Frank Bridge-Complete Music for Piano

Peter Jacobs piano, Volume 1

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

6.

7.

8.
9.
10.

11.

12.
13.

Capriccio No 1
Capriccio No 2
A Sea Idyl
Arabesque
Fairy Tale Suite
The Princess
The Ogre
The Spell
The Prince
In Autumn
Retrospect
Through the Eaves
Miniature Pastorals, Set 1
Allegretto con moto
Tempo di Valse
Allegretto ben moderato
Hidden Fires
Winter Pastoral
Miniature Pastorals, Set 2
Allegro giusto
Andante con moto
Allegro ma non troppo
Three Improvisations for the left hand
At Dawn
A Vigil
A Revel
A Dedication
Cargoyle

2.52
6.25
5.07
2.21
10.46
2.44
1.19
3.49
2.54
7.00
4.43
2.17
6.29
1.49
2.00
2.40
2.19
3.41
8.09
1.51
3.15
3.03
9.33
4.40
2.47
2.06
4.20
3.22

Frank Bridge-Complete Music for Piano

Peter Jacobs piano, Volume 2
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

Etude Rhapsodique
Berceuse
Dramatic Fantasia
Three Poems
Sunset
Solitude
Ecstasy
Three Piano Pieces
Columbine
Minuet
Romance
Four Characteristic Pieces
Water Nymphs
Fragrance
Bittersweet
Fireflies
Lament
Canzonetta
Pensee Fugitive
Scherzettino
Moderato
Vignettes de Marseille
Carmelita
Nicolette
Zoraida
En Fte

2.08
3.24
11.45
10.52
3.22
3.14
4.07
8.47
2.28
2.06
4.04
10.02
2.12
3.35
2.03
2.00
5.19
2.38
3.35
3.50
3.11
11.30
3.18
3.10
2.58
1.53

Frank Bridge-Complete Music for Piano

Peter Jacobs piano, Volume 3
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.

Three Sketches
April
Rosemary
Valse Capricieuse
The Hour Glass
Dusk
The Dew Fairy
The Midnight Tide
Graziella
Miniature Pastorals, Set 3
No.l
No.2
No.3
Miniature Suite
Chorale
Impromptu
Caprice
March
Three Lyrics
Heart's Ease
Dainty Rogue
The Hedgerow
Bach: Come Sweet Death
Sonata
1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement

8.00
2.20
3.57
1.34
12.27
4.44
3.19
4.15
3.39
5.37
2.44
1.19
1.29
6.49
2.46
1.56
0.51
1.06
6.08
1.56
1.32
2.32
3.05
31.25
14.08
8.23
8.53

FRANK
BRIDGE
Complete Music
for piano
Volume 1

PETER
JACOBS

CCD 1016
CONTINUUM

FRANK
BRIDGE
Complete music
for piano

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

6.

7.

FRANK BRIDGE

PETER JACOBS

8.
9.
10.

11.

12.
13.
Recorded in St James's, Clerkenwell Green, London
Photo of Peter Jacobs by Charles Tyler
Front cover drawing of Bridge by John Minnion
Recorded in association with the Frank Bridge Trust
1990 C.L. Continuum Ltd

(10.46)

(7.00)

(6.29)

(8.09)

(9.33)

CONTINUUM CCD 1016

PIANO WORKS VOL 1

Volume 1

Capriccio No 1
(2.52)
Capriccio No 2
(6.25)
A Sea Idyl
(5.07)
Arabesque
(2.21)
Fairy Tale Suite
The Princess
(2.44)
The Ogre
(1.19)
The Spell
(3.49)
The Prince
(2.54)
In Autumn
Retrospect
(4.43)
Through the Eaves
(2.17)
Miniature Pastorals, Set 1
Allegretto con moto
(1.49)
Tempo di Valse
(2.00)
Allegretto ben moderato
(2.40)
Hidden Fires
(2.19)
Winter Pastoral
(3.41)
Miniature Pastorals, Set 2
Allegro giusto
(1.51)
Andante con moto
(3.15)
Allegro ma non troppo
(3.03)
Three Improvisations for the left hand
At Dawn
(4.40)
A Vigil
(2.47)
A Revel
(2.06)
A Dedication
(4.20)
Cargoyle
(3.22)

