WILLIAM SWEENEY I TREE O’ LICHT
Robert Irvine cello
Erkki Lahesmaa cello l Fali Pavri piano
WILLIAM SWEENEY (b. 1950): TREE O’ LICHT
1 The Tree o’ Licht for two cellos [12:36]
2 The Poet Tells of his Fame [18:55] an electroacoustic fantasy after Borges for cello, pre-recorded samples and live processing Sonata for Cello and Piano
A composer harvests his crop: William Sweeney’s music for cello
The fruits of Bill Sweeney’s composing life are on display in the three major recent works presented on this recording. A life experience crystallised into musical discourse through the medium of that most expressive of instruments, the cello, in the hands of two of its greatest exponents. Yet a life experience that is not just musical, but social and emotional in the deepest senses. What could be more socially caring and vitally connected than sitting through the deliberations of three days of the Scottish Trades Union Congress?
I am writing this soon after returning from Perth, where Bill and I sat for three days in the Musicians’ Union delegation hearing an array of problems and struggles from impoverishment to rising unemployment to quests for unity to demands for women’s rights and much more.
negotiating the rocky road of student politics in the late 1960s while studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (with W.T. Clucas for clarinet and Frank Spedding for composition). Activism did not prevent, perhaps aided, his winning the Sibelius essay prize every year, as well as prizes in composition and performance. Further studies took him to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where, on top of intensive work with Alan Hacker (for clarinet) and Harrison Birtwistle (for composition), he found time to organise his fellows into the National Union of Students, becoming union president in 1972. My final year at the RAM overlapped with his arrival and I was pleased to be able to reacquaint myself with his music and ideals.
World premiere recordings made in the presence of the composer
Delphian Records Ltd is grateful to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the University of Glasgow for their generous support of this recording.
Recorded on 2-3 November and 13-14 December 2012 in the Concert Hall, University of Glasgow
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Software supervision: Nick Fells
Piano: Steinway model D, serial no. 459250
Piano technician: Roy O’Niell
Robert Irvine photo © Delphian Records
Cover image: Richard Pilnick Photography
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
Such political, moral and emotional striving has imbued Bill’s life since his earliest years following his birth in Glasgow in 1950 –memories of the Springburn and Cowcaddens districts of the city, of his grandparents’ struggles there and of the Clydebank shipyards where his grandfather William Docherty worked; of his father’s activism in the National Union of Railwaymen; of political discourse with his late brother. One of the pieces on this disc is a memorial to his mother, Jean Sweeney. I have fond memories of chatting to her on my visits to Clyde Books, the radical bookshop she lovingly tended for many years. So it is not surprising that we find Bill
Intensive life-experience continued back in Glasgow with a decade of full- and part-time woodwind and wind band tutoring followed by performance mentoring, then Honours composition teaching, at the University of Glasgow, where today he is Professor of Music in the School of Culture and Creative Arts. He has always demonstrated a deep commitment to the city itself. Most of his life has been spent in its heart. Of course his family life has been central too. His lifetime’s companion Anna and their two, now grown-up, children are his greatest supporters. Hence educating the new generations is a notion close to Bill’s heart. Evolving new approaches to music education was an important aspect
Robert Irvine cello
Erkki Lahesmaa cello (1) l Fali Pavri piano (3–4)
of his work in the 1980s and 1990s with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Paragon Ensemble, integrating orchestral musicians into creative workshops for a wide range of learners including special needs students and even teachers themselves. As clarinettist and conductor he applied the unique outlook Alan Hacker had passed on to him, performing and commissioning new music himself – for BBC Radio 3, Park Lane Group and Society for the Promotion of New Music. As a writer about music his contributions span the years, from joining the editorial board of the radical cultural journal Artery in the 1970s to his current research essays for the Scottish Music Review and membership of its editorial board.
Lest a listing of all this activity suggest that composing was on the back burner, we can see now that his compositions were the central focus of his calling. No more proof is needed than to hear the quality of the works that won him the accolades of the Aeleph Composition Prize (1981), Scottish BAFTA Award for Best Music (1997), Creative Scotland Award (2006) and BASCA British Composer Award (2011, for the Cello Sonata featured on this disc). And a glance at some of the dozens of commissioned major works confirms this focus. His opera An Turus (libretto by Aonghas MacNeacail) was premiered by Paragon Ensemble in 1998 and is one of several works using the Gaelic language. A groundbreaking work is his Salm an Fhearainn, for the vocal
ensemble Cappella Nova, taking the medium beyond the influence of psalm-singing into new realms of mass vocal sounds. John Purser has commented in his book Scotland’s Music that it is ‘an astonishing fact that Gaelic had never been set or sung in any extended classical composition’ until Salm an Fhearainn. Bill’s settings in Scots include his remarkable Pro Patria to the words of George Buchanan, sixteenth-century scholar and poet. Looking abroad we find him setting the poetry of Neruda, Synge and Brecht.
