Acknowledgments Recorded on June 23-24, June 30, July 1, August 4, and August 6, 2014 at Washington State University Recording Studios, Pullman, Washington. WONDROUS LOVE: Recording Engineer: David Bjur Producer: Sean Butterfield Works for Solo Cello

The Bloch Suites are published by Broude. Miranda Wilson cello Daniel Bukvich’s works are available direct from the .

This recording was funded by the Kurt Olsson Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of Idaho.

WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1534 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD ERNEST BLOCH DANIEL BUKVICH TEL: 01539 824008 © 2014 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD Suite No. 1 | Suite No. 2 Variations on “What Wondrous Love Is This?” WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Suite No. 3 Phantasy on a Theme of Purcell Ernest Bloch (1880-1959): The opening Prelude of the First Suite begins mysteriously in C minor. With repetitive Suites for Cello Solo. No. 1 (1956), No. 2 (1956), No. 3 (1957) broken chords on open strings suggestive of one of Bach’s preludes for cello, it escapes slowly from the veiled tone of the first measures, building dramatic tension During the last years of his life, in the seaside hamlet of Agate Beach in Oregon, until the crisis of the dénouement, a high wailing A flat in the cello’s upper register. Bloch composed a series of works for solo instruments—cello, , , and A subtly altered return to the opening material ends on a questioning note, which is . The austere musical language of Bloch’s final years seemed to allude to the answered by the beginning of the second movement. This frantic moto perpetuo solo instrumental works of Johann Sebastian Bach, fusing the linear counterpoint, dashes all over the full compass of the cello’s range. The motto theme makes its phrase shapes, and mannerisms of Baroque dance with the octatonic harmonies of first, unobtrusive appearance; it will become more pronounced in later movements. modern times. The third movement, titled Canzona after the early Baroque form, is imbued with the slow triple meter and somber character of a Bachian sarabande. It’s in this The Three Suites for Violoncello Solo were written at the suggestion of the cellist freely-composed fantasy movement that the “bell” motive appears for the first time, Zara Nelsova, who had been a passionate advocate of Bloch’s most famous cello alongside a yearning version of the motto theme. This sense of nostalgia is sublimated work, Schelomo for cello and . “Zara Nelsova is my music!” the composer in the vigorous fourth movement, where the motto theme resurfaces with the wild enthused to his friends. energy of a Baroque gigue.

