Opalescence

Released November 2021, available from Prima Facie Records

Ruth Gipps was a remarkably versatile musician. She was a brilliant pianist who could – and did – triumphantly tackle the hallowed summits of the Brahms Second Concerto. She also toured nationwide as a freelance orchestral player during the dark days of the Second World War, as the second oboist and cor anglais player of the City of Birmingham Orchestra (CBO). Musicians with long memories remember her with fondness and fear as a spirited and pioneering conductor who, bruised and frustrated by the musical establishment’s distrust of baton-wielding women, simply set up her own orchestras and ran them with remarkable drive and success for more than three decades. Gipps made her professional conducting debut at the Royal Festival Hall in 1957, and the London Repertoire Orchestra – later the London Chanticleer Orchestra – introduced many outstanding young soloists at the outset of their careers. Gipps’s enterprises also gave a vibrant and much-needed platform to a significant tranche of neglected orchestral music, much of it by British composers working in traditional forms whose outputs had been sidelined by promoters in a culture then favouring the more assertively avant garde.

But this extraordinarily gifted musical polymath, a woman of powerful creative imagination and intense intellectual rigour, was first and foremost a composer. As memories of Gipps (or ‘Wid’, as she always liked to be called) recede with the passing years, we are left solely with her output of some eighty works as a memorial to her daring, questing, romantic spirit. Cast in a broad range of forms and genres, these are fastidious in craftsmanship, overwhelmingly tonal, invariably lyrical and poetic, and frequently deeply affecting. ‘My music’, she wrote, to her biographer Jill Halstead, ‘is a follow-on from Vaughan Williams, Bliss and Walton – the three giants of British music since the Second World War. All were great and inspired composers.’ A vigorous exploration of Gipps’s wide-ranging output certainly offers abundant evidence of a highly individual genius whose vivid and communicative personality is unmistakeably and strongly her own. Many influences are distilled in her work, but a full- blooded originality sings throughout. This recording delves into a selection of Gipps’s chamber works, and presents her complete œuvre for solo piano, to commemorate the centenary of her birth in 2021. It features her first work – The Fairy Shoemaker – and her last, the Sonata for double bass and piano, separated by some sixty-seven years.

Synopsis by Prima Facie Records

The Holy Boy

Released November 2021, available from Prima Facie Records

The idea for this programme of Christmas music was sparked by a handful of songs and a handful of singers. Having rather hurriedly gathered together repertoire for a Christmas concert in December 2020, after months of cancelled and postponed performances, it dawned on us that the few songs we had chosen (among them ‘The Little Road To Bethlehem’, ‘The Holy Boy’, ‘The Oxen’ and ‘The Bayly Berith The Bell Away’) belonged together and would sit very happily in an expanded programme of similar music. Little did we know how rich a seam we were to discover, and how much of this repertoire seems to have been sadly neglected.

While the Christmas songs of Peter Warlock could fill an entire disc (and have done), not all of the songs are well known, particularly in the versions for voice and piano. We have Warlock’s friend Arnold Dowbiggin to thank for the revised version of his well-loved carol, ‘Bethlehem Down’, one of the very last acts of Warlock’s tragically short life. Another fine singer to whom this programme owes a debt is Owen Brannigan, who is the dedicatee of both Michael Head’s ‘Carol of the Field Mice’ and Malcolm Williamson’s ‘A Christmas Carol’, composed some six years apart.

Two other singers deserve special recognition, namely Forbes Robinson (1926-87) and John Carol Case (1923-2012). It was ‘Christmas With Forbes Robinson’ (Tower LP 1973) that not only pointed us in the direction of Arnold Bax’s ‘Five Fantasies on Polish Carols’ and Mark Hankey’s delightful ‘Lucy’s Carol’ (of which we are told that “the words...were extemporised to her doll by a four year old child whose name was Lucy”) but also showed that a programme of Christmas songs for Bass-Baritone was not only plausible but genuinely commendable. As for John Carol Case, it was to his anthology ‘Sing Solo Christmas’ that we (as many others must have) turned for inspiration and stimulation, and it is hard to imagine a more varied and sensitively assembled collection of such music.

We are immensely grateful to The Peter Warlock Society for their generous support.

This recording is dedicated to the memory of Birgitta Honeybourne, 1939-2021.

Synopsis by Prima Facie Records

Dedication: The Clarinet Chamber Music of Ruth Gipps

Released September 2021, available from SOMM Recordings

This CD celebrates the centenary of the birth of Ruth Gipps with Dedication, featuring five premiere recordings of chamber works inspired by her clarinettist-husband, Robert Baker, most of which were recently broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week.