FRANK BRIDGE PIANO WORKS VOL I

CCD 1016

Frank Bridge
It is scarcely 20 years since the revival of interest in the music of Frank Bridge began to
get under way. As recently as the late 1960s his music, save for a few short and mainly
uncharacteristic works, lay virtually unplayed, and such performances as did take place
often seemed actuated by the wish to accord him a minimum acknowledgement as the
teacher of Benjamin Britten. The standard history of the period dismissed him in a few
damning paragraphs as a man who had done violence to his own gifts by attempting to
assimilate alien musical developments from the Continent, and daring to uglify his style
in imitation of freakish eccentrics such as Alban Berg.
That profoundly philistine verdict has already taken its place among historys classic
examples of critical idiocy. Bridges music is now regularly performed; nearly all his
major works are available on record; and his pioneering spirit and lively awareness of his
European contemporaries are at last accounted to him for righteousness and the basis
for radically revised critical estimation. He is the archetypal example - in the sense that
his achievement is, at last, clearly grasped - of that most talented generation of British
composers which also included such diverse figures as Holst, Havergal Brian, John
Foulds, Cyril Scott, and Francis George Scott. All of them, in their different ways,
successfully made the difficult transition to a truly 20th-century musical sensibility,
beyond Romanticism and in directions that ran counter to Neo-Classicism-even if their
creative personalities continued to develop Romantic traits.
Bridge wrote piano music for most of his creative life. Although that genre included, in
the Piano Sonata (1923-4), one of his most important works, by no means all of his other
piano pieces exhibit him in his more significant, progressive persona. Largely they are
comparative miniatures, characteristic genre-pieces; they provide a balancing reminder
of his firm grounding in sheer traditional craftsmanship and musicality, as a practical
workaday composer who produced many enjoyable pieces for public consumption. This
was the kind of music by which Bridge was best known in his lifetime, and which had the

1-1

widest circulation at the hands of amateur and professional performers alike. Many of
the pieces also illustrate his debt to the keyboard manners of his French
contemporaries, especially perhaps Faur, Debussy, and Ravel, whose own distinctive
palette of piano colour is often transmuted in Bridges music by an underwash of deeply
English background tones.
The first three pieces in the current selection date from 1905, a year in which Bridge
was just beginning to establish a reputation in musical life and which was among his
most productive in the sheer number of works he composed. It was in April of this year
that he wrote the Capriccio No 1, in A minor, as an entry for a competition sponsored by
the pianist Mark Hambourg. Out of the very respectable total of 96 entrants, the
26-year-old Bridge was the outright winner, and Hambourg premiered his piece at the
Queens Hall on 20 May. Shortly afterwards Bridge went on to write a pair of solo piano
pieces - A Sea Idyll and Capriccio No 2 - which he dedicated to Harold Samuel, who
almost immediately gave them both a highly successful first performance at the
Bechstein Hall. A Sea Idyll, dated June 1905, is a lush and possibly rather
Mediterranean piece in E major with a straightforward ternary form, the outer sections
barcarolle-like, with a persistent lapping wave-pattern' in the left hand, and a more
agitated and chromatic middle section. The opening passage is varied on its return,
leading to a brief Sostenuto coda. The two Capriccios, by contrast, are bravura display
pieces which demand excellent technique and plenty of panache from the executant. No
1 is the more delicate of the two, gossamer-textured, with a certain measure of sardonic
wit, especially in its deft prestissimo coda. No 2, in F sharp minor, is a more ambitious
conception, on a larger scale, and firmly in the Chopin/Liszt tradition of keyboard
virtuosity. It features an extended middle section, con tenerezza, whose sinuous melody
and sighing chromatic cadences faintly foreshadow Bridges late Phantasm of 1931, and
nicely offset the barnstorming prestidigitation of the outer portions. Equally capricious
in rhythmic pattern and figuration, the scherzo-like Arabesque dates from April 1914,
and was conceived at first as the last of a set of Four Characteristic Pieces; however,
Bridge eventually decided it was better to let it stand on its own (the other pieces were
issued as Three Poems). A rather Slavic tune in sonorous octaves burgeons smoothly