Anyone expecting Bloch’s Cello Suites to sound like Schelomo will be very surprised, The Second Suite is the longest, least traditional, and most enigmatic of the three. however. When Bloch asked Nelsova for ideas, she gave Bloch the scores of solo It falls into four movements, played attacca, which in their different ways are all cello music by Zoltán Kodály and Max Reger, but Bloch wasn’t impressed. Instead, meditations on the Prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major. The first movement, he turned to Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello, particularly Suite No. 1 in G major BWV also titled Prelude, sets up a sense of darkness and searching that is disrupted 1007, whose shadow pervades all three of Bloch’s Suites, particularly the Second. by the uneasy, fantastical Allegro. The stark Andante tranquillo returns to the bell motive and the sarabande-like character of the slow movement to the First Suite, Each of the three Suites works well as a stand-alone work, but they also function while the energetic final Allegro alludes to Bach’s G major Courante. together as a larger-scale cyclical whole. A “motto theme” in F major that first appears in the First Suite in various elusive disguises is recapitulated in four of The Third Suite, written a year after the First and Second, is rather livelier than its the five movements in the Third Suite, while a second recurring gesture, a motive predecessors. It is still thematically linked to them, however, through the motto reminiscent of the pealing of bells, occurs in the slow movements of all the Suites. theme, which occurs in all the movements but the second, and the bell motive, which emerges in its final guise in the fourth. Whereas the opening movements to the First and Second Suites were slow and Daniel Bukvich: tormented, the Allegro deciso is briskly robust. The Third is the only one of the Phantasy on a Theme of Purcell suites to have five movements, of which two are slow. If the Andante second move- ment is pensive, the fourth movement, also called Andante, echoes the Canzona The genesis for this composition was a lengthy conversation with Daniel Bukvich from the First Suite as the tones of broken chords ring out like the tolling of bells. about my student days in England. I loved to get lost the winding medieval streets Between them, is a volatile, menacing Allegro; the longest of the five movements, it of the oldest part of the City of London, where fragments of Roman wall sat in is the turbulent heart of the Suite. Compared with this stormy landscape, the finale, eccentric juxtaposition with 1980s tower blocks, elegant Victorian public buildings, Allegro giocoso, seems light-hearted, dispelling ghosts from the past as the motto traffic-clogged intersections, and ancient churches. Every structure seemed to be theme is finally laid to rest. built on top of layer after layer of history, and I imagined I could see characters from centuries past—Shakespeare, John Donne, Samuel Pepys, Anne Boleyn—at every turn. Daniel Bukvich (b. 1954): This time of discovery in my life was intertwined with the trauma of the death of Variations on “What Wondrous Love Is This?” a beloved great-aunt. A composer herself, she had loved the famous aria “When One of the connecting features between Ernest Bloch and Daniel Bukvich is their I am laid in earth” from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas above any other piece association with America’s Northwest—Bloch lived out his final years in Oregon, of music. On the day I learned of her death in faraway New Zealand, I left my flat while Bukvich, a native of Montana, has spent his career as a professor at the and walked for hours through the East End and City of London districts, getting University of Idaho in the northwest part of the state. As an undergraduate, Bukvich hopelessly lost. After several hours of wandering, I turned around and somehow studied Bloch’s manuscripts, which were then housed at Montana State University, found my way home. and still names Bloch as one of his influences. The idea of wandering, distraught, around a bustling, ever-changing landscape This set of freely-composed variations on the nineteenth-century American hymn is the central structural idea of Bukvich’s Phantasy. The structure is palindromic: “What Wondrous Love Is This?” was initially a violin piece, transcribed for cello by halfway through we reach the destination of the “walk,” turn around, and go the composer at my request. Bukvich seizes upon the pentatonic melody of the backwards until we reach the starting point. original and transforms it into characters from other musical traditions. In some variations, we can detect hints of Irish fiddling, Scottish bagpipes, and even the There are three main “characters” in the drama. The first is Purcell’s “When I am Chinese erhu. Interludes between variations suggest the solemnity of a church laid in earth” theme and its passacaglia bassline; the second, a fragment from organ or the angelic voices of a of boy sopranos, and an energetic coda an anonymous English Kyrie of the thirteenth century; and the third a play on the brings the variations to a light-hearted close. name “Miranda” using the medieval system of gematria—that is, using a grid to substitute note names for letters of the alphabet, so that M-I-R-A-N-D-A becomes A-D-F#-C#-B-F#-C#. (When I asked Bukvich why he hadn’t encrypted his own name in the thematic material, he pointed out that “D-A-N” was already part of this collection of pitch classes.) Sometimes the characters appear diatonically; other times they are disguised in extended techniques, artificial harmonics, and improvisando rhetorical gestures.

Just as the buildings in the City of London jostle together in a bizarre, multi-layered patchwork, so do these themes, building up into a dramatic mid-point standstill, whereupon the action turns around and goes backwards through inversions and retrogrades. We end up in the place we started—the anguished lament of Queen Dido—but home is not the same as it was before, since we have been changed forever by our experiences and the ghosts we met on the journey. —MIRANDA WILSON

Miranda Wilson A native of Wellington, New Zealand, Miranda Wilson made her soloist début at 16, playing Elgar’s Cello with the Orchestra Wellington. She has performed on five continents as a soloist and chamber musician, and for several years was the cellist of the Tasman String Quartet, the first all-New Zealand chamber ensemble to feature prominently on the international concert and competition stage. She has played on the première recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Quaternion (Chandos 9958), and many radio broadcasts. Since 2010, she has been a professor of cello at the University of Idaho, where she is also Artistic Co-Director of the Idaho Bach Festival.

Miranda Wilson was educated in New Zealand, England, and America. Her main teachers were Natalia Pavlutskaya, Alexander Ivashkin, Phyllis Young, András Féjer, and Judith Glyde. WONDROUS LOVE: Works for Solo Cello

WONDROUS LOVE: Works for Solo Cello Miranda Wilson cello

Ernest Bloch Ernest Bloch

Suite No. 1 Suite No. 3 Miranda Wilson, cello TROY1534 1 Prelude [3:02] 9 Allegro deciso [1:32] 2 Allegro [2:20] 10 Andante [2:40] 3 Canzona [3:23] 11 Allegro [2:47] 4 Allegro [2:39] 12 Andante—Allegro giocoso [4:25]

Ernest Bloch Daniel Bukvich Suite No. 2 13 Variations on “What Wondrous Love Is This?” [8:40] Miranda Wilson, cello TROY1534 5 Prelude [3:35] 6 Allegro [5:26] Daniel Bukvich 7 Andante tranquillo [4:54] 14 Phantasy on a Theme of Purcell [15:38] 8 Allegro [5:00] Total Time = 66:01 Works for Solo Cello

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