1919: Boulanger | Janáček | Elgar | Debussy

BENJAMIN BAKER, DANIEL LEBHARDT

1919

JANÁ EK C O D A

B ULANGER EBUSSY ELG R

1919: CODA JANÁ

B O ULANGER D EBUSSY ELG A R

BENJAMIN BAKER VIOLIN

8

Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) Sonata for Violin and Piano 1

I. Con moto [5:15]

II. Ballada: Con moto [5:08]

III. Allegretto [2:45]

IV. Adagio [4:45]

Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) Two Pieces for violin and piano

5 Nocturne [2:44]

6 Cortège [1:53]

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) Sonata for Violin and Piano

7

I. Allegro vivo [5:09]

II. Intermède: Fantasque et léger [4:25]

9

III. Finale: Très animé [4:37]

10 Lili Boulanger D’un matin de printemps [5:00]

Edward Elgar (1857–1934) Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 82

I. Allegro [8:23]

II. Romance: Andante [8:10]

III. Allegro, non troppo [8:24]

Total playing time [66:48]

Recorded on 7-9 June 2022

at Ayriel Studios, Whitby

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Piano: Steinway model D, serial no 550675 (2000)

Piano technician: Aidan Delacey-Simms

Front & back cover photography

© Kaupo Kikkas

Design: John Christ

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK

www.delphianrecords.co.uk

@ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

@ delphianrecords

Benjamin and Daniel would like to dedicate this album to the memory of Tessa Gaisman and Carole Donlin – two extraordinary people on opposite sides of the Atlantic who inspired them both through their unwavering positivity, generosity of spirit, and passion for life and for music.

This album was made possible thanks to the generosity of Paul Sekhri, Philip Carne and an anonymous donor

The three violin sonatas brought together here were conceived during the years of the First World War by composers living in Brno, Paris and West Sussex. For Leoš Janáček , patriotism in time of war was a complex matter. A proud Moravian who turned sixty in 1914, he had long been an advocate for Czech lands to become independent from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, as Austria (and, by extension, its territory of Moravia) fought on the side of the Germans, it was – as the pan-Slavic Janáček told his publisher – the successful early advances of Russian troops against German and Austrian forces that inspired him to compose his Violin Sonata. The date of 1 August 1914 in the sketches confirms this, although the Ballada that was to become the second movement had been finished as a standalone piece in May 1914 (and was published as such in 1915). In an article from 1923 called ‘Our Troops’, Janáček recalled the sonata’s wartime inspiration: ‘A gleam of sharp steel flashed through my mind. In the Sonata for Violin and Piano of 1914 I almost heard its clanging in my troubled imagination.’

In the years after completing a first version of the sonata, around autumn 1915, Janáček made extensive revisions, including the composition of a completely new finale (which was subsequently reworked as the present third movement) and a reordering of

the remaining movements, with only the first remaining where it had been all along. The work reached its final form when it was published in April 1922, and its premiere took place in Brno on 24 April, played by František Kudláček (violin) and Jaroslav Kvapil (piano) in the presence of the composer. The Prague premiere followed in December, and on 5 August 1923 Janáček was present for a performance given at the ISCM Festival in Salzburg. He also attended a performance at the Wigmore Hall in London during his only visit to Britain in 1926 – a concert that attracted only minimal notice as it was given in May during the General Strike.

The musical language is characteristic of Janáček’s mature style, dominated by short, epigrammatic ideas that are used both as melodies and as propulsive rhythmic figures, with the themes themselves often derived from typical features of Moravian folk music. This highly original technique can be heard clearly in the extremely dramatic first movement, as can Janáček’s equally individual use of harmony, basing his music on tonal principles but employing dissonances and surprising chordal progressions to startling effect. The Ballada is based on a theme that recalls the folk songs of the Hukvaldy region where Janáček grew up (and later maintained a country retreat). After the faster Allegretto with its hints of the music for the opera Katya Kabanova, the finale opens with the

juxtaposition of two starkly contrasted themes: slow, wistful chords on the piano and a terse, neurotic response from the violin (rapid notes, marked to be played feroce – ‘ferociously’). There are moments of great beauty and exultant passion in what follows, but at the end the mood returns to the uneasy atmosphere with which the movement began.