1-2

from the rippling textures of the opening, which return to produce a skittishly downbeat
ending.
Bridges first set of Miniature Pastorais (he wrote three sets in all - the last was
posthumously collected by Paul Hindmarsh from unpublished pieces) dates from July
1917: a triptych of childrens pieces, originally published with line-drawings by Margaret
Kemp-Welch. The first movement, a spritely, march-like Allegretto con moto in F sharp
minor, shows at once that notwithstanding a necessary simplification of melodic
material and texture, Bridge could write for young players with no hint of indulgence or
patronization. The sad little D minor waltz which follows is a perfect miniature: and the
last movement, in D major and marked Allegret to ben moderato, is a gem, contrasting an
oft-repeated birdsong figure (the accompanying drawing shows two children staring up
a tree) with a broad, gentle English pastoral tune in slow jig time.
The Fairy Tale Suite, which Bridge wrote immediately afterwards, in SeptemberOctober 1917, also looks at the world of childhood: however, they are not childrens
pieces but rather a grown-up reminiscence of childhood themes in the manner of
Debussys La Boite a Joujoux or Ravels La Mere lOye (which may well have served as
an immediate model). Of the four incisively-characterized movements. The Princess is
a fragrant and delicate little waltz, while The Ogre is a grotesque miniature scherzo with
a growly bass figure that strongly recalls Ravels treatment of Beauty and the Beast. The
Spell is by contrast a calm, pellucidly diatonic slow movement, featuring evocatively
harp-like chordal writing, The Prince forms an exuberant and comparatively extended
finale, full of cheerful flourishes of knightly virtuosity.
In the Three Improvisiations for left hand only we again find Bridge effortlessly
transcending imposed technical limitations and for the first time we can detect hints of
his emerging musical radicalism - a development that was undoubtedly affected by the
experience of the war. In fact he wrote the pieces, in May-July 1918, at the request of the
pianist Douglas Fox, who had lost his right arm in the fighting. Accordingly the first of
them, At Dawn, is no lyrical aubade but a sombre meditation, tonally wayward, though

1-3

centred around a very approximate E major. The left hand accompanies its own
brooding melody with arpeggio patterns that tend to span the keyboard with the severe,
modern sonorities of stacked perfect fifths and fourths, enveloped from time to time in
drifting chromatic mists. There is more than a hint of anguish at the climax, when the
melody returns intensified in octaves. A Vigil (equally approximately in G) seems a
further refinement of Bridges developing harmonic procedures: its dragging, uneasy
melody is subordinated to the pull of shifting chords, and again bare open fifths resound
in the bass, this time as a resonant foil to the acid, cluster-like seconds accompanying
the tune. The final number, A Revel, is more conservative harmonically, in that its
chromaticisms are still used to cast odd shafts of colour onto its basically diatonic
material. It is closer to the traditional conception of a bravura study or exercise , the
single hand ceaselessly busy up and down the keyboard in a continuous stream of triplet
semiquavers, with a beautifully witty will-o-the-wisp ending.
The second set of Miniature Pastorals (February and March 1921) is as gracefully
tailored to its twin purposes of teaching and entertainment as was the first, yet even into
this unpretentious music a certain spareness and ambiguity have entered. The first of
the three movements, an A major Allegro giusto, is a delightful miniature march with big
bass-drum beats and high piping tune, with an intrusive B flat bugle-call to add a spice of
bitonality. The central Andante con moto is, on the face of it, a warm and dreamy lullaby;
yet it equivocates between E flat and G minor, and subtle harmonic half-lights shadow its
apparent simplicity. The final tuneful Allegro non troppo in A is a kind of jig (the
Kemp-Welch drawing shows children playing on their way home from a country school)
that gives the impression of being enwrapped, not indeed in nostalgia, but in
imperceptibly receding memory - there is an almost ghostly frisson at the start of the
coda, with the main tune thin and distant over a rumbling bass pedal.
In March 1924
development; the
make up a short
troubled creative

Bridge completed his epic, war-torn Piano Sonata, a crucial work in his
next month he produced Retrospect, the first of the two pieces that
suite entitled In Autumn. Retrospect indeed seems an extension of the
impulse that had produced the Sonata: it has similar quality of

