THOMAS WILSON (1927–2001): A CHAMBER PORTRAIT
Simon Smith piano
Allan Neave guitar
Edinburgh Quartet
Tristan Gurney violin
Philip Burrin violin
Michael Beeston viola
Mark Bailey cello
1 Cancion [3:08]
Piano Sonata
2 Adagio – Allegro potente [7:12]
3 Variations [11:25]
4 Piano Trio premiere recording [16:50]
Three Pieces
5 Allegro molto [1:51]
6 Lento, con espressione [1:37]
7 Moderato, poco rubato [2:02]
String Quartet No 3 premiere recording
8 Allegro agitato – Più tranquillo [6:56]
9 Lento [7:42]
10 Allegro energico [6:42]
11 Incunabula [12:26]
Total playing time [77:56]
This recording has been made possible with financial support from the Thomas Wilson Trust
Recorded on 18 June and 17 September
2008 in the Reid Concert Hall, the University of Edinburgh, 19 June 2008 at Prestonkirk Parish Church, East Linton, and 10 April
2009 at the RSAMD, Glasgow
Piano: Steinway Model D Grand Piano, 1995, serial no 527910
Piano technician: Norman W. Motion, consultant to Steinway & Sons
Thomas Wilson: an appreciation
Any composer will tell you how important a second performance is to establishing a piece of music as more than just a passing enthusiasm. Even more valuable to a composer’s long-term standing, though, are the mechanisms which establish an afterlife for his work as a whole: the interest and engagement of successive generations of performers and listeners which imbues his work with continuing life, making it less a message from the past to the present than a message from his present to our present.
To come to know Thomas Wilson’s music eight years after his death, especially through the extraordinary playing of a pianist like Simon Smith who himself has reached artistic maturity only in those years, is at the same time an experience in immediacy and an exercise of historical imagination. The compositional personality revealed by these works is strong enough, and yet also so evocative of the concerns of a particular period in the history of twentieth-century music in Britain, that one is immediately eager to excavate and explore that context – not in terms of a dry fact-finding expedition that would substitute for the sheer enjoyment one can draw from the music’s own structural pleasures and expressive delights, but in the
spirit of vivid reconstruction, imaginatively recovering a sense of the past as it was for those who lived it.
It is by an act of historical imagination that we perceive not just what happened, but why: not just what music was written, but what the writing of that music meant to those who were engaged on it as the most authentic and artistically responsible work available to them. What were the questions composers asked themselves in the 1950s and 1960s? What was the importance to these composers of harmonic innovation, of rhythmic innovation, or of structural innovation? What role did the concept of expressivity play in their thinking about such issues? How did they view the competing demands of national and supra-national elements in the forging of a personal style?
Not only does Thomas Wilson’s music provide compelling answers to such questions, but they were questions that he asked himself, too – and that he asked himself in a uniquely collegiate atmosphere of ‘shop talk’ with fellow composers. In the decades spanned by the music on this disc, this loosely affiliated group of composers included Wilson’s older colleague William Wordsworth (a descendant of the poet’s brother Christopher), who had
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Simon Smith , Paul Baxter
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Photograph editing: Raymond Parks
Photography © Delphian Records
Cover painting: Gordon Wyllie, reproduced courtesy of Helen Wyllie
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
With thanks to the University of Edinburgh, David Wilde, Ian Mills, John Wallace, Eddie McGuire and the Rev Howard J. Haslett
moved to Invernessshire in 1961, and younger composers such as Martin Dalby, Wilson’s close friend John Maxwell Geddes, and the English-born Edward Harper. Harper taught in Edinburgh from 1964, and from 1973 to 1990 directed the New Music Group of Scotland, with which Wilson was also affiliated.
