Journeys into English Piano Music Part 4

Exploring piano sonatas by Jacob, Cooke and Dring

Duncan Honeybourne continues his series of articles exploring British piano music with a look at three sonatas he has been playing in 2023:

It seems to me that the piano sonatas of Gordon Jacob and Arnold Cooke breathe similar air. Both are muscular, lyrical, assertive and impassioned, with a real sense of organic growth and structural cohesion. Both composers had fully mastered their craft by the time they penned these mature and substantial works. It shows in the sureness of technique and the effectiveness and economy of the writing. Not a single note is unnecessary or employed for effect, and the dramatic gestures are calculated with precision and clarity. The emotional range of both works is wide and the colouristic palette almost orchestral.

Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob was born into a military family in Upper Norwood, South London, on 5th July 1895. He was the youngest of ten children and the seventh son, hence his third given name. Jacob’s father died when he was just three years of age, and the young Gordon was educated at Dulwich College before joining the Field Artillery at the beginning of the First World War. He went on to see active service in France before being captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany, whilst his brother Anstey, to whom he was especially close, was killed on the Somme in 1916. Gordon was later to dedicate his First Symphony to his brother’s memory. On his return to Britain after the 1918 Armistice, Jacob took a course in journalism before enrolling at the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Stanford and Vaughan Williams – with whom he had an uneasy relationship – and theory with Howells, winning the Arthur Sullivan Composition Prize. In 1924 – the year he married for the first time – Jacob took up a professorship at the RCM, which he was to hold for over forty years until his retirement in 1966. By all accounts he was a generous and sympathetic teacher, whose students included Ruth Gipps, Malcolm Arnold, Imogen Holst and Joseph Horovitz, and who always had a kindly eye and ear for the young. Jacob was a prolific composer, completing over 700 works in a wide range of genres. Always happy to write music that was needed and wanted, he found a considerable market in the composition of music for students and amateurs and later in his career achieved great popularity in the USA with his works for university wind band. He also completed many effective transcriptions and arrangements, including a fine orchestration of Elgar’s Organ Sonata in G. Following the death of his first wife in 1958, Jacob moved from their home in the New Forest and settled in Saffron Walden, Essex, with his second wife, who had been a niece of his first. He relished his new role as a father to two children, remaining highly productive as a composer and living life to the full right to the end. Jacob died in Saffron Walden on 8th June 1984, aged 88.

I had known the 1956 Piano Sonata of Gordon Jacob for some years before learning and performing it. It jumped off the page as a work of enticing lyricism and invigorating joie de vivre. I found the astringent chromaticism invigorating and the modal-inflected harmonies of the reflective episodes breathed a very English brand of warmhearted introspection. The work always made a strong appeal to me, but work got in the way and a decade or more elapsed between my purchasing the score and knuckling down to serious preparation. My efforts were amply rewarded, and I found a piece laden with Jacob’s signature rhythmic playfulness, vivid colouristic interplay and fertile melodic and harmonic imagination.

Striking is the way in which Jacob binds the Sonata together by cross-referencing ideas and material. The opening of the first movement – broad, spacious and linear – is to return at the beginning of the third, and Jacob is adept at referencing broader melodies across much more active and complex textures. There is a wonderful sense of organic growth in the third movement, with melodic cells reiterated and developed from stealthy beginnings, through an impassioned climax, into wistful repose. The Sonata treads a dramatic and continuous narrative: whilst the first and third are apparently “slow” movements, both reach ecstatic and virtuosic centres before gradually decompressing. The third movement, a terrifically effective and sparkling Scherzo, begins with a poised and lyrical introductory Andante with a pattern of rising semitones that mirrors ideas from the first movement. The boisterous Finale, buoyant, percussive and a real pianistic showpiece, has at its centre a broad chordal chorale flecked by brazen descending fourths played in octaves at the top of the instrument.

The Jacob Sonata was dedicated to, and premiered by, that fine English pianist Iris Loveridge (1917-2000), who also recorded the work.

Arnold Cooke’s highly distinctive and intricate compositional style is the product of a remarkably individual mind and a sophisticated technique. Born in Gomersal, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1906, Arnold Atkinson Cooke was educated at Repton School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining his music degree in 1929. He then moved to Germany to continue his studies with Paul Hindemith in Berlin and, in 1948, he was awarded a doctorate at Cambridge. Often branded “Hindemith’s English student”, Cooke was an individual and distinctive figure in his own right, but the contrapuntal ingenuity of his German mentor nonetheless makes its presence felt in Cooke’s multi-layered and incisively wrought textures. Like Jacob, Cooke lived a long and productive life, teaching at the Royal Manchester College of Music and later at Trinity College of Music in London, and dying in Kent in 2005 at the age of 98.

The broad, fanfare-like opening of the Piano Sonata no.2 gives way to an idea of skittish character whose descending melodic cell permeates the movement. Initially it is broadly announced by the right hand over a running left hand accompaniment, and later it takes on other characters: hushed, sweeter, more lyrical and more impassioned. After a slower moment of calm, the descending intervallic cell returns – mysterious and underpinned by a rumbling bass - to drive towards climactic resolution as the fanfare-like opening returns.