1-4

intensity and anguish, and is cast in the same chromatically-saturated harmonic idiom,
clouded in tonality, and subjecting its material to a much greater degree of restless
transformation than in Bridges earlier works. The other movement of the suite,
Through the Eaves, is similarly uncompromising, though lighter in texture. Essentially
it consists of a single gesture, a V-shaped arpeggio fluttering down and up the keyboard,
that is continually metamorphosed in fluid, iridescent harmonic colourings.
After Autumn, Winter: the lovely Winter Pastoral is a product of December 1925, and
though it scrupulously avoids the painful dissonance of Retrospect it shows Bridge
approaching his latest manner in terms of refinement and economy of gesture, its single
dolce tune wending its way through a bare and frosty harmonic landscape, open fifths
hanging in the air like puffs of condensing breath. No piece of Bridge is more clearly
influenced in its layout by the eloquent spareness of some of the Debussy Preludes, yet
the actual expression is very English, and all his own.
The enigmatically-titled A Dedication (it carries no dedication) was written in
September 1926 at Bridges Sussex retreat of Friston Field. Despite the A major keysignature there is little hint of tonal stability anywhere in this piece - one of his most
powerful miniatures, whose uncanny mood is one of deep feeling barely suppressed,
hesitant on the edge of full expression. Its harmonic complexity probably reflects the
experience of the Third String Quartet, which Bridge had completed in its first version
(only to have it rejected for performance by his patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge) a
few months before. Hidden Fires probably dates from around the same time, and was
published in 1927. In contrast to the languors of A Dedication this is a turbulent,
toccata-like piece of inexorable rhythmic drive. Perhaps the influence of late Scriabin, in
works such as Vers la Flamme, comes close to the surface here, but it remains a
splendidly effective recital item.
Finally, Gargoyle. This astonishing, eldritch, sardonically witty piece was composed
at Friston in July 1928, and is the most advanced of all Bridges piano works, with its
spiky, angular melodic material, bitonal harmonies, frequent biting dissonance and

1-5

stark, uncompromising textures. The title was only provisional - it is followed by a query
on the manuscript - but the music could indeed be a brilliantly vivid impression of some
scuttling, sarcastic, impish being. It had to wait nearly 50 years to become available for
performance, in an edition by Paul Hindmarsh. Bridge had sent the piece, on completion,
to the same publishers who for the past 18 years had accepted and printed his every
short instrumental piece without question. But this one was evidently too strong for
them - or too unlikely to be a good seller: it was rejected and returned to the composer.
Bridges feelings can only be guessed at; all we know is that he stuck Gargoyle into an
envelope and never wrote a piano piece again.

1989 by Calum MacDonald

Peter Jacobs has been an enthusiastic advocate for English piano music for
several years, often playing pieces by composers whose neglect has been
unjustified. His long list of recordings bears witness to this - four records of
sonatas by Harold Truscott, the major works of John Foulds, Alan Bush (the 24
Preludes, etc.,), Balfour Gardiner, Thomas Wilson, Vaughan Williams, and
others. One of his most successful records has been a recital of pieces by Billy
Mayerl, and recently he has begun to explore the neglected French repertoire.
His disc of the six sonatinas of Maurice Emmanuel has been critically acclaimed.
Peter Jacobs has always had a deep affection and respect for the music of
Frank Bridge, and gave the first performance, in 1979, of his Dramatic Fantasia.
He believes that Bridges body of piano music (more than 50 pieces, plus the
Sonata) represents what is probably the finest achievement by any English
composer in this field, and that Bridges deep musical and spiritual development
is intimately reflected in these works.

1-6

FRANK
BRIDGE
Complete Music
for piano
Volume 2

PETER
JACOBS

CCD 1018
CONTINUUM

Complete music
for piano

FRANK BRIDGE

PETER JACOBS

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

Producer: John Bishop

Recording engineer: Mike Skeet
Tape editor: John Taylor
Recording location: Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead, London
Recorded in association with the Frank Bridge Trust
Photograph of Peter Jacobs by Charles Tyler
Front>cover drawing of Bridge by John Minnion
1990 C.L.Continuum Ltd

Etude Rhapsodique
Berceuse
Dramatic Fantasia
Three Poems
Sunset
Solitude
Ecstasy
Three Piano Pieces
Columbine
Minuet
Romance
Four Characteristic Pieces
Water Nymphs
Fragrance
Bittersweet
Fireflies
Lament
Canzonetta
Pensee Fugitive
Scherzettino
Moderato
Vignettes de Marseille
Carmelita
Nicolette
Zoraida
En Fte

Volume 1-CCD 1010

Volume 3-CCD 1019

(2.08)
(3.24)
(11.45)
(3.22)
(3.14)
(4.07)

(10.52)

(2.28)
(2.06)
(4.04)

(8.47)

(2.12)
(3.35)
(2.03)
(2.00)
(5.19)
(2.38)
(3.35)
(3.50)
(3.11)
(3.18)
(3.10)
(2.58)
(1.53)

