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World music CD DVD shop and Classic distribution
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ID: GMCD7119 (EAN: 795754711929) | 1 CD | DDD Released in: 1996
- LABEL:
- Guild GmbH
- Collection:
- Instrumental
- Subcollection:
- Piano
- Composers:
- HOWELLS, Herbert Norman | STEVENS, Bernard
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Interprets:
- FILSELL, Jeremy (piano / organ)
- Other info:
Neither Herbert Howells nor Bernard Stevens were prolific composers, and both - for different reasons - found themselves sidelined by more fashionable figures during their lifetimes. But the integrity of their music, the inherent nobility of their chosen expression, and their distinctive individuality, have ensured that their music has not died, but has found new and exciting champions - and responsive and eager audiences - amongst the younger music-lovers and record-buyers of today. This is all to the good, and when we hear such immediately compelling music as Howells’s three pieces from his Opus 14, alongside his much later Sonatina of 1971 (written in his 80th year) we must wonder as to why this music has been so comparatively overlooked.
The same is also true of the piano music of the brilliant Bernard Stevens. There are many who feel, with much justification, that Stevens’s reputation as a composer suffered greatly, and unfairly, from his championship of Communism - although he resigned from the Party following the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 - and yet his music speaks to us purely as music, and as nothing else. His voice, like Howells’s, is a distinctive one, music by a composer with something to say and - more importantly - with the technical means to say it.
The result is a body of piano music to set alongside his noble symphonies and concertos. The Sonata in One Movement is a fine work of considerable integrity and individuality - like the two other Stevens pieces on this disc, it demands a player of technical ability as well as of musical command, a player such as we find in the gifted pianist Jeremy Filsell, whose commitment to the music of both these English masters can be clearly discerned in his brilliant and sensitive playing.
| HOWELLS, Herbert Norman (1892-1983) | | | 1. | Gadabout (1928) | 4:39 | | | 2. | Fantasia on Giles Farnaby's Dreame Bernard Stevens | 13:16 | | | Three Pieces Op. 14 | | | 3. | Rhapsody | 8:59 | | | 4. | Jackanapes | 5:22 | | | 5. | Procession | 4:21 | | | STEVENS, Bernard (1916-1983) | | | 6. | Sonata in one movement for piano Op. 25 | 4:48 | | | HOWELLS, Herbert Norman (1892-1983) | | | Sonatina (1971) | | | 7. | Vivo: Inquieto | 3:49 | | | 8. | Quasi Adagio: Serioso ma teneramente | 5:28 | | | 9. | Agile, destro, sempre veloce | 3:43 | | | 10. | Aria (original version) Bernard Stevens | 3:36 | |
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