Synopsis by SOMM Recordings

The Complete Solo Piano Music of John Joubert

Released June 2021, available from Prima Facie Records

Duncan Honeybourne’s recording of Joubert’s piano music was first released by Prima Facie in February 2019, a few weeks after the composer’s death. Honeybourne, a close friend of Joubert and the dedicatee of the Third Piano Sonata, had studied the works with the composer, who asked him to record his piano music and described his pre-release copy of the disc as “one of my most prized possessions.” The recital charted a chronological journey through Joubert’s complete published solo piano music, from the bracing Dance Suite, written in John’s twenties, to the transcendental musings of the Third Piano Sonata, composed when he was almost eighty.

This second edition also offers something extra: a remarkable work from Joubert’s years as a student at the Royal Academy of Music. In December 2020 Joubert’s daughter Anna discovered the manuscript of Evocations, a rhapsody for piano, which John had written at the age of 22. Howard Ferguson, one of John's composition professors, gave the work its first performance at the RAM in 1950, but this student work was quickly shelved as Joubert achieved international renown for his ever-growing output of masterpieces.

Honeybourne writes: “The strong personality I knew so well from Joubert’s later work jumped vividly and unmistakably off the page. I was astonished at the maturity and assurance of the writing, the fluency of the invention and the technical ingenuity with which the one-movement structure was knitted together. I felt that we should add Evocations to my existing recording of Joubert’s piano music, to offer a truly complete conspectus of this very distinctive composer’s writing for solo piano. This new set of two discs is the result."

Synopsis by Prima Facie Records

De Profundis Clamavi

Released June 2021, available from Em Records

De Profundis Clamavi is a two-disc recording of English piano music, contrasting three dramatic sonatas with a vibrant selection of shorter pieces ranging from the sublimely poetic to the darkly rhapsodic. Frank Bridge began writing his grandiose Piano Sonata in 1921, in the wake of the First World War, and it is suffused with a mood of desolation and torment. Contemporary composer Richard Pantcheff’s own sonata was completed in 2017 and evokes a similarly intense emotional landscape; hence the quotation from Psalm 130 that gives the album its name (‘Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord’). Also here making its first recorded appearance, the 1938 Sonata by Christopher Edmunds bubbles over with vivid pianistic colours, melting tenderness and and irresistible romantic warmth.

The three sonatas are complemented and contextualised by Parry’s delicious Shulbrede Tunes – affectionate portraits of the composer’s family and their Sussex home – plus the first recordings of two stunning romantic showpieces by a composer better known for his vocal writing, Cecil Armstrong Gibbs. Three unpublished – and previously unrecorded – gems by Edgar Bainton add further distinctiveness to the disc.

Synopsis by Em Records

Contemporary Piano Soundbites

Released September 2020, available from Prima Facie Records

Contemporary Piano Soundbites is a collection of solo piano miniatures composed during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown and premiered on video during the months of April, May and June. The project, which ranked in the top 10% of Just Giving fundraisers nationally during the month of April 2020, has already raised well over £2000 for the Help Musicians UK Coronavirus Hardship Fund, supporting musician colleagues struggling in the current situation. The disc, recorded in July 2020 under conditions of social distancing, presents a representative selection from the online series. It celebrates the diversity of styles embraced by a broad cross section of professional composers working today, and it was an invigorating experience to record an entire disc of pieces which hadn’t existed less than four months earlier! Especially stimulating and exciting is the juxtaposition of several leading senior composers with some of their most gifted younger colleagues. Several young composers make their first appearances on disc.

My objective, as I stated in my invitation to composers, was fourfold: to imaginatively harness the zeitgeist of our present situation: to bring comfort and enjoyment to a large ready-made audience stuck at home, to aid musicians badly affected by the “cultural lockdown” and to add to the contemporary repertoire, creating an artistic keepsake of this extraordinary phase in our history.

My long term plan is that, as well as helping our colleagues at a time of need, the collection will provide a snapshot of reflections and musings by some of the finest and most distinctive composers of our time at a unique and unprecedented moment in our history. I hope the disc will make for a refreshing, enriching, stimulating and quirky listening experience too!"

