Music for cello and piano by Giles Swayne (b. 1946)
Robert Irvine cello; Fali Pavri piano
Four Lyrical Pieces, Op. 6 (1970)
1 Tempo rubato, espressivo
no. 1 for solo cello, Op. 111 (2007) 5 Prologos:
12 Canto for cello, Op. 31 (1981)
for cello and piano, Op. 103 (2006)
13 Turbulence
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
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
Notes on the music
Giles Swayne is the possessor of one of the most distinctive, communicative and impassioned voices in contemporary British music. Born in Hertfordshire in June 1946, he spent his early childhood in Singapore and Australia, before returning to Britain to live in Liverpool and later Yorkshire. He played the piano from an early age, and also began writing music, encouraged by his composer cousin Elizabeth Maconchy. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Harrison Birtwistle, Alan Bush and Nicholas Maw, and later in Olivier Messiaen’s composition class in Paris. During the 1970s, he spent some time working as a répétiteur and as a teacher, but he also composed prolifically. He enjoyed great success with CRY, an epic ‘hymn to Creation’ for 28 voices, amplified and electronically treated, which was first performed in 1980.
CRY draws on ideas from African music, but it was only in 1981/82 that Swayne made his first visit to Africa, recording the music of the Jola people in Senegal and also visiting The Gambia. This experience not only had a profound influence on his musical language, but also aroused in him a lasting admiration for African culture, not least its integration of music
into the mainstream of social life. Later, in the 1990s, he lived for several years in a village in eastern Ghana. He now lives in north London, teaching at the University of Cambridge but otherwise supporting himself as a composer.
Swayne is probably best known for his choral music – not only CRY but also its darker successor with ensemble HAVOC (1999), the unaccompanied Stabat mater (2004), and many smaller works including the popular Magnificat I (1982). (A cross-section of his choral output has been recorded on Delphian DCD34033.) He has composed several landmark works for large orchestra, notably Pentecost Music (1977), The Song of Leviathan (1988), and recently his first full-scale Symphony (2007), subtitled a small world However, he has also written a great deal of chamber and instrumental music, for both professional and amateurs; and his concert works include several for the instrument which is often described as most closely resembling the human singing voice, the cello.
Indeed, one of the earliest compositions Swayne still acknowledges is his Four Lyrical Pieces for cello and piano. He composed these in 1970, while he was still at the Royal Academy, and partnered the cellist Jonathan
Williams in the first performance at the 1971 Aldeburgh Festival. The first piece is Romantically volatile in tempo and gesture. The second, a very short scherzo with some intricate syncopated rhythms, leads into the third, a slow cantilena over long-held chords. The last is for the most part tautly rhythmic, but broadens and loosens at its climax. The language is unsystematic and remarkably flexible, with wide-spread chromatic chords alongside passages in dry perfect fourths and occasional held minor triads. There are some connections between pieces, in particular a falling quintuplet figure in the first which recurs in the last. But what chiefly holds the sequence together is the urgent continuity of the long singing line, shared by the cello and the piano’s right hand, which reflects the title of the work.
The idea of singing is also inherent in the poetic term ‘canto’ which Swayne used as the 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 commissioned by the Park Lane Group for its annual Young Artists series at the Purcell Room in London, and first performed by Tim Hugh in January 1982. The work is one of Swayne’s most obviously ‘African’ pieces, inspired by
the West African harp known as the kora, and in particular the kora playing of the Gambian musician Amadu Bansang Jobaté. The composer describes it as ‘a re-interpretation through European ears’ of an ancient piece of the Mande people called Lambango, originally a song in praise of music. It reflects the structure of the original piece in its structure of variations interspersed with refrains, and echoes the sound of the kora in its frequent use of pizzicato The selection of pitches is very restricted: initially a pentatonic scale on C, C–D–E–G–A, to which is soon added the sharpened fifth F sharp, with the minor third E flat an occasional variant and the flattened seventh B flat a later addition, while the sharpened fifth G sharp makes a single climactic appearance. This simplification of pitch focuses attention on the work’s sophisticated rhythmic structures, with repeated patterns in constantly changing metres, including 5/8, 5/16 and 7/16 time, creating a mesmeric effect.
If the Canto is audibly African in conception, the Sonata for cello and piano which Swayne composed in early 2006 belongs equally clearly to the European tradition. The composer says that ‘it inhabits a world which Beethoven and Brahms would recognise; but it does so, I
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.
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,
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.
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
patrons of new music, intended for the same cellist, and performed for the first time on this recording. Its obvious model is the six Suites for solo cello of Bach, both in many of its melodic shapes and string-crossing patterns, and in its formal outline of a free prelude followed by a series of dances – with four of the movements, Nos. 3 to 6, in unchanging 3/4 time. Reflecting the fact that the work was written during a holiday on the Greek island of Paxos, the titles of the movements are borrowed from classical and modern Greek. The ‘Prologos’, or prologue, has the tempo marking ‘Flexible’ and frequently changing time-signatures. ‘Choros I’ and ‘Choros II’ (the word means ‘dance’) are respectively ‘Masculine’, in changing metres but always with a crotchet pulse, and ‘Feminine’, in quick minuet time. They are followed by a ‘Serenata’, 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
opening section in gigue time, a middle section in ‘Tempo di Tango’, during which wild glissandi represent the male dancer plunging the female to the floor, and a reprise of the opening with the hard-to-resist instruction ‘grinning broadly’.
Incidentally, Swayne has given the Suite the number 1 because he reckons to have material for, if not a full set of six, certainly another one. So, happily, his productive engagement with the cello seems likely to continue.
© 2007 Anthony BurtonAnthony Burton spent fifteen years on the production staff of BBC Radio 3 (where in 1980 he was responsible for the commissioning and first performances of Giles Swayne’s CRY), before leaving in 1989 to be become a freelance writer and broadcaster on a wide range of music.
Robert IrvineRobert 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.