The compositional voice in these and other pieces – including many for orchestra and wind band – shows a transition from the influence of modernism, even of Stockhausen in the early 1970s, to a rediscovery of the power of tonality. Inspirations behind this change have included traditional Gaelic music, jazz and, in particular, the expressive music of Janácek. In the music on this recording, the strengths of this lifetime of influences have interacted in a mature and most productive way.
inspiration mentioned previously – that of the ancient freely-weaving Gaelic psalm-singing –is here concentrated in its intensity, distilled down into the realm of just two passionately interacting cellos. In a closely echoing dialogue often just one beat (a heartbeat?) apart the two instruments weave their lament, articulated by almost tear-jerking grace-notes. Pentatonic phrases resolve sometimes sweetly into unisons – but again and again we are taken on a journey through more jagged emotional territory, in flurries of conflicting and discordant fast falling grace-notes. In the soaring tones of the duo – in the instruments’ highest range – a literary image is revealed. The genius of nature in the form of entrancing nocturnal birdsong emanating from ‘the tree o’ licht’ (a description of the silver birch from Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘By Wauchopeside’) is a symbolism that inspires Bill in this powerful piece. Its conclusion is signalled by an agitated section that rises to a high-pitched, dramatic tremolando. Resonant strummed chords herald a return of the psalm-like meditative theme and the duo ends on a bittersweet harmony, a blue-note ambiguity between major and minor.
The Poet Tells of his Fame
The rim of the sky is the measure of my glory, The libraries of the East fight to own my verses, The rulers seek me out to fill my mouth with gold, The angels already know my last couplet by heart. The tools of my art are humiliation and anguish. Oh, if only I had been born dead!
An early stage of composing this piece was the creation of cello sound samples by Robert Irvine working with the composer in the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Glasgow. This pre-recorded material is played back as the soloist performs from the score. However, during this playback the sounds are modified by the use of filters and reverberators. These are triggered by some characteristics of the live cello performance. Bill writes: ‘I am indebted to Dr Nick Fells for his invaluable guidance and assistance throughout the development of this particular PD canvas.’ Here ‘PD’ refers to what Bill describes as a ‘real-time graphical programming environment for audio and graphical processing’. This provided the means to trigger and filter.
The Tree o’ Licht reveals the composer in an elegiac, contemplative and passionate frame of mind. It was commissioned by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama for its cello-themed ‘Stringfest’ in March 2008, and the score bears the dedication ‘in memory of my mother, Jean Sweeney (1916–2007)’. The
In The Poet Tells of his Fame, composed in 2003, the inspiration comes from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, presented as a translation from the twelfth-century Abulcasim el-Hadrami (a Borgesian fiction, perhaps, since no such person seems to have existed). In W.S. Merwin’s translation from Borges’ Spanish it reads:
The soloist, meanwhile, has three types of musical material – defined as ‘Melodies’, ‘Ostinati’ and ‘Textures’ – and has the freedom to play the material in any order. A set of guidelines is provided by the composer, one of which is: ‘Allow the work to begin and end with the pre-recorded material.’ Bill’s characteristic grace-note textures, expressive intervallic
themes, pitch slides and rapid flurries are all brought to bear in this dramatic piece.
I was privileged to be able to sit in on the recording session at the University of Glasgow’s Concert Hall back in November 2012. As Robert’s natural and artificial harmonics (some with added tremolo, some with a nasal sul ponticello) surged around the entangled leads, cables and microphones, Bill’s disembodied voice would ring out with ‘If it’s busy, give it 5 seconds!’, or ‘Think about the poem!’ And, persevering, Robert grappled with several mobile sheets of music, headphones (left ear uncovered), wires, microphone stands while engaging in his brilliantly vigorous cello playing – and all embedded in a pulsating sea of electronic ‘cello’ sounds. And yet, in the midst of the dense textures there is the hint of a Baroque harmonic pull, perhaps suggested by the cross-string arpeggios and low pedal notes left to ring. Impassioned, singing phrases leave the listener in no doubt about the expressive power of this music. Robert’s fast-thinking choices from the free material allow the piece to build in an increasingly intense emotional curve. Who needed rules or guidelines when there was this frenzy of creative thought? Single upward-zooming notes high in the range lead to a final, more reflective phase. In the midst of all this, there was Nick Fells monitoring the pre-recorded sound loops, the filtering and triggering programme: and in the calm of the recording
room sat Paul Baxter, steering the ship through the electro-storm. Remarkably enough, the track was recorded successfully in one continuous performance, on the second take.