Synopsis by Duncan Honeybourne

The Road Less Travelled

Released 17 July 2020, available from Prima Facie Records

Prima Facie’s latest release features the English pianist Duncan Honeybourne in the first commercial recording of the work of composer Geoff Cummings-Knight (b.1947), whose contribution to British musical life in recent decades has been self-effacing but of consistent and remarkable quality. His solo piano music is highly distinctive, impassioned and lyrical, and its appearance on disc long overdue.

Cummings-Knight was born in Colwyn Bay and grew up in Yorkshire. He studied at Goldsmiths College, the Birmingham School of Music and Leeds University, gaining BMus and MA degrees. His numerous compositions include a cantata The Turning Year, two symphonies, chamber works, choral settings, stage works and a symphonic prelude The Infancy of Hercules. In 1986 Geoff was a finalist in the Barclaycard Composer of the Year competition and in 1998 his work was featured in the TV series Heartland FM.

His works have been widely performed and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and his Piano Concerto, premiered in 1985 by Philip Challis and the Worthing Symphony Orchestra underJan Cervenka, received a further acclaimed performance in Birmingham’s Adrian Boult Hall.

The piano works on this disc range from two of the early, vividly descriptive Russian Tableaux - composed in 1970 and broadcast by Philip Challis on BBC Radio 3 in 1984 to the magisterial and richly-contoured Sonata in C sharp major, premiered by Duncan Honeybourne in 2011.

Honeybourne writes that Cummings-Knight’s "creative road is a rewarding one and his substantial catalogue of piano music central to any consideration of it. This is a journey on which I am honoured and delighted to accompany the inquisitive and enterprising listener."

Richard Francis Solo Piano music (2006-2015)

Released 2020, available from Prima Facie Records

Prima Facie’s release of recent piano music by Richard Francis celebrates the craftsmanship, wit and eclecticism of this popular Shropshire composer, winner of the 2001 Gregynog International Composition Award. The disc comprises Francis’s complete solo piano output from the years 2006-2015, all played by its dedicatee, Duncan Honeybourne, whose previous Prima Facie discs – of piano music of Sadie Harrison and John Joubert – have met with critical acclaim.

Duncan Honeybourne plays here the ‘Piano Sonata no.2 (Irish Memories)’, with its references to Irish folk melodies, premiered in Christ Church Cathedral, Waterford, in 2011. The first movement evokes a Donegal storm whilst the second is a set of variations on the much-loved hymn tune Slane. The ‘Grand Concert Variations’ are inventive and virtuosic, while the set of 10 ‘More Characteristic Pieces’ must surely contain something for everyone, ranging from the touching ‘Evensong’ to the rumbustious ‘Seaside Jaunt’!

This attractive and varied disc was recorded on a Bosendorfer piano in the Ty Cerdd studio at Cardiff Bay, in April 2019.

Synopsis by Prima Facie Records

The Piano Music of John Joubert

Released 22 February 2019, available from Prima Facie Records

“The spring of 2017 offered me a heartwarming opportunity to revisit the complete piano music of a composer who has been highly significant in my musical life. John Joubert celebrated his 90th birthday in March, an occasion I marked by presenting the cycle as an evening recital at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. This creative artist of trenchant expressive power, finely tuned eclecticism, visionary intensity and refined craftsmanship has, over some six decades, enriched the solo piano repertoire with a sequence of personal and dramatic essays: each of them with a distinctive individuality, yet charting a compelling and logical narrative when presented as a whole. The three piano sonatas constitute in themselves a major cycle, the triptych charting an instructive journey through different seasons of his career and musical mindset. Most striking for me as an omnipresent juxtaposition throughout the cycle is the irresistible coalescence of the violent and the consoling, the heart-stoppingly lyrical and the menacingly unsettling, the sumptuously tender and the bracingly aggressive. Rarely, if ever, have the percussive and the song-like attributes of the piano fused more organically, or to more dramatic – and beautiful – effect. The jagged rhythms of the irresistible early Dance Suite and the warm lines of the operatic Lyric Fantasy complement the cycle of sonatas very effectively.”

Synopsis by Duncan Honeybourne

The God Marduk

Released January 2019, available from Em Records

As a complement to EM Records’ disc of piano music by Andrew Downes, this release features the composer’s music for violin and viola, including World Premiere recordings of the Violin Sonata, the Viola Sonata, and the work from which the disc takes its title, ‘The God Marduk’. Downes was a student of Herbert Howells and his work is characterised by influences absorbed from a wide variety of musical cultures, including Indian ragas, African drum-rhythms and Carolingian plainchant, these being fused to form a language that is rich in colour and vivid in the immediacy of its portrayals. This recording is a dramatic representation of Downes’s art, ranging from the gentle lyricism of the second movement of the Violin Sonata, through the playful whimsy and implacable sternness of ‘The God Marduk’, to the devotional stillness and joyful assurance of the ‘Sacred Mass’ for solo violin.

