Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is best remembered as Benjamin Britten’s most influential composition teacher. But we should be celebrating Bridge for his work as much as his mentoring — as is clear in a new Nash Ensemble album from Hyperion.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
The album is gorgeously realised, showcasing the rich talents of a composer who found a comfortable way to straddle the tectonic aesthetic shift from the Romantic world to the Modern one.
The album is also a bonus lesson — one learned through listening enjoyment, not in assiduously taking notes — in the difference between the classical era’s way of structuring music and a more freeform approach using musical themes that recur in different permutations. To use the proper musical language, it is the difference between sonata form and cyclical form.
All of the chamber music collected here by members of the Nash Ensemble is written in cyclical form. The most fun part is that some of the pieces use familiar folk material to do the work. The most prominent is a 1908 string quartet movement An Irish Melody: The Londonderry Air.
The tune is one even a big city mayor in a cracked drunken stupor would recognize, although he might not be able to follow the little tune’s quicksilver journeys and transformations through the fabric of this art music. There are three other little pieces for string quartet assembled here in the same vein, all a pleasure to follow.
Pianist Ian Brown, who is a master at finding a balance between critical mass and lyricism, gets involved with the disc’s heavier lifting: an intense, two-movement World War I-era Cello Sonata, a Violin Sonata from 1932 and a piece that gives Fauré and Debussy as well as Edward Elgar a run for their pounds and francs, the Phantasy Piano Quartet in F-sharp minor, from 1910.
Paul Watkins’ work in the Cello Sonata is seductive.
For all the details on the album, click here.
To get a better idea of Bridge’s lighter side, here are Sally in Our Alley and Cherry Ripe (both on the album), which date from the end of World War I, in a string orchestra arrangement played by the English Northern Philharmonia under conductor David Lloyd-Jones:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