‘Where is French music? Where are the old harpsichordists who had so much true music?’ It was thoughts like these that prompted Claude Debussy to embark on a series of instrumental sonatas at the start of World War One. The teenaged Francis Poulenc, eager to acquire Debussy’s autograph, wrote to the composer in October 1915 (masquerading as a Belgian music critic) and Debussy replied:

‘This is a time when we should be trying to regain a hold on our ancient traditions: we may have let their beauty slip from us, but it has not ceased to exist.’

It was in this frame of mind that Debussy set out to write his set of sonatas. Weakened by cancer, he lived to complete only three of the planned six. The Violin Sonata was the third (and last) to be written, following sonatas for cello and piano and for flute, viola and harp. On the title page of each, the composer proudly described himself as musicien français – a ‘French musician’. Debussy’s original plan for the third sonata had been

to write it for violin, cor anglais and piano but when he started sketching the work in 1916, he settled on violin and piano. The work did not come easily: Debussy was unwell and often depressed during the war years and in October 1916 he wrote to Jacques Durand that ‘going for a walk recently at Cap Ferret [Arcachon], I found the cellular idea for the finale of the Violin Sonata. Unfortunately the first two movements don’t want to have anything to do with it. Knowing myself as I do, I am certainly not going to force them to put up with an awkward neighbour’. In February 1917, the finale was still giving him trouble and he reverted to an earlier idea for it. The sonata was completed by the start of May, and Gaston Poulet and Debussy gave the first performance at the Salle Gaveau on 5 May 1917 in what turned out to be the composer’s last public appearance. Two days later he wrote to his friend Robert Godet:

I’ve at last finished the sonata for violin and piano. By one of those very human contradictions, it’s full of happiness and uproar. In future, don’t be taken in by works that seem to fly through the air; they’ve often been wallowing in the shadows of a gloomy brain. Such is the finale of the same sonata. It goes through the most curious contortions before ending up with a simple idea which turns back on itself like a snake biting its own tail … It was played last Saturday at a concert for the benefit of blind soldiers. The public had come with charitable purposes and applauded it.

A month later, Debussy started to have doubts about the work, telling Godet on 7 June that he only finished it to get it off his desk, and because he was spurred on by his publisher, Durand, noting that ‘the sonata will be interesting from a documentary point of view and as an example of what an invalid can write in time of war’. This is an absurdly self-deprecating assessment of a work in which Debussy’s ideas flow with a freedom that often approaches a kind of quixotic dreamscape within a very concise threemovement design. The Allegro vivo opens with piano chords over which the violin spins a melody which is initially rather melancholy, before becoming more animated. The whole movement is in a kind of compressed and highly concentrated sonata form. The Intermède which follows (marked ‘Fantastical and light’) is much more capricious, its moods shifting suddenly from playfulness to introspection, its energy eventually spent as it dies away to a close. The finale begins with an allusion to the first movement, but what follows most closely matches Debussy’s description of the sonata as ‘full of happiness and uproar’. It was his farewell to composition.

The phenomenal gifts of Lili Boulanger were recognised when she was in her teens, and in 1913 she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition with her cantata Faust et Hélène. She was nineteen at

the time, but her musical language was already distinctive. The Nocturne was one of her earlier pieces, originally entitled ‘Pièce courte pour flûte et piano’ (subsequently reworked for violin and piano), the manuscript dated 27 October 1911. Cortège was composed in June 1914 as a piano solo which was then arranged for violin and piano with a dedication to the violinist Yvonne Astruc. D’un matin de printemps is dated 1917–18, and it demonstrates the more harmonically adventurous and astringent style that Boulanger had developed in her settings of Psalms made in 1914–17. Troubled by ill health since childhood, Boulanger died on 15 March 1918 at the age of twenty-four: a brilliant musician whose surviving works are all the more poignant for their hints of what might have been.