The Sonata for Cello and Piano’s dedication – ‘Written for Erkki Lahesmaa and Robert Irvine, keepers of the cello’s inner voice, and dedicated to Hanna Nurminen, inspirational Executive Director and chairperson of the Kone Foundation, Finland’ – is the key to the origin of this work, composed in 2010. For some time Bill had harboured a strong inclination to write a substantial work for cello and piano. Getting started was sparked by learning that Robert Irvine, who had inspirationally interpreted his music for years, and Erkki Lahesmaa, who had greatly impressed him in Turku in 2009, were already colleagues and friends. Thus the dedication to both and the dual premieres, by the Finnish cellist in Scotland and by the Scottish cellist in Finland (both accompanied by Fali Pavri). Bill also gives a detailed thanks to the new work’s supporters, worth quoting to show how important this piece was to a substantial period of his life:
This work was commissioned by Robert Irvine with the support of Creative Scotland. I am also grateful to the following organisations for their support in allowing me time, the opportunity to travel, collaborative effort and space to think: the University of Glasgow, RSAMD, Music Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences, Scottish Arts Council, The Carnegie Fund for the Universities of Scotland
and the Kone Foundation, for a period of residence at the Saari Manor.
Bill pinpoints one of the inspirations behind this sonata as starting with his fascination with the way Schumann placed the listener ‘right in the centre of the music’ with ‘ideas whirling about one’s head, almost drowning in the breathless succession of phrases’. Inspired too, by ‘those moments when he turns inwards, reflective, and the music reaches down inside us’. One result of Bill’s thinking in this direction are the more reflective passages in which each instrument plays alone. The first movement goes on a stirring and dramatic journey, but reaches a considered, peaceful resolution – typical of Bill’s handling of life’s ups and downs. The meditative opening of the second movement grows in intensity, but by the seventh minute it evaporates and the piano quietly enters. Serene thoughts form its conclusion. I think the grand landscape of this sonata speaks for itself. From here we can look forward with anticipation to further musical harvests from this richly productive composer.
© 2013 Eddie McGuire
A friend and colleague of William Sweeney for forty-five years, Eddie McGuire is himself a prolific composer of orchestral, chamber and solo works. Often inspired by folk music, he is also flautist with The Whistlebinkies. Various Delphian recordings feature his works for organ, solo trumpet, and clarinet quartet, and a portrait disc (Delphian DCD34029, a Gramophone Editor’s Choice) surveys his music for flute, guitar and piano.
There’s mair in birds than men ha’e faddomed yet. Tho’ maist churn oot the stock sangs o’ their kind
There’s aiblins genius here and there; and aince ’Mang whitebeams, hollies, siller birks –– the tree o’ licht –I mind
I used to hear a blackie mony a nicht
Singin’ awa t’an unconscionable ’oor Wi’ nocht but the water keepin’t company …
(Hugh MacDiarmid, from ‘By Wauchopeside’)
Robert 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. 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, broadcasts and recordings.
He left the Philharmonia in 1988 to take up the position of principal cello with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. In 1990, he returned to Scotland as principal cellist of 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, an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone magazine in December 2001. 2008 saw two releases on Delphian Records: the complete cello works of Giles Swayne (DCD34073) with Fali Pavri on piano, and sonatas by Rachmaninov and Shostakovich (DCD34034) with pianist Graeme McNaught.
Robert is a senior tutor of Cello and Chamber Music at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Artistic Director of Red Note Ensemble. He plays on a very fine cello by Jean-Louis Prochasson made in 2007, and uses a fine bow by Howard Green, made in 2011.
Coryton Ensemble in the USA and of the Quatuor Arthur-LeBlanc in Canada. He is also a member of the Plus Ensemble and of the piano trio Trio Ad Libitum. With these ensembles he has made recent appearances in the Warsaw Autumn and in the Berliner Festspiele’s MaerzMusik series, as well as numerous recordings.
venues around the world. He has performed and collaborated with many eminent musicians including the Vertavo Quartet, the Leopold Trio, Paragon Ensemble, Scottish Ensemble, the conductor Richard Hickox, and singers Roderick Williams and Mark Padmore.