The threnodic slow movement is warm-breathed and superbly lyrical. A declamatory episode interjects at its heart, generating a powerful climax which is built up chromatically and enriched with an almost orchestral use of the piano’s resources.

The gritty final movement contrasts driving rhetorical gestures with episodes of impassioned lyricism, sometimes finding expression in warm threads of melody sung by the piano’s left hand. Both characters unite in a section of martial character, its determined theme being announced in the left hand before being tossed to the right as tension builds. A brilliant, vigorous, scurrying coda concludes the movement and bare, pounding, B flat octaves bring the Sonata to its close.

The work was premiered by my former professor, Rosemarie Wright (1931-2020) at the 1966 Cheltenham Festival in Cheltenham Town Hall. After her death in 2020 I was privileged to inherit the manuscript, with many of her own markings made in consultation with the composer. It is from this unique copy that I learned the piece, and inevitably I felt Rosemarie – and the composer – looking over my shoulder. I am also privileged to possess a second handwritten copy of the piece, made in 1976 and used - with the consent of the composer, as is noted on the title page - by another British pianist of the same generation, Eric Parkin (1924-2020). Wright broadcast the Sonata twice: at its premiere in Cheltenham on BBC Network Three and again twenty years later on Radio 3 from the Wigmore Hall. Parkin broadcast the work from Birmingham on Radio 3 in 1987.

The third work under consideration in this article, the Fantasy Sonata by Madeleine Dring, is less mature and less extended than the works of Jacob and Cooke, having been sketched when the composer was just fifteen years of age. I have played it around Britain in 2023 to mark the centenary of Dring’s birth and found it a convincing and enjoyable concert piece. Born in Hornsey, North London, on 7th September 1923, the daughter of an architect and surveyor, Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring became a Junior Exhibitioner and later a full-time student at the Royal College of Music, where Gordon Jacob was among her composition professors. Dring was a highly individual spirit and a lively polymath, with a keen sense of humour. As well as being a musician she was an actress and a gifted artist with a penchant for drawing hilarious and wickedly accurate cartoons. Of her compositional output, she is best remembered for her songs, whilst her substantial body of chamber music prominently features her husband’s instrument, the oboe. There is a small amount of piano music, some of it unpublished and much of it on a small scale. The striking exception is the Fantasy Sonata, composed in her teens and published by Lengnick in 1948. The pianist and scholar Ro Hancock-Child, in her excellent biography of Dring (Madeleine Dring: Her Music, Her Life; Micropress 2000), highlights the composer’s “clever knack of obtaining maximum aural effect for minimum technical effort”. In the Fantasy Sonata, as in other piano works and in the beautifully effective piano writing in the songs, the approach betrays a pianist with a naturally fluent and economical approach to the instrument. We quickly develop a feel for Dring’s own most comfortable hand shapes.

The Dring Fantasy Sonata is a one-movement work, achieving a variety of colour and mood through a sequence of alternating sections and contrasting tempi. The style is warmly romantic and picturesque, the harmonic language chromatic and the manner pianistically virtuosic. I find a French character in the lyrical episodes, whilst the grander climaxes recall Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Perhaps this teenage work is a distillation of some of the piano music the young Dring loved to play, but what I find worthy of note is the distinct thread of individuality which lifts the whole above any notion of pastiche. This is allied to a tangible sincerity and economy which removes any potential sense of playing to the gallery in the impassioned climactic moments.

Ro Hancock-Child quotes an interesting review of the work’s publication in Musical Opinion, although I wouldn’t entirely concur with the reviewer’s opinion that the work is easy. There are plenty of notes, it isn’t easy to play well, and a good deal of challenge for the executant lies in successfully knitting the disparate structure together. The contemporary reviewer opined:

“This has the decided advantage of being the easiest modern sonata I have come across. Easy in every way. Indeed, to one who always opens a new piano sonata with some trepidation its unashamed romanticism, simple construction and its almost Rachmaninovian freneticism was at first somewhat puzzling – and afterwards very refreshing.”

Hancock-Child, an authority on the composer who has made a special and detailed study of Dring’s work over many years, concludes that “the sonata overflows with ideas, the abundant small sections don’t mesh together convincingly, the ubiquitous fancy passage-work is devoid of significant content and the multiple build-ups usually fall flat.” She allows, however, that “these 16 earnest pages demonstrate a most fecund imagination and a familiarity with the keyboard that is quite astonishing, especially since she claimed that she conceived the piece while still at school.”

Whilst the Dring Fantasy Sonata is what it is - an early work and a somewhat immature, overwhelmingly romantic utterance – the piece contains some splendidly beguiling music within its 9 minute span, and makes a powerful claim on the attention of listener and player without outstaying its welcome. I have found it well worth exploring in honour of Madeleine Dring’s 2023 centenary, and audiences have enjoyed discovering its clear merits. Our understanding of Dring’s more sophisticated songs, chamber music and later solo piano pieces is certainly set in useful context by acquaintance with this striking early piece, which in itself makes a bracing addition to a recital programme.

Duncan Honeybourne 2023

First published in Spirited, the magazine of the English Music Festival, 2023