(10.02)

(11.30)

CONTINUUM CCD 1016

PIANO WORKS VOL 2

Volume 2

CCD 1018

FRANK BRIDGE PIANO WORKS VOL 2

FRANK
BRIDGE

Frank Bridge
Frank Bridge wrote music for the piano for much of his creative life; yet although he
contributed one of his most important works to the genre with his Piano Sonata (1923-4),
by no means all of his other piano pieces exhibit him in his more significant, progressive
persona. In general they are comparative miniatures, character-sketches, genre-pieces;
they provide a balancing reminder of Bridges firm grounding in sheer traditional
craftsmanship and musicality, as a practical workaday composer who produced many
enjoyable pieces for public consumption. This was the kind of music by which he was
best-known in his lifetime, and which received the widest circulation at the hands of
amateur and professional performers alike. Many of the pieces also illustrate his debt to
the keyboard manners of his French contemporaries, especially perhaps Faur, Debussy,
and Ravel, whose own distinctive palette of piano colour is often transmuted in Bridges
music by an underwash of deeply English background tones.
Yet this should not be taken as implying that the music is necessarily minor or
derivative. Even in the smaller pieces there is sometimes a flamboyance of gesture, or a
disturbing intensity of expression, which may cast a revealing light on the painful
personal development of a composer whose larger-scale achievements were generally
in the spheres of orchestral and chamber music. Volume 2 of this first complete
recording of Bridges piano music therefore spans the gamut between music for mere
pleasant listening and works of a deeper, or more ambitious, kind. It also charts the
development of the Bridge salon piece into a genre as deeply personal as the Brahmsian
intermezzo or the Faurian nocturne.
Earliest and most unassuming of the pieces here recorded is the Berceuse, a
miniature that Bridge wrote originally for small orchestra in August 1901. It seems to
have been a firm favourite of his, for he not only published it in 1902 in versions for violin
(or cello) and piano and for violin and strings, but subsequently (in 1929) made a
different small-orchestra version and also the transcription for piano solo recorded

2-1

here. As its title implies, it is a gentle, lulling tune (in B flat) with a slightly more anxious
central section over a pedal G and a nagging triplet tremolo; the triplet rhythm stays to
enliven the return of the main tune.
The latest discoveries to be added to the canon of Bridges piano music are three
separate manuscript pieces which may be grouped together solely on account of their
early date: a Pense Fugitive in F minor dated Summer 1902, a Moderato in E minor,
dated Cardigan, Sept 5/'03, and a Scherzettino in G minor which is probably the earliest
of the lot: Paul Hindmarsh assigns it to the period 1901-2. Dedicated to O.B. and marked
Prestissimo, this is within its moderate compass a rather ambitious student piece and
certainly tricky for the pianist, with quite a wide range of virtuoso textures in the outer
sections and a skittish central trio in G major ending in a cadenza-like chromatic
flourish. The Pense Fugitive, more modest in its requirements, was probably
envisaged as the first of a set of pieces (the title is actually given in the plural, and
followed by the numeral T). It is built on a cello-like espressivo melody and a rapidlyrocking triplet texture that goes on chiming and thrumming in various registers
throughout the length of the piece. The brief Moderato grows from two contrasted
ideas, a song-like melody and a more dance-like staccato one; it rises to a climax, and
then subsides with the song trailing away into the lower reaches of the left hand.
Another early piece, the Dramatic Fantasia, is by contrast among the most ambitious
piano works Bridge ever wrote. Apparently composed in January 1906 for a Royal
College of Music friend, the pianist Florence Smith, it remained entirely unknown in the
composers lifetime and only came to light in 1978; the world premiere was given the
following year at the Wigmore Hall by Peter Jacobs. The Dramatic Fantasia seems to
have been Bridges first essay in the kind of phantasy arch-form (basically a sonata
design with an interpolated slow movement) which he later employed with such success
in his chamber music, and even in large-scale orchestral designs such as Phantasm. It
appears that Bridge originally entitled it Sonata - maybe, indeed, he intended it as the
first part of a multi-movement Piano Sonata (perhaps with the slightly earlier Etude
Rhapsodique forming the scherzo) - but eventually realized it was a self-sufficient

