John THOMAS (1826-1913)
Complete Duos for Harp and Piano - Volume 1
Duo Praxedis
rec. November 2018, Flügelsaal Music Hug, Bülach, Switzerland.
TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC0561 [79:48]
John Thomas was an important figure, as both harpist and composer, in the world of Victorian music. Born in Bridgend (South Wales), the son of a tailor and amateur musician, also called John, John Thomas the Younger displayed musical gifts very early, playing the piccolo at the age of four. In 1838, when only 12 he competed in an eisteddfod at Abergavenny and, winning the competition, gained the prize of a triple harp specially commissioned from a Cardiff harp-maker, Bassett Jones. Just two years later, aged 14, he was admitted to the Royal Academy, where he was to study composition with Cipriani Potter, and harp with John Balsir Chatterton. He was only able to study at the Royal Academy because his playing had so impressed Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace that she offered to pay three quarters of the costs if the young musician’s father could find the remainder of the necessary money. This John Thomas the Elder managed, moving the whole family to London and working there. It was only when he went to London that John Thomas the Younger first learned to speak English. He had to learn another new skill too: he had to give up the triple harp he had previously played and play the new Erard pedal harp; this meant resting the harp on his right shoulder rather than his left, and now he had to use his right hand to play the treble and his left for the bass – a reversal of his previous technique. He coped with all these changes, and after making a very good impression as a student he began to teach at the Royal Academy (being made Professor of the Harp in 1871) and at the Guildhall School of Music, alongside the development of a concert career. In 1861, at that year’s eisteddfod, he was given the title ‘Pencerdd Gwalia’ (Chief Musician of Wales). In 1872 (some records say 1871) he was appointed harper to Queen Victoria.
This attractive disc (labelled Volume 1) offers a programme of duos for piano and harp. There are a good many delightful melodies to be heard, though it has to be said that most of them didn’t originate with Thomas himself; there are Russian melodies in ‘Souvenir du Nord’, traditional melodies in the ‘Welsh Duets’ and, as the contents list below indicates, melodies by Beethoven, Rossini, Handel and Gounod.
This selection of Thomas’s work is played (admirably) by Duo Praxedis
(Praxedis Hug-Rütti (harp), Praxedis Geneviève Hug (piano)). Active since around 2010, this Swiss duo is made up – somewhat unusually – of mother (harp) and daughter (piano). They have some ten CDs behind them, including Histoires and Grand Duet (both released by Ars Production), Sound of Zurich (Guild), Russian Souvenirs, Brahms’ Hungarian Dances and Original Classics (all Paladino). They have recorded music written for the formerly popular combination of harp and piano by, amongst others, Charles Oberthür (1819-95), Anton Rubinstein (1829-94), Henriette Renié (1875-1956), Théodore Labarre (1805-70), Robert-Nicholas Charles Bochsa (1789-1856), Jean-Baptiste Krumholz (1742-90) and François-Adrien Boildieu (1775-1834). Alongside the ‘excavation’ of the musical past, Duo Praxedis have also premiered works by contemporary Swiss composers such as Carl Rutti (b.1949) – (husband of Praxedis Hug-Rütti), Richard Dubugnon (b.1968) and Rudolf Lutz (b.1951). They have also played (and often recorded) their own arrangements of pieces by a range of other composers, including J.S. Bach, Johann Strauss II and Tchaikovsky. Their arrangement of excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade (on Russian Souvenirs, Paladino PMR 0069) is outstanding and a hearing of it should persuade any sceptic of just how effective this combination of instruments can be.
Duo Praxedis bring, then, considerable experience to their recording of works by John Thomas, one of those significant figures in Victorian music who has now been largely forgotten – though not in his native Wales (Though myself Yorkshire-born, I have lived in Wales for almost half a century). The duo are fine advocates for the music of John Thomas, who remains a significant cultural figure in the land of his birth. The disc opens with Souvenir du Nord, a piece written in 1854 and based on Russian material he perhaps heard during a tour in Russia in 1853. As Martin Anderson (founder and driving force behind Toccata Classics) points out in his excellent booklet notes, the “principal melody” used as the basis for the set of variations in Souvenir du Nord is that of ‘The Nightingale’, a song by Alexander Alya’byev (1787-1851), a setting of a text by the poet Anton Delvig (1798-1831); the song was composed in 1825 while the composer was in prison on suspicion of murdering a guest (and fellow card-player) at his house. The song became widely popular in Russia and beyond - Glinka wrote some piano variations on the song in 1833 and Liszt produced two transcriptions of it (as ‘Le Rossignol’) in 1842 and 1853. Anderson also points out that Vieuxtemps used Alya’byev’s tune in his Divertissements d’amateurs sur des melodies russes favorites (c. 1850). Thomas’s choice of material was not, then, especially original, but his treatment of the melody, in an introduction, a statement of the theme and four variations is well put together and appealingly inventive. All four of the variations make thoroughly pleasant listening, though I was particularly taken by the second, in which the harp presents the melody and the piano is largely limited to accompaniment.
Not many of us, I suspect, are all that familiar with Alya’byev’s melody (I wasn’t, until now, save as it was refracted by Liszt), but most will be on more familiar ground when it comes to Thomas’s other treatments/arrangements as, for example, of Beethoven’s ‘Adelaide’, the ‘Gigue’ from Handel’s Water Music, Gounod’s Marche solennelle or the hits from Carmen (which include the March of the Toreadors, ‘L’amour est une oiseau rebelle’, ‘Parle-moi de ma mère’ and the Toreador’s Song). Where the Welsh Duets are concerned much of the material will be familiar, even to those who haven’t been based in Wales as long as I have.