Edward Elgar made some sketches for his Violin Sonata while recuperating from painful throat surgery in March 1918. After a few days’ convalescence at the home of his friend Frank Schuster, he rejoined his family at Brinkwells, a cottage set in woodland near Fittleworth, West Sussex which was Elgar’s home between 1917 and 1919. Its tranquil setting served as an inspiration to the composer: he had written few major instrumental works since Falstaff in 1913, but in 1918 he embarked on four large-scale compositions. The Violin Sonata and String Quartet were completed that year, and the Piano Quintet and Cello

Concerto in 1919. According to his diary, Elgar got down to serious work on the Violin Sonata on 20 August 1918 and finished it less than a month later, on 15 September. Before finishing it, he offered the dedication to Marie Joshua, a friend and supporter, telling her that ‘it is full of golden sounds and I like it, but you must not expect anything violently chromatic or cubist’. Marie Joshua died a few days after receiving this letter and the printed dedication on the first edition read simply: ‘M.J. – 1918’. When he heard the news of Joshua’s death, Elgar was in the middle of composing the finale, and he incorporated a reminiscence of the slow movement as a memorial to her.

Elgar wrote to his beloved friend ‘Windflower’ (Alice Stuart-Wortley, daughter of the artist John Everett Millais) about the sonata on 11 September, as he was putting the finishing touches to it. He revealed to her that his inspiration for the long violin melody in the slow movement came when he heard news of Windflower breaking her leg in an accident while walking on the cliffs at Tintagel. As well as this significant detail, Elgar also told her more generally about the work and his newfound confidence:

I suddenly took to writing music! – and have nearly ‘done’ a sonata for violin and piano in E minor. [Landon] Ronald and [W.H.] Reed both like it … The first movement is bold and vigorous, then a fantastic,

curious movement with a very expressive middle section: a melody for the violin – they say it’s as good or better than anything I have done in the expressive way: this I wrote just after your telegram about the accident came and I send you the pencil notes as first made at that sad moment … The last movement is very broad and soothing like the last movement of the Second Symphony.

A private first performance was given by W.H. Reed and Elgar himself at the composer’s London home (Severn House in Hampstead) on 14 October 1918, and the sonata was first heard in public at London’s Aeolian Hall on 21 March 1919, played by Reed and Landon Ronald. Along with its companion pieces from Brinkwells – the String Quartet, Piano Quintet and Cello Concerto – the Violin Sonata marked a kind of valediction. Elgar was devastated by the death of his wife in April 1920, and apart from sketching a Third Symphony (in 1932–4), he never again attempted any significant instrumental compositions.

©

2023 Nigel Simeone

Nigel Simeone is a musicologist with special interests in twentieth-century music and opera. He has published books on Janácˇek, Bernstein, Messiaen, Charles Mackerras and, most recently, on the musical friendship between Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult. He broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3, and writes for the Salzburg Festival, Royal Opera House, Wigmore Hall and Opera magazine.

Biographies

Since winning First Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York and Third Prize at the 2017 Michael Hill Competition in New Zealand, Benjamin Baker has established a strong international presence. Described by the New York Times as bringing ‘virtuosity, refinement and youthful exuberance’ to his debut at Merkin Concert Hall, he is much sought after as both soloist and chamber musician. Recent highlights include debuts with Charleston and Fort Worth Symphony orchestras in the USA, and Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the East Neuk Festival, and he has made regular appearances at Wigmore Hall and on BBC Radio 3.

He has undertaken tours in the USA, Colombia, China and Argentina, participated in the Al Bustan Festival in Lebanon and the Sanguine Estate Music Festival in Australia, and in 2021 launched his own festival – At the World’s Edge (AWE) – which takes place annually in Queenstown, New Zealand, bringing together artists from all over the world.

