby by Ronald Huntington and materials from the Leo Sowerby Foundation, President Francis Crociata.
Malcolm Halliday
Malcolm Halliday has performed in the United States and Europe, both as solo pianist and in collaboration with singers, instrumentalists and orchestra. Resident pianist for the American Schubert Institute in Boston, he frequently performs with nineteenth century pianos from museum and private collections. He has degrees in piano from the Oberlin Conservatory and Boston University. His teachers include Paul Badura-Skoda, Henrica Bordwin, Miles Mauney and Bela Nagy. Malcolm Halliday appears with bass-baritone Robert Osborne on the Albany Records compact disc My Love Unspoken, performing songs by Leo Sowerby (TROY196).
|