Erkki Lahesmaa studied the cello with Aldo Parisot, Zara Nelsova, Harvey Shapiro and Timo Hanhinen at the Juilliard School, the Yale University and the Turku Conservatory (Finland). He has also had extensive chamber music studies with, among others, the Juilliard and Tokyo String Quartets. In 1986 he took second prize in the Turku Cello Competition in Finland, and in 1990 he won the Juilliard Cello Competition in the USA. He made his debut in New York in 1990 performing the Dvorák concerto at the Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, and since then has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician in Europe, the USA, Canada, South America and Japan. His most recent appearances as soloist have been with conductors such as Leif Segerstam and others, and have included the cello concertos of Kalevi Aho and Camille Saint-Saëns, and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. He is an active performer of contemporary music, and several works by Finnish composers have been written and dedicated to him.
As a chamber musician, he has been a member of the Artisti del Mondo and of the
Erkki Lahesmaa is senior lecturer of cello and chamber music at the Turku Music Academy in Finland. He has been a jury member in numerous music competitions and has been invited to give masterclasses in Beijing, Shanghai, Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Florence, San Sebastian, Lisbon, Glasgow, Weimar, Bremen, Warsaw, Krakow, St Petersburg, Stockholm, Reykjavik, Bergen, Oslo and Stavanger. He is also the director of Nauvo Chamber Music Festival in Finland.
Fali Pavri enjoys a busy and varied career as soloist, chamber musician and teacher. Born in Mumbai, India, where his first teacher was Shanti Seldon, he studied the piano at the Moscow Conservatoire with Professor Victor Merzhanov and at the Royal Academy of Music, London with Christopher Elton. While still a student, he was invited by the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich 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
Besides partnering Robert Irvine on a previous Delphian release, of music by Giles Swayne (Delphian DCD34073), he has recorded two critically acclaimed discs with the cellist Timothy Gill on the Guild label, including world premieres of works by the Indian composer John Mayer. Also on Guild are two CDs featuring the music of the Swiss composer Volkmar Andreae; the first was awarded International Record Review magazine’s coveted ‘Outstanding’ accolade, and a further disc of Andreae’s piano concertos (this time with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) will be released in 2014. Radio broadcasts include regular appearances on BBC Radio 3, where he has played some unusual and challenging repertoire including Sinding’s Piano Quintet with the Vertavo Quartet and Alexander Goehr’s Das Gesetz der Quadrille with the baritone Roderick Williams. He has recorded for All-India Radio with Mstislav Rostropovich and for CBC (the North American premiere of Mauricio Kagel’s La Trahison orale).
A committed and sought-after teacher with many international prize-winning students, Fali Pavri is a Professor of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Giles Swayne: Music for cello and piano
Robert Irvine cello, Fali Pavri piano
DCD34073
Giles Swayne’s works for cello exhibit an astonishing array of moods and colours.
The restless beauty of Four Lyrical Pieces and strident romanticism of the Sonata offer remarkable counterpoint to his Suite for solo cello. Canto seduces the listener with its symbiotic blend of African traditional and Western art music.
‘Superbly played … recorded with trademark spaciousness and clarity. [Canto] projects that positive tone and enquiring spirit which represent this composer at his considerable best’
– Gramophone, March 2008
‘This music is ablaze with colour and irrepressible energy. Irvine and Pavri make it truly sing’
– The Scotsman, March 2008
Rachmaninov / Shostakovich: Sonatas for Cello and Piano
Robert Irvine cello, Graeme McNaught piano
DCD34034
Along with his famous Piano Concerto No 2, Rachmaninov’s impassioned Cello
Sonata of 1901 is one of the two crucial works that signalled the composer’s recovery from an intense depression. Acknowledging the precedent of Chopin’s sonata both in its G minor tonality and in the importance given to the piano part, it is joined here by Shostakovich’s Beethovenian sonata of 1934.
‘Rarely can [the Rachmaninov] have been recorded in a performance of such potent and poetic intensity, intelligence and clarity … Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata is equally well done: poised, subtle and controlled where it needs to be, but appositely pugnacious, brittle and pointed in the scherzo’
– Sunday Times, July 2008
‘… performances of exhilarating musicality and intimate understanding. Proof couldn’t be stronger that it’s not always the most marketed names that produce the finest interpretations’
– Classic FM Magazine, September 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 composing 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. Under leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet delivers 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
Knight Errant: solo music for trumpet McGuire / Maxwell Davies / Turnage / Boyle / Geddes / Sweeney
Mark O’Keeffe
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 works he himself has commissioned from Eddie McGuire, John Maxwell Geddes and William Sweeney – and wins his spurs in this stunning debut recital.
‘No other solo instrument has the expressive range of the trumpet as played by the golden-tongued Irish virtuoso O’Keeffe, who seizes the ear with brilliant tone and a warm exuberant jig in McGuire’s Prelude, foghorn greeting and rhythmic zip in Maxwell Davies’s Litany for a Ruined Chapel ’
– The Times, May 2007