The Piano Music of Frank Bridge – Volume 3

With hints of Debussy, or even Mompou, the piano music of Bridge is never less than mesmerising. His personality not least in the forward-looking Gargoyles,is fascinating. There are other versions of this music, but this third volume is even more impressive than the previous ones in Bebbington’s series, and my respect and admiration for him continues to grow. Glorious piano sound and excellent notes — now, here is a bridge over troubled waters!

***** Essential — go get it!

Marius Dawn, The Pianist Magazine October-November 2011

“Frank Bridge is still best known as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, but thanks to dedicated performers such as Mark Bebbington, his own music is emerging from the shadows. These piano pieces show an astonishing range of influences, from Chopin to expressionist Schoenberg to Debussy to English pastoralism, sometimes within the space of one piece. To make it all cohere requires a firm structural grasp, which Bebbington certainly has, but he catches the sensuousness of the music too.”
Saturday Telegraph, 24th September 2011

Ivan Hewett, Saturday Telegraph, 24th September 2011
4****

“Frank Bridge, teacher of Benjamin Britten….Yes, that was all he was known as for decades : but as a composer he moved far more forward than his basically inhibited, almost prissy student (for all I love his music) ever dared.

The third volume in Mark Bebbington’s deft, elegant and probing exploration of Bridge’s music for piano is so revealing, redolent of how much Bridge was au fait with what was going on in Europe (no wonder the closeted English establishment were so suspicious of him ).

We hear in on this warmly recorded release Bridge’s teetering on the verge of Schoenbergian and Bergian atonality, right from the opening of Sunset from the Three Poems.

Later we find links with the French school and Chopin, Rachmaninov and even Scriabin.

And the final track, Gargoyle, would fool anyone in a quiz question.”

Christopher Morley
Birmingham Post, July 2011

“The latest instalment of Mark Bebbington’s survey of Frank Bridge’s piano music exhibits all the virtues of its predecessors (reviewed in November 2006 and February 2009), not least the superbly realistic (Symphony Hall) sound as well as Lewis Foreman’s useful notes, while outweighing them in encompassing the extent of the composer’s contribution to the medium.

Certainly it is not possible to get much nearer the beginning than with Berceuse (1901) , whose Elgarian grace served as a modest calling-card for the young Bridge. Bebbington wholly eschews sentimentality here, while bringing a notably deft touch to the three pieces of 1902-3 : whether the slightly hectoring Moderato, the arresting Pensees Fugitives, with its listlessly repeating accompaniment, or the capricious figuration of Scherzettino. The Three Poems (1914) come from near the onset of the composer’s transitional period – witness the tardy harmonic cadences of Sunset, the becalmed textures of Solitude and (appropriately) Scriabinesque flights of fancy in Ecstasy. Initially intended as a companion piece, Arabesque (1914) is much lighter in manner and was rightly issued as a stand-alone item. A sure highlight is the set of Three Improvisations for the left hand (1917), written for the pianist who had lost his right arm on active service and among the earliest indications of where Bridge’s music was headed: hence the disembodied bugle calls of ‘At Dawn’, the simmering disquiet of ‘A Vigil’ and impulsive energy of ‘A Revel’ in all of which Bebbington’s technical prowess is at the service of real expressive insight.

Lighter fare is provided by the third set of Miniature Pastorals (1921), actually assembled from unpublished pieces by Paul Hindmarsh though comparable to its predecessors in the whimsical poise of the first piece as well as the recalcitrance and folk-inflected robustness of those following. The Three Lyrics (1924) is a final collection written ostensibly for the amateur market, yet how many pianists would have persevered with the rhythmic fluidity of ‘Heart’s Ease’, the piquant humour of ‘Dainty Rogue’ or teasing reticence of The Hedgerow (an unlikely instance of Bridge meets Billy Mayerl) is anyone’s guess. Bebbington presents them with understated aplomb , nor does he disappoint with the final five pieces featured here; the diaphanous Winter Pastoral, (1925) with its variants on an unadorned theme that comes into its own in the elegiac coda: the pale radiance of Canzonetta (1926), with its obsessive central section (notably opened out in the orchestral version); the cumulative intensity and regretful dissolution of A Dedication (1926), where the Piano Sonata’s slow movement is movingly revisited: the moto perpetuo that is Hidden Fires (1927) and which calls for playing of real panache; finally, the Bartokian angularity and eruptiveness of Gargoyle (1928), with which Bridge pointedly brought his corpus of solo piano music to a close.

