570034Bk Hasse 3/12/09 10:18 AM Page 4

572289bk Ferguson:570034bk Hasse 3/12/09 10:18 AM Page 4 Raphael Terroni Raphael Terroni studied the piano with John Vallier and Cyril Smith. He has given Howard concerts both at home and abroad and has appeared at major festivals as a soloist, accompanist and chamber-music player. He has made several recordings and received much critical acclaim for his recording of piano music by Lennox Berkeley. His most FERGUSON recent release of piano music and songs by Robin Milford was Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and is available on Toccata Classics. He played on two recordings by British composers released in 2006, Piano Trios by Arthur Butterworth and Sonatas for Piano Sonata in F minor violin, viola, cello and piano by Arnold Cooke, in which he was joined by Suzanne Stanzeleit, Morgan Goff and Raphael Wallfisch. Raphael Terroni is a Steinway artist Discovery • Five Bagatelles • Partita and and in 2008/9 he was Warden of the Performers and Composers section of the Incorporated Society of Musicians. Photo: John Terroni Raphael Terroni, Piano Phillida Bannister Phillida Bannister, Contralto • Vadim Peaceman, Piano The contralto Phillida Bannister studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and with Miette Muthesius. As a soloist in recital and oratorio she has performed in major festivals and venues throughout Britain and Europe. Her extensive repertoire encompasses works by British composers, German Lieder, French, Russian and Spanish songs and folk-songs, as well as first performances of several works by contemporary composers. Works with orchestra range from Vivaldi solo cantatas to Mahler songs, and rarities such as Arthur Bliss’s The Enchantress. Her operatic rôles include Erda and Flosshilde in Wagner’s Ring-cycle. Among her recordings of British composers are the Alan Bush cycle Life’s Span and, with Raphael Terroni, Swan Songs and other works by Robin Milford. Photo: Peter Bucknall Vadim Peaceman Vadim was born in 1969 in Baku, in the former USSR. He started to play the piano at the age of five, making his concert début at the age of nine with the Baku Philarmonic Orchestra. In 1983 he received the First Prize in the annual Republic Music Festival for young musicians, and in the same year was awarded First Prize in the Young Pianist Competition. In 1987 he began studying at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St Petersburg and in 1992 he continued his studies at the Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv. In 1995 he was awarded a scholarship by the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music to study on a Postgraduate Course of Advanced Studies at the Royal Academy C of Music, London, under Christopher Elton. During this time he won the Christopher Carpenter Recital Prize, the Myra Hess Trust Award and Second Prize at the Inter- M Collegiate Beethoven Competition in London. Since moving to Britain he has performed extensively as a soloist, accompanist and in chamber music throughout the United Kingdom, Israel, Europe and the United States. Y Photo: Zoe Gallagher K 8.572289 4 572289bk Ferguson:570034bk Hasse 3/12/09 10:18 AM Page 2 Howard Ferguson (1908–1999) thereafter. His sudden death in 1937 inevitably came as a music. With a single pause between the third and fourth Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 8 • Discovery, Op. 13 • Five Bagatelles, Op. 9 great shock, Ferguson pouring his emotional response items, they divide into two ‘movements’: thus the into the Piano Sonata written during 1938-40 and which brusquely preludal First and intermezzo-like Second is Partita for Two Pianos, Op. 5b duly consolidated his reputation when given its première followed by the scherzo-like Third; while the rapt by Myra Hess at the National Gallery in April 1940. Its inwardness of the Fourth contrasts with the athletic Fifth. Howard Ferguson was born in Belfast on 12th October Ferguson’s reputation as a composer, which was to intent is evident from the outset of the first movement, Despite (or perhaps even because of) his deep 1908. On the advice of pianist Harold Samuel, he was attract renewed interest during the two decades before his where a stormily rhetorical introduction only gradually friendship with Finzi, Ferguson produced relatively few educated at Westminster School and the Royal College of death, rests on the nineteen published works that he wrote makes way for a sonata-form trajectory whose angular songs. His only song-cycle is Discovery, composed in Music; studying composition with R. O. Morris and Ralph between 1928 and 1959. From the outset, a command of first theme contrasts with a more lyrical successor. There 1951 to verse by Denton Welch (1915-48); specifically Vaughan Williams, and conducting with Malcolm Sargent. Classical forms and procedures was allied to a grasp of is a short but intensive development and truncated reprise, the latter’s posthumous collection A Last