Synopsis by Em Records

The Wanderer

Released December 2018, available from Em Records

The Wanderer is EM Records’ first triple-disc set: a celebration of the violin-and-piano works of one of Britain’s most important composers, C. Hubert H. Parry.

Parry is not popularly known as a composer of chamber music; yet his contributions to the genre span his entire career. Of particular historical-musical interest are his works for violin and piano, from the early ‘Freundschaftslieder’ – amongst the first works Parry completed in adult life – to the two Suites, published in 1907. These show a wide range of aspects of Parry’s multifaceted character: the generously-spirited young man, acknowledging his debt to Brahms and Schumann in the Sonata in D minor; the warm-hearted family man shown in the ‘Twelve Pieces for Violin and Piano’, which are dedicated to his wife and his two daughters; and the musical experimenter that is seen in the ‘Fantasie-Sonate in einem Satz’, in which Parry, inspired by the Piano Concerto of Xaver Scharwenka, combines four tautly-unified movements in a single, 14-minute work. The recording also features a number of intriguing and characterful miniatures which were discovered among the composer’s manuscripts in the Bodelian Library, Oxford.

The recording is dedicated to the memory of Parry’s great-granddaughter, The Hon. Laura Ponsonby, whose knowledge and enthusiasm were instrumental in bringing the project to fruition.

Synopsis by Em Records

A Hundred Years of British Piano Miniatures

Released October 2018, available from Grand Piano Records

These piano pieces trace a trajectory from the Edwardian poetry of Leo Livens to the overdubbing of Peter Reynolds by way of a century of evocative, descriptive and exciting miniatures. Reflecting pastoral, light and experimental traditions, these previously unrecorded works offer rich variety from neglected composers.

Return of the Nightingales: Music for Solo Piano by Sadie Harrison

Released October 2017, available from Prima Facie Records

‘Return of the Nightingales’ is a celebration of four pianists with whom Sadie has collaborated extensively over the past decade – Duncan Honeybourne, Philippa Harrison, Ian Pace and Renée Reznek. As the majority of the pieces were premiered by these pianists, the disc is a showcase not just of Sadie’s music but also of each performer – from Duncan Honeybourne’s sumptuously expressive renditions of Lunae (2012) and Shadows (2013) to the hyper-virtuosity of Ian Pace in the title work; from the quirky vivacity of Philippa Harrison in Four Jazz Portraits (2014) to Renée Reznek’s highly coloured interpretation of Par-feshani-ye ’eshq (2013-14). As such, the disc offers a unique insight into a range of contemporary piano performances, an unusual contribution where the emphasis is as much on the players as the composer herself.

Synopsis by Prima Facie Records

Daybreak in the Fields

Released August 2017, available from Em Records

Duncan Honeybourne has been associated for many years with the piano music of Andrew Downes, distinguished English composer and former Head of Composition at the Birmingham School of Music/Birmingham Conservatoire. On this new set of two discs taking their name from one of Downes’ piano preludes, Duncan plays the complete solo piano music of Andrew Downes, much of it dedicated to and premiered by him. To complete the discs, he is joined by pianist Katharine Lam for the Downes Sonata for Two Pianos.

The Piano Music of Andrew Downes: a personal note by Duncan Honeybourne

A Western Borderland

Released December 2015, available from Em Records

The counties on the borders between England and Wales – Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire – are rich in spiritual resonance, powerful historical imagery and a tangible sense of tranquility and apartness, which continues to appeal strongly to composers, writers and artists. This CD presents works for piano by four composers associated with this borderland.

Edward Elgar was born just outside Worcester; the Concert Allegro, his only substantial piece for solo piano, was written whilst living at Malvern Wells. Ivor Gurney was strongly attached to his native Gloucestershire, and his Five Western Watercolours paint sound portraits of favourite landscapes in that county. Walford Davies was born in Oswestry, Shropshire; his Theme and Variations, written whilst a student at the Royal College of Music, was rediscovered by Duncan Honeybourne, who gave its first known public performance in 2015. Richard Francis was born in Herefordshire and now lives and works in Shropshire: the works on this CD were given their première performances by Duncan Honeybourne.