These men met and talked frequently. They did not share a single style, still less a single outlook on the world – Wilson’s spiritual background and preoccupations, for instance, were foreign to Geddes, despite the pair’s musical and personal sympathy. What all of these composers did share was the assumption that an activity such as composition could be discussed and debated, both in terms of its technical armoury and as a mode of relating to the world, a mode of articulating human experience. The debates Geddes has recalled having with Wilson –about whether all music is at some level tonal, for instance, or about whether there is such a thing as true stasis in music (Wilson disagreed, countering that stasis was an illusion produced by the juxtaposition of different levels of activity/energy) – were not just abstract speculation about technique, but were grounded by a (possibly unspoken) intuition that technique and meaning are never independent of one another: that if a composer hopes to engage areas of human feeling and experience, his first responsibility is to his materials. The notes will not speak of
something beyond the notes if the notes do not speak at all.
Technique, seen this way, is a vehicle for music’s capacity to express – to achieve human engagement. Wilson’s Piano Sonata, composed in 1959 and revised in 1964, is an ideal exemplification of the style of his first mature period. Its opening tritone descent swiftly and effectively establishes the harmonic axis around which the sonata will operate, and adumbrates the octatonic world within which much of Wilson’s music moves. The play of tritones and minor thirds against perfect fourths and whole-tone scale fragments is a powerful feature of the sonata’s contrapuntal language, just as the later Piano Trio’s equal linguistic cohesion rests on that work’s more vertically conceived blocking-out of harmonies built on tritones, perfect fourths, major sevenths and minor ninths. And yet what is more powerful still is the sense of fluency, both technical and expressive, within Wilson’s chosen idiom – for instance the way the slow introduction to the first movement of the sonata, its exploration of the instrument’s middle and low registers as nascently expressive as its pitch content is expertly controlled, launches into a propulsive allegro of strongly etched two-part counterpoint. Close inspection reveals this fast music to be built from the same row of six pitches (itself formed of a three-note cell and its transposed repetition) that opened the adagio; but far from limiting Wilson’s music to a playing-out of some
of the characteristic technical concerns of its period, such constructive rigours imbue it with its striking expressive power and reach, and provide Wilson with a disciplined access to the numinous.
Furthermore, it is such features – the features that make it of its time – that also allow Wilson’s music to transcend its time, make it available for rediscovery by performers who may never have known Wilson and listeners for whom this music speaks from and of a period which is not their own. Its conviction of style and idiom give it a self-assurance which leaves performers free to bring out the music’s expressive range, buoyancy and lightness. And this in turn frees the listener’s imagination to hear other traces, other points of comparison: Is that a hint of Prokofiev at 4:20 into the first movement of the Piano Sonata? What currents of feeling and expression underlie the joyous major-key finale of String Quartet No 3?
The overall arc of Wilson’s career, from the harmonic-rhythmic vigour and instrumental virtuosity of sonata and string quartet to a late lyrical flowering of concertos and piano music, invites comparison with a number of contemporaries – aptly so, since what Wilson and his colleagues were doing in these years was establishing a viable lingua franca for musical modernism in Scotland. The audibility of stylistic and technical affiliations between Wilson’s work and music from
outside Scotland could be seen as proof of the success of this project, and one might also observe in this connection similarities between some of Wilson’s work and that of an English contemporary such as Hugh Wood (whom Wilson would have known when they were lecturers together in Glasgow in the late 1960s). Both composers shared an interest in renewing the medium of chamber music through a fresh approach to its ‘standard genres’ – trio, quartet, sonata – often involving an approach to motivic writing which in Wood’s case marked the influence of his teacher, the Hungarian emigré Mátyás Seiber. As with the Hindemithian aspects of Tippett’s earliest mature language, the European lineage of midcentury modernism is highly relevant here.
The key work inaugurating Wilson’s own efforts in this direction was his String Quartet No 3 (one of two earlier works for the medium was withdrawn). Composed in 1958, the year after his thirtieth birthday, the quartet was seen by Wilson himself as a breakthrough, and is symbolically dedicated to Margaret Wilson, whom he had married six years earlier. A closelyworked motivicism drives the music throughout, determining both small details of melodic formation and larger aspects of structure and form. The four-note motif announced by the first violin at the outset of the opening Allegro agitato recurs in each of the quartet’s three movements, pervading the slow central Lento as well as the lyrical second-subject area of the fast finale.