Sheaf. The It was at this time he also formed an enduring friendship Romantic harmony and melody, resulting in an idiom that before the coda recalls the mood of the opening without inward and often ominous character of all these poems, with the composer Gerald Finzi, whose music he was to is inherently yet never defensively conservative. Motivic resolution being reached. The slow movement follows on moreover, no doubt prompted Ferguson to some of his promote assiduously in the years after the latter’s death in evolution occupies a central rôle in his works, whether directly (all three movements are to be played without most astringent and forward-looking music. Hence the 1956. During the Second World War he assisted Myra instrumental or vocal in their conception, as does a pause): its predominant mood is of subdued reflection, first setting, Dreams Melting, with its harmonic unease Hess in organizing the much-lauded concerts of chamber rhythmic energy that endows all his music with its but this does not preclude the emergence of more forceful that underlines the transition between sleeping and waking; music at the National Gallery. Ferguson’s earliest notable continual and cumulative sense of momentum. emotion in the central section. The finale attempts to the melodic line that struggles and ultimately fails to define success as a composer had come with the performance of The earliest piece featured here, Partita was written resolve the accumulated tensions with a sonata-allegro itself in the second setting, The Freedom of the City; the his First Violin Sonata at the Wigmore Hall in October simultaneously during 1935-36 for orchestra as well as whose two main themes build to a massive climax, out of far from tender austerity of mood that permeates the third 1932, followed three years later by his Two Ballades at for two pianos. The title alludes to the suites of dances which the music seems to be heading to a resigned setting Babylon; the decidedly ambivalent humour of the the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester. It was for the prevalent in the Baroque period, but, as was Ferguson’s conclusion. The defiant gestures from the very opening fourth setting, Jane Allen, evincing an unexpectedly latter event that he wrote his two most substantial works, wont with the larger-scale works that emerged in its wake, return, however, to see the whole work through to a close sardonic edge; finally, the setting of Discovery, with its Amore langueo in 1956 and The Dream of the Rood in extended and enriched by the formal and expressive in which there can be no false consolation. depiction of tramping feet and ringing bells, leading on to 1959, whereupon he decided that he had said all that he thinking of subsequent eras. Thus the first movement is The sonata was to have no successor, though Ferguson a close of sustained emotional intensity. Not for nothing needed to say and ceased original composition. cast in the manner of a French Overture in that it opens did write a further work for piano in his Five Bagatelles of was this cycle a favourite of contralto Kathleeen Ferrier, In the years following this cessation Ferguson and closes with powerfully wrought music that frames a 1944. Dedicated to Arnold van Wyck, who provided the whose recording of it shortly before her death in 1953 concentrated on performing, teaching and musicology. driving Allegro which, along with its more relaxed second five-note ‘formulas’ from which each of these pieces is added a valedictory note to one of Ferguson’s finest works. He edited several anthologies of pre-classical keyboard theme, sets up the purposeful development. Its scherzo- derived, they were again taken up by Myra Hess, whose music, featuring the collected works of John Blow, Henry like successor suggests elements of the courante in its disc was the first commercial recording of Ferguson’s Richard Whitehouse Purcell and William Tisdall; volumes of French and energetic progress, though it is the understated second Italian composers, critical editions of all the Schubert theme that emerges to bring about a quiet yet hardly sonatas as well as selected piano works by Brahms and serene close. The slow movement draws on the sarabande Schumann. He also published the well-regarded book in its stately and unhurried progress, textures thinning out Keyboard Interpretation in 1975. As a pianist he enjoyed in the rarified central section to reveal an alluring several long-standing partnerships, notably those with the transparency. Ferguson suggested elements of a reel as violinist Yfrah Neaman and the pianist Dennis Matthews. lying behind the finale, whose initially robust humour He also taught composition at the Royal College of Music gives way to greater inwardness as earlier ideas are between 1948 and 1963, where his many students fleetingly recalled, before a re-gathering of energy on the included such significant figures as Richard Rodney way to a resolute conclusion.

Load more