Flowing Waters

Released June 2015, available from Divine Art Records

Luke Whitlock’s music is firmly rooted in traditional harmonies and tonal bases, lyrical and expressive. This is the first album devoted to his work and features acclaimed pianist Duncan Honeybourne in solo works ranging from Whitlock’s survey of 18th century Suite form, to two picture-pieces and a lively, witty and sparkling waltz. A very open, airy flute sonata and three impressionist works for wind trio make this a fine introduction to music of wide appeal.

King of Instruments, Instrument of Kings

Rupert Marshall-Luck, violin, Duncan Honeybourne, piano/organ

Released May 2015, available from Em Records

The use of the sobriquet ‘King of Instruments’ for the organ is well-known; and the violin was the instrument of the royal courts of Europe from the seventeenth century until after the Enlightenment. The chiasmus offered by the juxtaposition of these two instruments was thus irresistible as the title of a disc that features works for violin and organ or piano by three organist-composers: Herbert Sumsion, Harold Darke and Richard Pantcheff.

Composed early in their respective careers, the sonatas for violin and piano by Sumsion (organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1928 until 1967) and Darke (best-known for his setting of the carol ‘In the bleak Midwinter’) are full of zestful life and with a rich harmonic language that lends them depth and warmth. They are complemented on this recording by Richard Pantcheff’s Sonata for Violin and Organ, composed in 2010, and which casts the two instruments as partners in a dialogue that is full of lyricism, passion and energy.

Recorded in December 2014 in the Chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, this disc highlights the Hudlestone Organ, built by the Swiss firm of Orgelbau Kuhn and installed in 2007.

Schubert and Schumann

Played by Duncan Honeybourne

Released 2015, available from Forbury Records

This disc presents two of the greatest masterworks of nineteeth century piano literature, staples of Duncan’s recital programming for many years. Both the Schubert B Flat Sonata and the Schumann Fantasy are works which convey profound landscapes of emotional intensity and raw human experience, distilled through the exceptional sensitivity and insight borne of creative genius. Both composers died relatively young and both suffered shattering setbacks and traumas. The works recorded here are among their most personal and self-revealing.

The disc was recorded at the magnificent Lion Ballroom, Leomister’s striking and beautifully restored arts centre.

To order, please email the Director of Forbury Records, Alan Crumpler: alancapriole@talktalk.net

A Forgotten English Romantic

Released May 2014, available from Em Records

Duncan Honeybourne’s disc for EM Records explores the piano music of a forgotten romantic composer-pianist, the Englishman Greville Cooke. Cooke combined a professorship in composition at the Royal Academy of Music with parallel careers as a poet and Anglican priest, rising to become a canon of Peterborough Cathedral and a regular broadcaster in both musical and spiritual roles. EMR CD022 presents Cooke’s superbly evocative, richly passionate music – bearing wonderful titles such as Cormorant Crag, Whispering Willows, Sundown and Reef’s End – with miniatures by Holst and Vaughan Williams to create a disc of English romantic piano music of vibrant colour and wide-ranging expressive power.

An Irish Idyll

Released 30 July 2014, available from Em Records

This disc from EM Records, performed by Duncan Honeybourne, explores the piano music of a forgotten romantic composer-pianist, Archy Rosenthal. This larger-than-life character wrote for his instrument with telling individuality, melting tenderness and searing intensity. Dublin-born Rosenthal was a virtuoso pianist of international fame, a pupil of Leschetizky and Godowsky and a close friend of Grieg. The land of his birth never lost its enchantment for this immensely charismatic and imaginative man, and our new release complements Rosenthal’s barnstorming Variations on Hush-a-bye Baby and his reflective Irish Pastels with beguiling Hibernian musings by Stanford and Bax. All the works by Rosenthal receive here their World Première recordings.

E.J. Moeran: The Complete Solo Piano Music

Released 1 February 2013, available from Em Records

E.J. Moeran: The Complete Solo Piano Music performed by Duncan Honeybourne (piano) presents Moeran’s complete, deeply atmospheric piano music alongside works by his English and Irish contemporaries. Included on this disc are première recordings of works by Aloys Fleischmann and Ronald Swaffield, while music by Howells, Vaughan Williams, Baines and Pitfield complete a set of discs that open musical vistas of the rugged mountains and grandeur of wild Ireland and the verdant pastorality of England’s lush hills.

2 CD set released 1st February 2013 by EM Records. Available to order online at www.em-records.com