The slightly later Piano Trio – written in 1966 and first performed at a BBC Invitation concert in Edinburgh that year – seems to approach Wilson’s characteristic dialogue between stillness and activity from the opposite direction, and also, in its still tightly-worked but now less overt motivic integration, to presage the warmer, more relaxed lyricism of his later music. In fact, Wilson’s ability alternately to foreground melodic/harmonic unity or to make it felt as more of a background presence in the Trio appears to stem from the adoption of a loose form of the serial principle, with a note-row which is equally capable of providing a basic pitch vocabulary or of surfacing in melodic fragments which are perceived more motivically – as, for example, the melodic shape which provides ‘rhyming’ endings to the two extended violin/cello passages which open the work, and which are each followed by an answering piano solo. These initially measured statements grow more impassioned and release at length into an allegro passage where all three players come together for the first time. Their driving octaves give way to strong, syncopated counterpoint until the nowfamiliar melodic shape is recalled cadentially in glassy violin harmonics. A slow, expressive cello solo introduces a scherzando section of dancing celerity, with violin pizzicati and repeated-note figures in the piano right-hand. Now the cello solo is balanced by a songful cadenza for violin, which grows into extended lyrical music for all three instruments – is the
(transposed) echo of Shostakovich’s musical signature (D–S–C–H) accidental, here at the work’s emotional heart? The work comes full circle in a coda based on the opening string/ piano statements.
Although his work-list contains little for wind instruments – his chamber output being predominantly for strings and/or piano – Wilson wrote several times, and with great idiomatic understanding, for the guitar, including his last concerto (1996) as well as a number of solo pieces throughout his career. The Three Pieces (1961), like the Piano Trio, are based on a 12-note series, though here its use is more systematic: each of the pieces explores a different way of using the row, giving them a study-like character.
The first piece is for the most part a rapid single line, based on constant permutations of the row, which is heard at the outset. Despite its serial nature (it contains one of each of the 12 chromatic pitches), this row is not subject to the ‘classic’ serial operations of retrograde, inversion or even transposition; Wilson uses it simply as a sequence of three four-note cells, through which the piece cycles repeatedly, varying their contents mainly by octave displacement of individual pitches and offsetting any potential squareness by means of a syncopated distribution of accents. Harmony, such as it is, is usually a simple matter of verticalising one of these four-note
cells, although there is a brief moment of mirroring at the centre of the piece in which the first six notes of the row are simultaneously heard in original and inverted forms.
The third piece again uses for the most part only the basic (untransposed) row, but now divides it into sequences of three-note chords as well as four-note melodic cells, thus producing from within the row a melodyand-accompaniment texture whose idiomatic conception for the guitar is further enhanced by the incorporation of different types of articulation and modes of attack. The second piece, meanwhile, uses two-part counterpoint throughout. It employs a wider variety of row forms (inversions and transpositions) but with less internal repetition, thereby focussing on the forward motion of the two melodic lines – which the player must bring out cantando sempre, legato possibile.
If tonal implications are not far below the surface of the row in Three Pieces, tonality is a more explicit presence in Cancion (1977), although – as in the Piano Sonata of two decades earlier – it is a tonality which inflects and is inflected by more abstractly symmetrical, and in particular octatonic, pitch formations. Symmetry again features strongly in the piano piece Incunabula (1983), which originates in a cycle of seven ‘songs from the Chinese’, The Willow Branches, which Wilson wrote earlier the same year for the
mezzo-soprano Marilyn de Blieck and the pianist Roger Vignoles. Incunabula grew from the piano writing of the song cycle; and the following year, expanded from within, the piano piece in turn became the basis of the slow movement of Wilson’s Piano Concerto, written for David Wilde. The Latin title – meaning ‘cradles’, or ‘origins’ – seems to signify these multiple relationships, one work giving birth to the next. And Incunabula’s material is itself almost self-generating, with arabesques sprouting from sustained chords, right-hand lines mirrored exactly in the left, sections and phrases juxtaposed and reordered to make the whole. The instrument is like a cradle, too, with melodic lines played lontano (‘as if from afar’); faster passages enclosed by slow music which acts like a resonating chamber around them; chords imitating different varieties of bell sounds and gongs ... Towards the end, a chiming motif in octaves rises magically from the middle of the texture and concludes the piece in a haze of pedalled harmony which –like so much else in this piece, on this disc, and in Wilson’s oeuvre as a whole – might be tonal, might be modal, might be octatonic, but gains both meaning and beauty from its quiet, strangely assured ambivalence.