Such familiarity makes it easier to appreciate how exceptionally sympathetic and adroit Thomas is in his adaptation of the music of these better-known composers. The ‘Duet on Subjects from Bizet’s Carmen’ is put together brilliantly and is played with appropriate vigour, vivacity and sensitivity by Duo Praxedis. Thomas seems to have had a particular affinity with Spanish music (or music imitative of Spanish idioms). As Martin Anderson points out, while still a student Thomas wrote an opera “on a Spanish subject”.
The ‘Gigue’ from Handel’s Water Music is pleasant but slight. There is more substance in the Grand Duet in E flat minor which closes the disc. This is the one work on the present disc which is a completely original composition. It is an attractive romantic piece, written at a time (in the 1860s) when the musical language of Romantic figures such as Schubert, Weber and Berlioz (of whom more later) had been ‘domesticated’ as one of the prevailing idioms of cultured salons. Thomas’s ‘Grand Duet’ is in three movements, marked Allegro con brio, Andante and Allegro con spirito. There is an elegant symmetry to Thomas’s construction of this work. In the first movement the harp is effectively the ‘soloist’, accompanied by the piano. In the second movement the piano is the dominant melodic voice and the harpist decorates and comments upon the melodies played by the pianist. The closing movement balances the two instruments in a sophisticated musical conversation. It is instructive to compare this present recording with one played by two harpists – I went back to the performance by the Lipman Harp Duo on Naxos (8.570372). While I have no complaints to make about the recording by the Lipman duo – which is perfectly acceptable – I find the interplay of the plucked sound of the harp and the percussive sound of the piano more rewarding, both in terms of the creation of some engagingly distinctive sonorities (alone and together) and also in the clarification of musical voices and their dialogue, to a degree not so apparent when Thomas’s work is played by two harps.
I don’t propose to discuss all the works on this disc, but some of my Welsh friends would regard me as remiss (or worse) if I said nothing of Thomas’s Welsh Duets. His versions of traditional songs such as ‘Gwyr Harlech’ (Men of Harlech) or ‘Y Ferch o’r Scer (The Lady of Sker) are stirring and eloquent. Their power – for Welsh listeners or, indeed, for those who listen to them with an awareness of their cultural context – is considerable. Thomas had a significant role in the Welsh cultural revival in the nineteenth century. The notorious (in Wales at least) ‘Blue Books on Education in Wales’ of 1847, prepared by commissioners of the London government, presented a picture of the Welsh as uneducated (and, by implication, uneducable so long as they spoke Welsh), a people without a culture of their own (the commissioners knew no Welsh and were evidently ignorant of the great tradition of Welsh poetry which, even then, had a history some thirteen centuries long). The Welsh, unsurprisingly, reacted with anger and a determination both to fight against the London government’s attempts to eradicate the Welsh language, and to make clear their cultural achievements past and present. A musician like Thomas, who became a significant figure in the musical life of Victorian London and achieved a Europe-wide reputation was a living refutation of the calumnies of the ‘Blue Books’.
During his European tour of 1854 – he made such tours annually for some years – Thomas gave a private recital for Berlioz in Paris. We don’t know what Thomas played on that occasion – but Berlioz declared himself “charmé”, fasciné” and “magnetisé” (charmed, fascinated and magnetized) by what he heard. He wrote “Voila comment jouer la harpe” (That is how to play the harp). In addition to his own international standing as a performer (he was made an honorary member of both Rome’s Società di Santa Cecilia and Florence’s Società Filharmonica), Thomas did much else for the knowledge and appreciation of Welsh music. In 1861 his edition of Welsh Melodies for harp was published. Between 1862 and 1874 he published four volumes of Welsh Melodies, with Welsh and English Poetry. As a composer he wrote choral, chamber and orchestral music as well as many pieces for his own instrument. In 1862 he organized the first in a series of concerts of Welsh music, a series which ran for some 42 years. The first concert (with a choir of 400 and twenty harpists!) was held in St. James’s Hall, Piccadilly; some later concerts took place at the Crystal Palace. In 1863 he endowed an annual scholarship for a Welsh harpist at the Royal Academy in London.
Well recorded and accompanied by excellent documentation, these fine performances by Duo Praxedis are thoroughly enjoyable and also constitute a valuable document of the work of an important Victorian musician now too often forgotten. I am pleased by the implicit promise in the use of the phrase “Volume One” in the title of this disc.
Glyn Pursglove
Contents
John THOMAS (1826-1913)
Souvenir du Nord (1854) [7:57]
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Adelaide, op. 46 (transcribed THOMAS, 1875) [5:47]
Welsh Duets:
Dyddiau Mebyd (Days of Childhood) (1862) [8:58]
Cambria (1863) [9:33]
Dewch i’r Frwydyr (Come to the Battle) (1886) [10:24]
Duet on Subjects from Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ (1885) [8:49]
George Frideric HANDEL (1685 - 1759)
‘Gigue’ from Water Music (transcribed THOMAS, 1882) [3:22]
Charles GOUNOD (1818-1893)
Marche Solennelle (transcribed THOMAS 1889) [5:27]
John THOMAS
Grand Duet in E flat minor (1865) [19:28]