2-2

structure on its own and gave it the present title. An Adagio introduction in E flat minor
adumbrates the basic material, which gives rise to a striving Allegro moderato first
subject in that key and a warmer, more chordal Ben sostenuto second group hovering
around B flat major. Virtuosic arpeggio writing derived from the first theme closes the
exposition and there follows a broadly melodious Lento ma non troppo slow movement
in a wingly lyrical B major. The Allegro sets in once again in F major, the second subject
reappearing now in E flat major - in which key the work comes to a conclusion of
triumphant bravura.
The Etude Rhapsodique was written in November 1905 but, like the Dramatic
Fantasia, it remained unpublished and unperformed among Bridges papers. Its world
premiere took place as recently as 1986, in a BBC radio recital by John Gough. This brief
but volatile and virtuosic movement - in a C major that serves largely as the blank
background for the imposition of a myriad chromatic colourations - has something of
the coldly intoxicating, post-Chopinesque bravura we might associate with early
Scriabin. The piece was eventually published in 1990
We move on in time to find Bridge the accomplished miniaturist represented by the
Three Piano Pieces, which he published in 1913. The Minuet which forms the
centrepiece of this set nevertheless dates from 1901, almost exactly contemporary with
the Berceuse; but it was extensively revised for its publication with the other two
numbers, which date from 1912. The first panel of the resulting triptych, Columbine, is a
delicately-perfumed and rather capricious A flat major waltz in salon style. The trim little
Minuet itself has a somewhat Ravelian air; one suspects its shiny successions of parallel
fourths and sixths are products of its revision, and of acquaintance with the French
composers recent work. The final Romance is a rather more personal utterance, its
languorous opening section becoming agitato and producing a contrasting tune that
drives to a maestoso climax before the music progressively calms towards a peaceful
semplice close.
The Three Poems were composed in 1913-14 as part of a set originally entitled Four

2-3

Characteristic Pieces (not to be confused with the actual suite of that title from 1917,
also on this disc): the fourth piece was Arabesque, published separately (and recorded
on Continum CCD 1016). The Poems chronicle an increasing sensitivity and subtlety of
utterance, moving steadily away from the salon-music archetype - a development
paralleled in his orchestral output by the tone-poem Summer, whose atmosphere of
rapt nature-mysticism these Poems share. Sunset might be viewed as a study in
spacing, in the evocative effects to be derived from the resonant placement of bare
fourths and fifths and plangent false relations with a hint of a gentle berceuse rhythm and
a gradual darkening of harmony and register. Solitude is a striking example of what can
be achieved out of a single texture and gesture: a brooding, slowly descending tune
whose every bar is undermined by an obsessive, upward-curling fragment of chromatic
scale. Most remarkable (and substantial) of these pieces is Ecstasy, whose slowly-builtup opening harmonies and long-breathed, tonally ambiguous melody suggest a passing
acquaintance with the op 11 Klavierstcke of Schoenberg. That impression is hardly
sustained as the piece launches into a romantic, fluidly surging Allegro con moto - but
this generates a considerable rhetorical force and virtuosity, and the piece evolves
fantasia-like with a restless abandon, finally provoking a dissonant climax and a return of
the Lento introduction to square the circle.
Though small in compass, the little Lament of 1915 must be accounted one of Bridges
most significant works, if only because it is the archetypal demonstration of the
possibilities for expressive intensity inherent even in what might appear an occasional
miniature. It bears the poignant dedication: Catherine, aged 9, 'Lusitania' 1915 - and was
inspired by the deaths of a family of friends (Catherine was the young daughter) among
the 1,200 people drowned when the great Cunarder was sunk by a U-boat off the coast of
Southern Ireland on 7 May 1915. Bridges own deep sense of shock at this outrange of
total war is manifest in every bar of the brief but deeply troubled Lament, in which
harmony of a severe, almost choked, chromatic complexity builds up over a tolling pedal
E flat. The work was originally conceived for string orchestra, and has become fairly well
known in that form in recent years - but Bridges own contemporary transcription for
solo piano is a surprisingly effective alternative.