As before, comparison with Peter Jacobs’s always sympathetic accounts is instructive, but it cannot be denied that Bebbington has set new standards in this repertoire as a whole. Hopefully he will now go on to record more of this composer, not least Phantasm, Bridge’s typically personal take on the concerto genre and among the most imposing works of his full maturity.”

International Record Review July/August 2011
Richard Whitehouse

“The third volume of Mark Bebbington’s survey of Bridge’s piano music comprises a sequence of miniatures including his first work, the Berceuse of 1901, and his last, Gargoyle of 1928. In between we hear the emergence of a European progressive: tentative in the Three Poems, bolder in the Winter Pastoral, liberated in Gargoyle. These are fine pieces played with a sense of excitement, discovery and affection for a composer who was too long lazily dismissed as Britten’s teacher. The recording is brilliantly clear.” RC

Yorkshire Post, August 2011

“This concluding instalment in Mark Bebbington’s exemplary survey of Frank Bridge’s solo piano music lacks a single big unifying work, like the Sonata or the Dramatic Fantasia in the previous two volumes. But it spans the whole length of his keyboard-writing career from early light-music miniatures, such as the charming pensee fugitive and Scherzettino written while he was still a student of Stanford at the Royal College of Music, to the radical late works from the 1920s. In these especially – as also in the Three Improvisations for the left hand, written in 1918 for Douglas Fox, who had lost his right hand on the battlefields of Flanders – we can appreciate Bridge’s restless, questing imagination and his assimilation of continental influences. His last piece, Gargoyle, may remind us of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, just as the simmering toccata Hidden Fires recalls Scriabin’s Vers la flamme , and it’s clear throughout that Bridge was absorbing Debussy, yet the results are wholly personal.

Bebbington brings out the opalescent harmonies and wayward phrases of these pieces to perfection, and deftly characterises the various songsters in The Hedgerow. Perhaps the expressive high-points of the disc are the desolate Winter Pastoral of 1925 and the enigmatic A Dedication of the following year; Bridge at his most mystical and inward, very difficult to bring off, but performed here with rapt attentiveness and beauty of tone that reveals the expressive impact of these works. the recording is beautifully balanced, matching the sensitivity and sympathy of Bebbington’s playing. What a series this has been. Despite the real excellence of competing cycles from Peter Jacobs (Continuum) and Ashley Wass (Naxos), this is ultimately the one to have.”

Calum MacDonald, BBC Music Magazine August 2011
Performance 5*****
Recording 5*****

“There are no substantial pieces in the third volume of Mark Bebbington’s survey of Frank Bridge’s piano music – the longest piece included ( the first of the Three Improvisations for Left Hand) lasts just six minutes, and the average length is much nearer three. Yet even within such a collection of miniatures and occasional pieces, which ranges right across Bridge’s composing career, there is still enough to show what a remarkable and , in the context of early -20th-century British music, unique figure he was. The shifting impressionist harmonies of Sunset, the first of Three Poems could have come from a solo by Bill Evans, for instance, while the expressionist Gargoyle, composed in 1928 but rejected at the time by Bridge’s publisher and only published half a century later, is as harmonically freewheeling as anything he ever wrote. Bebbington plays these and other radical pieces, such as the mysterious Dedication, with the same poise and clarity he brings to the more obviously Edwardian salon music here.”

Andrew Clements *** Guardian, June 2011