Frank Bridge, famed as Benjamin Britten’s teacher, remains less famous as a composer. Yet his Violin Sonata, composed in the aftermath of the Great War, is one of the British masterpieces of its time, a work of passion and high originality. The opportunity to hear it at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh’s final New Town Concert of the season on February 29, will be something to seize.
Like Britten in Aldeburgh, Bridge was a product of the English coast. Born in Brighton, he died in Eastbourne, and his Violin Sonata could be said to stare across the English Channel towards Pourville, where Debussy in 1917 composed one of his last works, likewise a violin sonata, when the war was at its destructive height and the battles of Verdun and the Somme formed the background that prompted Debussy to call himself Musicien Francais.
Bridge, a pacifist thrown into dark depression by the war, was a deep admirer of Debussy, and the linking of these two works in Jack Liebeck’s recital with Katya Apekisheva as pianist will give his programme a special sense of purpose.
Framed by the bleak beauty of Brahms’s “Rain” sonata and and the sudden final vivacity of a sonata by the American composer John Corigliano, these pieces will give the Edinburgh audience something to think about. Though Bridge’s day has yet to dawn, it is getting closer.
His devotion to the music of Alban Berg - an unwilling soldier in the Great War who was later to be shunned by the Nazis - prompted him to draw Britten’s attention to that inspired Viennese at a time when few British composers had learned to love him. But Bridge did so, and it set him startlingly at odds with the English pastoral tastes of the period, helping Britten to make Peter Grimes - as well as the subsequent Billy Budd, Owen Wingrave, and Gustav von Aschenbach - the great operatic outsiders who could stand beside Berg’s Wozzeck.
15 February 2016
Like Britten in Aldeburgh, Bridge was a product of the English coast. Born in Brighton, he died in Eastbourne, and his Violin Sonata could be said to stare across the English Channel towards Pourville, where Debussy in 1917 composed one of his last works, likewise a violin sonata, when the war was at its destructive height and the battles of Verdun and the Somme formed the background that prompted Debussy to call himself Musicien Francais.
Bridge, a pacifist thrown into dark depression by the war, was a deep admirer of Debussy, and the linking of these two works in Jack Liebeck’s recital with Katya Apekisheva as pianist will give his programme a special sense of purpose.
Framed by the bleak beauty of Brahms’s “Rain” sonata and and the sudden final vivacity of a sonata by the American composer John Corigliano, these pieces will give the Edinburgh audience something to think about. Though Bridge’s day has yet to dawn, it is getting closer.
His devotion to the music of Alban Berg - an unwilling soldier in the Great War who was later to be shunned by the Nazis - prompted him to draw Britten’s attention to that inspired Viennese at a time when few British composers had learned to love him. But Bridge did so, and it set him startlingly at odds with the English pastoral tastes of the period, helping Britten to make Peter Grimes - as well as the subsequent Billy Budd, Owen Wingrave, and Gustav von Aschenbach - the great operatic outsiders who could stand beside Berg’s Wozzeck.
15 February 2016
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