2-4

With the Four Characteristic Pieces of April-May 1917 we find Bridge in complete
command of a keyboard style which owes much to contemporary French idioms, but is
rapidly evolving in a wholly individual direction. There is an almost casual virtuosity of
gesture in the way Water Nymphs swathes its elegant tune in liquidly rippling arpeggio
figuration. The Fragrance which gives the second piece its title is primarily an harmonic
one: a haunting pedal figure and a chord that spans a major seventh. From these delicate
materials grows a hesitant melody that gives rise to a movement of some emotional and
textural complexity. Only at the close is the key revealed as an unequivocal E major, as
the music evanesces in a return of the opening figure and a pppp whiff of tune. (Bridge
dedicated this movement to his wife Ethel.) Bittersweet brings a fragrance of another
kind,
evolving
at
first
a
trellis-work
of
sinuous
chromaticism.
The
emotional
temperature rises unexpectedly high in a sudden outburst of con fuoco vigour and a
swift cadenza-like Presto that gradually winds down to a paler, slimmer version of the
opening music. Finally, Fireflies is a brilliant bitonal study in continuous flickering
semiquaver motion, which could well have been inspired by such virtuoso conceptions
as Debussys Mouvement or Poissons dor.
In August 1925 Bridge and his wife were refreshed by a holiday touring in the Alps and
along the Mediterranean coast in the company of his patroness, Elizabeth Sprague
Coolidge. Shortly afterwards he recaptured some of the carefree mood of that time in the
piano suite Vignettes de Marseille - a serenade-like work, remarkable among his
music of the mid-1920s for its comparative gaiety of spirit and bright, uncomplicated
textures, all four movements hinting at local colour and based on Mediterranean
dance-rhythms. For some reason Bridge does not seem to have tried to get it published,
though 13 years later he produced an orchestral version of the first three movements
under the title Vignettes de danse. It was only in 1978 that the original piano suite
received its first performance (in a broadcast on BBC Scotland by Kathleen Renilson)
and was published in an edition by Paul Hindmarsh. It seems possible that Bridges
intention was an affectionate parody of light-music conventions. The first three
movements bear girls names, fictitious postcard beauties, in the manner of popular
salon pieces, and Carmelita proves Spanish indeed with her vigorous habanera rhythm,

2-5

while Zoraida, with her hints of oriental mystery and exotic fioriture, clearly has some
Moorish blood. Between them Nicolette, obviously the French girl, displays a more
formal grace in a rather more complex movement. Finally, En Fete, a cheerful rondo
with hints of march and fanfare, provides an appropriately exuberant ending.
Written in 1926, the Canzonetta (Happy South) (of which Bridge also made an
orchestral version) might almost be an appendix to the Vignettes de Marseille in its
seemingly artless outpouring of florid melody in clear, sunlit keyboard textures.

1990 by Calum MacDonald

Peter Jacobs has been an enthusiastic advocate for English piano music for
several years, often playing pieces by composers whose neglect has been
unjustified. His long list of recordings bears witness to this - four records of
sonatas by Harold Truscott, the major works of John Foulds, Alan Bush (the 24
Preludes, etc.,), Balfour Gardiner, Thomas Wilson, Vaughan Williams, and
others. One of his most successful records has been a recital of pieces by Billy
Mayerl, and recently he has begun to explore the neglected French repertoire.
His disc of the six sonatinas of Maurice Emmanuel has been critically acclaimed.
Peter Jacobs has always had a deep affection and respect for the music of
Frank Bridge, and gave the first performance, in 1979, of his Dramatic Fantasia.
He believes that Bridges body of piano music (more than 50 pieces, plus the
Sonata) represents what is probably the finest achievement by any English
composer in this field, and that Bridges deep musical and spiritual development
is intimately reflected in these works.

2-6

FRANK
BRIDGE
Complete Music
for piano
Volume 3

PETER
JACOBS

CCD 1019
CONTINUUM

Complete music
for piano

FRANK BRIDGE

PETER JACOBS

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.

18. Bach: Come Sweet Death

Sonata
1st movement
19.
2nd movement
20.
3rd movement
21.
Producer: John Bishop
Recording engineer: Mike Skeet
Tape editor: John Taylor
Recording location: Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead, London
Recorded in association with the Frank Bridge Trust
Photograph of Peter Jacobs by Charles Tyler
Front>cover drawing of Bridge by John Minnion
1990 C.L.Continuum Ltd

Volume 1-CCD 1016

Volume 3-CCD 1018

(2.20)
(3.57)
(1.34)

(8.00)

(4.44)
(3.19)
(4.15)
(3.39)

(12.27)

(2.44) )
(1.19)
(1.29)

(5.37)

(2.46)
(1.56)
(0.51)
(1.06)

(6.49)

(1.56)
(1.32)
(2.32)