Solo appearances in recent seasons include the Philharmonia, Auckland Philharmonia, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica

Simón Bolívar de Venezuela, Krasnoyarsk

Philharmonic, Albanian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Royal Northern Sinfonia,

London Mozart Players, Long Bay Symphony, the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain, Sinfonia Cymru, Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese L’Aquila and the Maui Pops Orchestra. In 2015 he collaborated as soloist with the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

Recordings include as soloist with the BBC Concert and Royal Philharmonic orchestras, and for Delphian Records, a critically acclaimed duo album ‘1942’: Prokofiev – Copland –Poulenc with pianist Daniel Lebhardt in 2021 and chamber music by Matthew Kaner in 2022.

Born in New Zealand, Benjamin studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School with Natasha Boyarsky and at the Royal College of Music, London, where he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Rose Bowl.

He was a prizewinner at the 2013 Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) International Auditions in London.

Benjamin plays on a 1694 Giovanni Grancino instrument, on generous loan from a charitable trust.

Biographies

Pianist Daniel Lebhardt has been acclaimed by the New York Times for his ‘power, poetry and formidable technique’. Born in Hungary, Daniel studied at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest with István Gulyás and Gyöngyi Keveházi, then at the Royal Academy of Music, London with Pascal Nemirovski. He was a prizewinner at the Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) International Auditions in 2015, and graduated with an Advanced Diploma in Performance from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2019.

Recent highlights include Liszt’s Totentanz with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 1 for his debut in Turkey with Bilkent Symphony Orchestra, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5 for his debut with The Hallé, as well as a return visit to the Barbican with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Daniel also debuted with the Venice Symphony, Florida in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 2 and with the National Philharmonic of Ukraine performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 3.

As a recitalist, Daniel has made recent debuts at the Aldeburgh, Lucerne, Heidelberger Frühling and Tallinn Piano festivals and in Dublin and Kiev. He has also given recitals at Wigmore Hall, St David’s Hall in Cardiff, Bath International Festival, the Luxembourg Philharmonie, and L’Église Saint-Germain-desPrès in Paris (as part of the festival ‘Un weekend à l’Est’). He has made return visits to the

Louvre in Paris and Festspiele MecklenburgVorpommern in Germany, and given concerts in the USA, Canada, China, Japan, Colombia, Argentina and Chile. In the UK he has taken part in the Nottingham, Oxford and Birmingham International Piano festivals, performed Mozart with the European Union Chamber Orchestra and appeared at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden.

An avid chamber musician, Daniel collaborates regularly with Benjamin Baker, and is a member of the Northern Chords Ensemble founded by Jonathan Bloxham. He has also worked with Mark van de Wiel, Jonathan McGovern, Charlotte Scott, Alice Neary, Eivind Holtsmark Ringstad, Timothy Ridout and with Delphian artists the Castalian String Quartet, among others. He took part in a BBC Proms composer portrait of Olga Neuwirth, broadcast by BBC Radio 3, and has also worked with composers Brian Elias and Stephen Hough. Most recently he and Benjamin recorded chamber works by Matthew Kaner, also released by Delphian Records.

Daniel has won several international prizes, including First Prize at the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in Paris and New York in 2014, and the Geoffrey Tozer Most Promising Pianist Award in the Sydney International Piano Competition in 2016. He lives in London and is represented by Askonas Holt.

‘1942’: Prokofiev – Copland – Poulenc

Benjamin Baker, Daniel Lebhardt

DCD34247

Since winning First Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York, New Zealand-born violinist Benjamin Baker has established a presence across the globe, with acclaimed solo, chamber and concerto appearances on five continents. His Delphian recording debut sees him joined by regular duo partner Daniel Lebhardt in a programme of three powerful works which were all begun in 1942. Each marked in its own way by a world at war, these sonatas show three of the twentieth century’s most individual composers engaging themes of private loss, political uncertainty and music’s enduring ability both to reflect and to transcend circumstance.