© John Fallas 2009
John Fallas is a writer specialising in 20thcentury and new music.
Thomas Wilson’s close working friendship with several fellow composers extended also to his relationships with artists working in other disciplines. He and Margaret Wilson met the Scottish artist Gordon Wyllie and his wife Helen in the early 1970s, when the SNO (now RSNO) Chorus and the John Currie Singers undertook a joint tour to Israel. The Singers were performing a piece by Wilson as part of their touring programme, and Gordon and Helen were at this time members of the Chorus. The two men remained friendly, and often discussed work and other matters in the subsequent decades.
Wilson never sat for Gordon, but the latter began to sketch a portrait of Tom based on a photograph passed to him by Margaret Wilson in the late 1980s or early ’90s, drawing
inspiration from his many discussions with Tom and incorporating motifs relating to Wilson’s St Kentigern Suite (1986). These include fragments of Glasgow buildings (St Kentigern is patron saint and founder of the city of Glasgow), as well as the symbols – fish, bird, ring, bell and tree – which represent episodes in the saint’s life and which can also be seen on Glasgow’s coat of arms. The use of figurative elements was typical of Wyllie’s later style, after a period in the 1960s in which his work had been characterised by a greater degree of abstraction.
The painting was never finished, although Gordon Wyllie worked on it in several stages, as was his habit, and various layers were added over a period of several years. We reproduce it here by kind permission of Helen Wyllie.
Simon Smith was born in Northumberland in 1983. At St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh he studied piano with Richard Beauchamp and composition with Tom David Wilson and James MacMillan. He read Music at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 2005, where he studied composition with Giles Swayne.
The majority of Simon’s efforts as a pianist have been devoted to contemporary music. In 2000 he gave a recital of the complete piano music of James MacMillan, and subsequently recorded it (along with the first recording of the Piano Sonata by Stuart MacRae) for Delphian Records. Reviews of the disc described Simon as ‘an astounding player, with a huge expressive range’ (International Record Review ) and ‘clearly a talent to watch’ (Gramophone ). Following a performance in 2005 of Ligeti’s complete Etudes, he was acclaimed as ‘a phenomenon – nothing daunts him, technically or musically’ (The Scotsman). Considering it his privilege as a performer to give people the opportunity to hear music they may not otherwise encounter, he is devoted to performing works by lesser-known composers,
as well as less well-known pieces by more mainstream figures, including Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No 1 and Dvorák’s Piano Concerto. He has a particular interest in works by Eastern European and Russian composers. He has been an advocate of the work of Valentin Silvestrov, and in 2009 he will record the complete piano works of Alfred Schnittke for Delphian.
Simon now lives in Edinburgh, and works professionally as a music engraver, having completed large-scale projects for Boosey & Hawkes, Schott & Co and the StockhausenVerlag, among others. He is a member of the Hebrides Ensemble, a contemporary music group performing around Scotland. Among his other passions are Polish language and culture, collecting recordings, and cats.
Simon Smith Gordon H. Wyllie (1930–2005)
The Edinburgh Quartet
The Edinburgh Quartet was founded in 1959 and quickly became established as one of Britain’s foremost chamber ensembles, appearing regularly at prestigious venues across the country including London’s Wigmore Hall and South Bank Centre. It achieved international recognition after winning the Contemporary Prize at the Evian-les-Bains String Quartet Competition, and has since toured extensively across Europe, the Far East, North and South America and the Middle East, as well as making numerous radio and television broadcasts within the UK. The year 2010 marks the quartet’s fiftieth anniversary, and it is now one of the longest-running chamber ensembles in the UK, with a busier performing schedule than ever before.
The Quartet is resident at Glasgow University and Napier University and also collaborates with the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In addition to a regular classical concert series at each of these institutions, the Quartet is committed to nurturing talent and championing new music. It has worked with many important and prolific composers of our age, including James MacMillan, its patron, and Michael Tippett, who selected the Edinburgh Quartet’s recording of his String Quartet No 1 for re-release on EMI shortly before his death.
