Susan Spain-Dunk (1880-1962)
Piano Quartet (c.1920, ed. Peter Cigleris, 2021)
Henry Walford Davies (1869-1941)
Quintet in G major for piano and string quartet, Op.54 (1927 rev. 1940)
Alfred M Wall (1975-1936)
Quartet for piano and strings in C minor (1920)
Tippett Quartet
Lynn Arnold (piano)
rec. 1921, St George’s Headstone, Harrow
DUTTON EPOCH CDLX7396 SACD [76]
The process by which a composer comes in from the cold is rather mysterious. What alignment of the stars saw the arrival of so many recordings and BBC broadcasts of the music, for instance, of Susan Spain-Dunk? And why is her most attractive Piano Quartet the headliner on the cover when it only lasts 12 minutes and is massively dwarfed by the works of Walford Davies and Alfred Wall, whose Piano Quartet finale is longer than her entire work? The commercial imperative is as valid as the artistic, I suppose.
Spain-Dunk was a relatively well-known composer whose works were taken up by Henry Wood. I know her best from her participation in the Cobbett Quartet – though principally a violinist she was also a viola player, like Rebecca Clarke – and she made a very late acoustic recording with the group of Schubert’s String Quintet, amongst other things. Her Piano Quartet of c.1920 has been edited for performance by Peter Cigleris over a century later and is firmly cast in the ‘Cobbett’ four-movements-in-one form or, in this case, a kind of two movements in one multiplied by two. It’s notable for opening with a strongly confident maestoso and as it develops Spain-Dunk - an expert practitioner who knew the medium from the inside – has the confidence to admit some salon influence as well as a sequence of exuberant episodes. Its short length is by no means untypical of Cobbett quartets of this time; in fact, it’s pretty much par for the course, and it’s played by the Tippett Quartet and Lynn Arnold with commendable flair.
Of the three composers Walford Davies remains the best known. His Piano Quintet dates from 1927 and was revised in 1940 shortly before his death. Dedicated ‘with love’ to Elgar it’s unpublished, little known, and heard here for the first time on disc. The structure is clear, an opening ‘energico’ first movement is followed by a Theme and Variations, and then a finale that balances the opening movement in proportion. I think that Lewis Foreman, the always perceptive sleeve note writer, is right to ascribe the opening’s striding confidence to the precedent of Elgar’s own Piano Quintet, composed less than a decade earlier. The Theme, based on a student melody of Davies’, is a delight, which he follows with a contrasting sequence of five variations. Fortunately, Dutton tracks them separately. The well-argued finale generates British momentum, then gradually fades away. This strong, sensitive work should certainly not have lain unperformed for so long, a fate it’s shared with so many down the decades.
Alfred Michael Wall, who – like Walford Davies – studied with Parry was for a time something of a jobbing fiddler, playing in Edgar Bainton’s trio for a while. His Piano Quartet was composed in 1920 and given a première by an ensemble whose pianist was Joseph Holbrooke. It is a big work lasting some 35 minutes and indebted in places to Brahms. Its urgency is admirable but at almost every turn Wall rather overextends his material. What is attractive is the rather Slavic slant at the beginning of the finale. Though the first auditors of the work, members of the Carnegie UK Trust, praised it at the time as a ‘work rich in colour and varied in expression’ it too has fallen into the void – until now.
The rescue work of the Tippett Quartet and Arnold, allied to Lewis Foreman’s notes and Dutton’s commitment to the project - all these three works are heard in première recordings – represents a valuable act of restoration, beautifully performed and finely recorded.
Jonathan Woolf