‘Baker and Lebhardt are superb partners, with a rare passion and energy’

— Apple Music, April 2021

Matthew Kaner: Chamber Music

Mark Simpson, Guy Johnston, Benjamin Baker & Daniel Lebhardt, Goldfield Ensemble

DCD34231

Storytelling and making – craft and narrative, and the ways in which they are both enabled and complicated by the presence of music – lie at the heart of Matthew Kaner’s compositional world, as revealed on this debut album devoted to his work. Extended solo works for basset clarinet and for cello are presented by stellar soloists Mark Simpson and Guy Johnson respectively. Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt perform Five Highland Scenes for violin and piano and are joined by cellist Matthias Balzat in Kaner’s evocative and playful Piano Trio, while clarinettist Kate Romano leads the Goldfield Ensemble in the quintet At Night.

‘reveals a composer deftly able to draw the listener into his far-reaching imaginative world … It is his ability to look through others’ eyes that renders his music eloquent’ — BBC Music Magazine, February 2023, FIVE STARS

Origines et départs: French music for clarinet and piano

Maximiliano Martín, Scott Mitchell

DCD34280

Born in the Canary Islands and resident for many years in Scotland, clarinettist Maximiliano Martín here explores the ways in which music can express national character as well as tracking more personal life journeys. The result is a joyous tour of French repertoire (from the tenderness of Saint-Saëns’s clarinet sonata to the emotional turbulence of Poulenc’s), supplemented by recent works from the two places Martín calls home: exquisite miniatures from the Scottish composer Eddie McGuire and the Tenerife-born Gustavo Trujillo. Maxi’s infectious personality pervades an album that is wholly his own.

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

Beau Soir: Debussy – Satie – Ravel – Poulenc

Maciej Kułakowski, Jonathan Ware

DCD34277

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

‘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

Also available on Delphian

Mozart: Sonatas K 304, K 378 & K 454

Olivier Stankiewicz, Jonathan Ware

DCD34245

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the craft of transcription reached its zenith. Popular works such as favourite opera arias were offered to the public in domestically playable versions, and chamber and orchestral works published with alternative scoring options or reworked entirely for different instruments. Thus taking its place in a now somewhat buried tradition that has its roots in the composer’s own time, this cherishable recording by LSO principal oboist Olivier Stankiewicz reimagines three of his best-loved violin sonatas for oboe and piano.

‘The expansive K454 and the genial K378 come off exceptionally well … Jonathan Ware is an ever-attentive co-conspirator’

— Gramophone, August 2021

Between Two Worlds

Castalian String Quartet

DCD34272

From the darkness of night emerges day, the cycle of nature tracing the journey of the soul. The finely calibrated emotions of Orlande de Lassus’s song La nuit froide et sombre, and of his near-contemporary John Dowland’s Come, heavy sleep, are made newly vivid in transcriptions by the Castalian String Quartet, framing a programme which exists both  inside and beyond time. Profound meditations on immortality and worldliness from Beethoven and Thomas Adès receive readings of extraordinary intensity, the Quartet’s burnished tone and astounding interconnectedness making this a debut that demands to be heard.

‘To hear this music, so full of poetry, joy and sorrow, realised to such perfection, felt like a miracle’

— The Observer, January 2020

Elgar: Organ Works

Benjamin Nicholas

DCD34162

Behind the contemporary sophistication of its construction and design, the new Dobson organ commissioned by Merton College, Oxford to celebrate the 750th anniversary, in 2014, of the College’s foundation is essentially an English Romantic instrument with a big, warm-hearted personality. This recording highlights those qualities in music by the composer who pre - eminently shares them. Benjamin Nicholas proves himself a fine Elgarian and an inventive programmer, coupling Elgar’s two original major works for the organ with three transcriptions – including a first outing on CD for the superb arrangement of the Prelude to The Kingdom made by Elgar’s contemporary, the Gloucester Cathedral organist Herbert Brewer.

‘Compelling readings … The warmly detailed recording captures every nuance, every pianissimo and swell’ — MusicWeb International, June 2016

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, we encounter the exploded intensities of Penderecki’s Three Miniatures, the lean, focused expressive charge of Lutoslawski’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