The Edinburgh Quartet’s extensive discography features recordings on various labels including Delphian, Linn Records, Meridian and RCA.
Recent releases include the complete string quartets of Hans Gál (Editor’s Choice –Gramophone, 2007), the complete string quartets of Kenneth Leighton (‘The unanimity of their ensemble, even at the densest polyphonic moments in flying scherzo tempo, is very impressive’ – BBC Music Magazine), and discs of Bartók, Robert Crawford, Haydn and Schubert. Future projects include a studio recording on Delphian of the complete quartets of Mátyás Seiber, works which the Edinburgh Quartet has already featured on a live broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
Allan Neave
Allan is Senior Lecturer in Strings and Head of Guitar Studies at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. Since studying at the RSAMD (1984) and the RNCM (1988), he has been a regular guest at many of the world’s leading musical events and has worked with many influential musicians including Nikita Koshkin, Eddie McGuire, Hans Werner Henze and Stephen Dodgson.
Career highlights to date have included recording Gordon McPherson’s concerto Born of Funk and Fear of Failing with new music group Psappha, performing Scottish guitar music in Peru, a tour of Australia with virtuoso flautist Alison Mitchell, a tour of the Far East with Tetra Guitar Quartet, performances of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the RSNO in their Prom season, and recording the soundtrack for a film documentary about the great Scottish painter, John Bellany.
Allan has also been Artistic Director of the Dundee International Guitar Festival since its inception, and in 2000 he received the Scotland on Sunday Glenfiddich ® Spirit of Scotland Award for Music. These awards were set up to recognise individuals who lead the way in Scottish culture.
Robert Crawford: Piano Quintet, music for solo piano
Edinburgh Quartet
Nicholas Ashton piano (DCD34055)
Elder statesman of the Scottish music scene, Robert Crawford has throughout his life lavished intense care upon every one of his comparatively few compositions. The Edinburgh Quartet and pianist Nicholas Ashton are intimately acquainted with Crawford’s work, and mirror the composer’s attention to detail in a long overdue survey of this lovingly crafted music, spanning 60 years of compositional activity.
‘an impressive collection … committed and excellent performances’
– Musical Opinion, March/April 2008
‘splendid, incisive playing’
– The Wire, April 2008
The Cold Dancer: Contemporary string quartets from Scotland Clapperton / Dempster / Sweeney / Weir
Edinburgh Quartet (DCD34038)
Rich and personal contributions to the quartet tradition from four contemporary Scottish voices, ranging from the lyrical profundity of Kenneth Dempster’s meditation on a George Mackay Brown poem to a characteristically idiosyncratic and yet songful work by Judith Weir. The Edinburgh Quartet deliver blazing, committed performances, celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.
‘On this outstanding CD, driven by scorchingly focused performances from the Edinburgh Quartet, the impact of the four pieces is colossal … Each of the composers is at his and her peak, and the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’
– The Herald, February 2007
Eddie McGuire: Resistance Movements
Nancy Ruffer flute/piccolo, Abigail James guitars, 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 eclectic as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of 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. The listener cannot help being drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world, which is at once bold and playful.
‘This is quite simply beautiful music … Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on … the perfect entrée to his sound-world’
– Gramophone, Awards issue 2006
Miracles: The music of Edward Harper David Wilson-Johnson, Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Garry Walker Edinburgh Quartet; Louise Paterson cello (DCD34069)
Delphian’s first orchestral recording presents a richly imagined new choral symphony by Edward Harper, setting it alongside chamber works by this inventive and limpidly expressive composer. Harper’s music takes its place firmly within the British symphonic tradition, yet ranges wider still in its deeply felt response to human experience, from the nineteenth-century Dorset of William Barnes to a message of hope and reconciliation from the presentday Middle East.
‘The Three Folk Settings for string quartet are quite masterly in the way their allusions to familiar folk materials are framed’
– Gramophone, July 2008
‘It’s impossible not to warm to Harper’s taut, severe but rapturous idiom. Excellent performances’
– Financial Times, June 2008
New