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FRANCIS POTT Farewell to Hirta Cello & Piano. David Watkin (cello); Howard Moody (piano); Francis Pott (piano). Guild GMCD 7141


This expansive work for cello and piano (almost an hour in performance) happily acknowledges its antecedents in Beethoven and Brahms - and in Bridge and John Ireland, the latter influence most noticeable (the composer himself also acknowledges Elgar.) The Sonata however is full of original thought and emotive music of considerable power - played with great assurance and conviction by the excellent soloists. Without a score for such a big work, which was some 12 years in completion, it is necessary to write subjectively, but the Sonata’s richly coherent structure is impressive enough. There are four movements - cyclic in that the solemn opening gently repetitive 2-chord pattern recurs, like the tolling of a bell, at the end of the work. The two outer movements make much of deeply felt adagio passages despite some agonised climaxes.

The composer, Francis Pott, a pupil of Robin Holloway and Hugh Wood (as well as of the pianist Hamish Milne) reveals that the Sonata was written in memory of his father (died 1983) and that the Finale, written in the year of his mother’s death (1995), "fought its own way out in exceptionally unpromising circumstances … in emotional terms it is thus the product  of sharper memory than what precedes it…"

With an opening B minor and a second subject in F minor a curious tritonal relationship is established which carries the emotional burden not only of the first movement but seems to suggest the anguish underlying the whole concept, perhaps also embodied in the  quotation from Alun Lewis which heads the score of the final movement:

"Out of the depths of the sea

Love cries and cries in me

And summer blossoms break above my head

With all the unbearable beauty of the dead."

Yet there is a vein of optimism throughout the work, expressed in sonorous cello lines. In the Scherzo, placed second, the questing cello line seems to ask ‘Why’ - its drooping figures over Rawsthorne-like piano figuration suggesting resignation which however is duly overcome with a great melodic surge. The third movement is a short cadenza for the cello solo - which has much relevance to the overall material and mood, and none at all to any kind of virtuosic showmanship. The composer, in his full and well written sleeve note uses the word ‘songful’ - in fact ‘rhapsodically songful’ which is fully realised in the music and for me places the Sonata in the top rank of significant British chamber music of these recent decades. Pott’s penultimate paragraph is a ‘c../graphics/redo’ that few composers today have da../graphics/red to utter.

It is no surprise to find that the two solo piano compositions draw their inspiration - in the first instance via the poet Vernon Watkins - from the sea. ‘Hunt’s Bay’ - a stretch of the Welsh coastline - recalls for me the mysterious doings in a cave related by Dermot O’Byrne in his tale ‘Ancient Dominions’ and by Arnold Bax in his First Symphony. The final piece, from which the CD takes its title, is an impressionistic illustration of the magic that any vista of St Kilda (Hirta in the Gaelic) presents to a romantic such as this young composer so obviously is. I would warmly recommend this disc to all lovers of English chamber music - and to all ‘Brazen Romantics’.

Reviewer

Colin Scott-Sutherland

Reviewer

Colin Scott-Sutherland

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