Freda SWAIN (1902-1985)
Piano Music - Volume 1
Sonata Saga in F minor (1925–30) [29:39]
The Croon of the Sea (1920) [6:21]
Piano Sonata No 1 in A minor, The Skerries (1936–37; rev. 1945) [14:18]
An English Idyll (1942) [4:46]
Piano Sonata No 2 in F-sharp minor (1950) [17:57]
The Red Flower [4:36]
Timon Altwegg (piano)
rec. October 2021, Wyastone Concert Hall, Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, UK
TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC0579 [77:34]
Freda Swain’s is a name encountered in British music but the same can’t be said of her music. By a long process, the owner of her surviving manuscripts is Timon Altwegg whose booklet essay offers a first-class introduction to her life and work and also, it needs to be said, to the somewhat problematic state of her manuscripts, which he has laboured long and hard to bring to a performing standard. She could hardly have had a more versatile or a more understanding interpreter than the Swiss musician.
The music in this album, all heard in first performances, starts early with The Croon of the Sea, written when she was 18, and carries on to the Piano Sonata No 2 of 1950. The Croon is a brief sea picture, which captures the sway of the plume and spray, before moving onward to embrace the rich opulence of the sea, ending quietly. Effective though this piece is, it was intended for her piano teacher, Arthur Alexander, who married her shortly afterwards. The Sonata Saga was her first real sonata, though it was not noted as such, composed between 1920 and 1925. There’s Rachmaninovian glower in the early pages as well as some clotted storm-tossed chording and a real sense of textual density. In the slow movement one can feel the tension between the pull of the left hand and the right hand’s attempts to rise free, before a dour episode that generates more drama – the treble here really glints. Her grandeur is not unmixed by persistence in a finale which is again quite clotted.
The problem of textual density embodied by this work, effectively her first sonata, is resolved by the actual Piano Sonata No 1, The Skerries, which occupied her during 1936-37 and was revised in 1945. Here the writing is much clearer and cleaner, devoid of clutter. She relishes the toccata-like clarity and direction of the music and the neo-classical cum pastoral nature of the central music and the finale. This quality is reinforced by the Second Sonata of 1950, where the toccata element is made explicit in the title of the first movement, which develops a boogie effect – not that Swain, in all seriousness, would have seen it as such. The Canzona Pastorale is the slowest music in the album – a pastorale of limpid refinement – whilst the intriguingly titled finale, a Pandean Rondo, generates a fast folk-like play that is both convincing and catchy. Which leads to the last piece, The Red Flower, undated but timeless in its pastoral allure.
Thanks to Timon Altwegg and Toccata we now know a lot more about Swain and her music in its movement from rich late romanticism to a palette-cleansing clarity that shows awareness of Debussy.
Jonathan Woolf
