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London Nights
Sir Michael TIPPETT (1905-1998)
Sonata No 1 for Piano (1936-37 rev. 1942) [21:45]
Benjamin BRITTEN (1913-1976)
Holiday Diary, Op 5 (1934) [17:24]
Frank BRIDGE (1879-1941)
Three Sketches for Piano, H.68 (1906) [8:30]
John IRELAND (1879-1962)
Ballade of London Nights, Op Posth. (1930) [6:45]
Sir Arnold BAX (1883-1953)
First Sonata in F-sharp minor, GP.127 (1910 rev. 1917-20) [21:16]
Franziska Lee (piano)
Rec. 22 & 24 September 2020, Wolfgang-Rihm-Forum, Hochschule für Musik, Karlsruhe Germany
CAPRICCIO C3010 [75:49]

A disc such as this with an imaginative and well-played programme is always to be welcomed. Coming as it does from a German label featuring a Korean pianist doubly so. British piano music from the first half of the 20^th Century is a rich and varied trove of music of the highest calibre but sadly it seems too little played or appreciated outside of the United Kingdom.

I had not encountered Franziska Lee before. This is her second recital for Capriccio, the first featuring a similarly diverse grouping of 20^th Century French music. There are certain characteristics to her playing that are immediately apparent. She plays with remarkable clarity and precision. We are in an age where sheer keyboard dexterity is the norm, but even by those lofty standards Lee plays with astonishing precision. In part she is aided both by her choice of instrument – a rather bright-toned Steingraber E-272 - and the engineering. The microphone placement is very close indeed – so close that the stereo division as Lee moves across the keyboard high to low is clearly discernible through the speakers and especially headphones. I must admit I did find this ‘motion’ to be rather disconcerting – I do prefer a slightly more distanced and integrated piano sound.

Some of the music benefits more than others from Lee’s super-clean playing. Michael Tippett’s Piano Sonata No 1 most certainly does. I had not encountered this work before and with its energetic neo-classical style the innocent ear would more likely place it across the Channel in a Stravinskian Paris. Lee does not favour a Romanticised approach in any of this programme and certainly her emotional detachment allied to her dexterity serves this work well. If Tippett was a relatively late developer then Benjamin Britten was quite the opposite. A genuinely prodigious talent, by the time he came to write his Holiday Diary Op 5 at the age of twenty-one he was a composer with a substantial catalogue to his name. Given the diversity and breadth of his oeuvre as well as his skill as a pianist himself, it always comes as something of a surprise how little Britten wrote for solo keyboard. Indeed this suite of four pieces lasting around seventeen minutes is his most substantial work. As such it merits more consideration than perhaps such a piece of relative juvenilia might. The diary’s four ‘entries’ have almost naive titles; Early Morning Bathe, Sailing, Fun-Fair and Night respectively. The music itself – with probably the exception of the atmospheric Night – paints broad mood-pictures rather than evocatively. Again Lee’s playing is remarkably articulate but here a slight doubt creeps in. There are not many competing versions in the catalogue but Stephen Hough originally on Virgin and now available via Warner (and shortly as part of an Erato retrospective) is a good touchstone. Hough’s technique is justly famed and the equal of Lee but in this work he finds a playful and light-hearted touch that eludes her. With Hough you can imagine him being on holiday, with Lee it feels all rather serious rather than effervescent.

Likewise the Three Sketches by Bridge are quite beautifully played but with a sense of technical control that reduces the salon-sentiment that imbues these lovely works. Bridge is a composer who struggles to be recognised as the major and individual voice he was. These three pieces are quite early and pre-date by a decade the upheaval of World War I which transformed Bridge’s creative voice. Yet even in 1906 he was taking a form of simple almost domestic music and finding an individuality of expression that is quite unique in British music of that time. So the challenge for the performer is to find a way to reconcile the Romantic and Impressionistic elements. In performance this requires a fluidity of touch and an unforced rubato so elegance and expressiveness are understatedly clear. Mark Bebbington’s survey of Bridge’s piano music on Somm epitomises this approach to perfection and against him Lee is simply literal, beautifully polished, but literal.

For some unclear reason the disc takes as its collective title from that of the next work John Ireland’s Ballade of London Nights. If the Tippett and Britten are neo-classical and the Bridge Romantic/Impressionist, then Ireland’s work is the most completely Impressionistic in the programme. Alongside the Tippett this is the most wholly successful performance here. Again Bebbington provides a useful comparator. He is considerably slower and more languorous than Lee but here I find her detached and cool approach works rather well. The technical aspect of Lee’s playing is never in doubt across the whole disc but somehow I get the feeling that she is more naturally attuned to Ireland’s emotional world as represented here.

The disc is completed by Bax’s stormy and tumultuous Piano Sonata No 1. This is very much a youthful work – the epitome of Bax the self-proclaimed “Brazen Romantic”. Written as a result of a failed love affair in Russia and modelled on Lizst’s great single movement sonata this is a work that teems with musical and technical challenges. There is a danger that the work can sprawl. Lee’s performance on timing alone sits towards the slower end of the ‘standard’ performances; Binns and Parkin are both 1-2 minutes quicker than Lee’s 21:16, Wass’ glowering turbulent performance a minute slower while Endres’ dispatches the work in just 17:55. For all the technical address of Lee’s performance, I did find myself feeling that control and clarity were being promoted ahead of the emotional imperatives of the work. At this stage of his career, music was pouring out of Bax in an unquenchable torrent. Given his struggles to write after the late 1930’s, at this stage in his life you feel that the issue was simply to write down all the ideas that were boiling up inside him. I must admit I like both Endres’ and Wass’ very different solutions to giving musical and indeed dramatic sense to this excessive work. Endres does not linger and, like Lee, textures are wonderfully clean and articulate. But Endres’ control of the potentially unwieldy structure is more convincing than Lee, he points the key motifs that bind the work structurally so effectively. In contrast, Wass lumbers and growls like some awakening Kraken but when he reaches the closing pages with their exultant pealing of Russian bells it is the most extraordinary sense of release and arrival. Lee by contrast plays the notes but with nothing like the sense of inevitability and arrival Wass achieves. In isolation, Lee’s performance is impressive and indeed exciting – how could this work be otherwise – but in direct comparison it does feels like work in progress interpretively.

So, overall an interesting indeed challenging programme that is very well-played in a particular style. Quite why Lee chose this specific programme must remain a mystery. The Capriccio liner is quite the most useless one I have read in years. It consists simply of an artist biography in three languages with not a word about the music itself. Given that it is likely that this music – and indeed the composers – are unfamiliar to many of the German/Korean target audience it would have helped greatly to have been given some context for the music as well as why the programme was so structured. My guess is that the rationale was to produce a sequence of works from the first half of the 20^th Century featuring British music by composers not influenced by the folksong or pastoral tradition. Also there seem to be different responses to the post-Romantic era. Clearly all the composers would have known each other to some degree; Bridge famously taught Britten, Britten and Tippett were close friends as were Bax and Ireland. But if there is some greater binding unity to the programme it eludes me. As previously mentioned the engineering is good although the chosen close-miked style is far from natural.

A recital to be welcomed for its endeavour and intent although greater expressive freedom in some works would have been beneficial.

Nick Barnard

Previous review: John France