(6.08)

(3.05)
(14.08)
(8.23)
(8.53)

(31.25)

CONTINUUM CCD 1019

PIANO WORKS VOL 3

Volume 3

CCD 1019
Three Sketches
April
Rosemary
Valse Capricieuse
The Hour Glass
Dusk
The Dew Fairy
The Midnight Tide
Graziella
Miniature Pastorals, Set 3
No.l
No.2
No.3
Miniature Suite
Chorale
Impromptu
Caprice
March
Three Lyrics
Heart's Ease
Dainty Rogue
The Hedgerow

FRANK BRIDGE PIANO WORKS VOL 3

FRANK
BRIDGE

Frank Bridge
Frank Bridge wrote music for the piano for much of his creative life; yet although he
contributed one of his most important works to the genre with his Piano Sonata
(1923-4), by no means all of his other piano pieces exhibit him, as that does, in his more
significant, progressive persona. The bulk of the compositions with which he enriched
the medium are comparative miniatures, character-sketches, genre-pieces; they provide
a balancing reminder of Bridges firm grounding in sheer traditional craftsmanship and
musicality, as a practical workaday composer who produced many enjoyable pieces for
public consumption. This was the kind of music by which he was best-known in his
lifetime, and which received the widest circulation at the hands of amateur and
professional performs alike. Many of the pieces also illustrate his debt to the keyboard
manners of his French contemporaries, especially perhaps Faur, Debussy, and Ravel,
whose own distinctive palette of piano colour is often transmuted in Bridges music by
an underwash of deeply English background tones. One of the minor sensations of
British keyboard music, however, is the steady development of the Bridge salon piece
into a genre as deeply personal as the Brahmsian intermezzo or the Faurian nocturne.
The concluding volume of this survey of Bridges complete piano output shows these
contrasting approaches particularly clearly, as it counterposes the great Sonata with a
cross-section of lighter pieces and occasional pieces from the composers still not fully
explored and astonishingly diverse output.
Quintessential examples of Bridges early salon style may be found in the Three
Sketches of 1906. At least one of them - Rosemary - retained a perennial popularity
through the long decades, when Bridges more substantial music was neglected or
forgotten. Yet they were not given their first performance until 1910 (by Eileen Edwards
at the Bechstein Hall), and not published until 1915. The set opens with April, a
capricious little scherzo, beginning in E minor but brightening to a confident and finally
contended E major, its glistening streams of thirds and sixths evocative of the month of

3-1

showers and sunshine. Rosemary delights with its charming and memorable main tune,
yet the uncomplicated mood is darkened in the central section by brooding harmonies
like a passing cloud, and by an unexpectedly passionate Allegro outburst. The third
piece, a somewhat Chopinesque Valse Capricieuse in G minor, displays Bridges
Edwardian drawing-room manner at its most elegantly balletic.
All the other music here dates from Bridges full maturity, although in the early 1920s
he was still struggling completely to individuate his musical language. The suite The
Hour Glass was written between September 1919 and April 1920. Although the titles of
the individual movements might still suggest the salon piece, the harmonic language while far short of the chromatic complexity and intensity which Bridge was discovering
in his larger works - has developed with an austere refinement, bare octaves and fifths
doing service for the more comfortable diatonic formulations of the early years. As a
result, the pieces evoke a deeper level of response, not least in the rapt contemplation of
Dusk, with its discreet decoration of a hauntingly repetitive, chant-like melody. The
Dew Fairy is a little gem, a virtuoso arpeggio-study of the utmost delicacy with a piping
melody on top. Lastly, The Midnight Tide, a resonant, sonorous study with an epic
sweep and surge, perhaps traces its ancestry back to Debussys La Cathdrale
Engloutie (and indeed La Mer). But Bridge was already a poet of the sea, as his
orchestral suite of that title had shown, and this dark invocation is one of the great
English sea-pieces for piano, along with the likes of William Bainess Goodnight to
Flamboro or Greville Cookes Cormorant Crag.
The following year, 1921, was one of Bridges richest for piano music. As well as
sketching the first movement of his Piano Sonata and the first of the Three Lyrics, he
wrote a large number of childrens pieces: among them his second set of Miniature
Pastorals (available on CCD 1016), the piano-duet ballet In the Shop, and at least seven
other short pieces which lay unpublished during his lifetime and for many years after his
death. In 1977, Paul Hindmarsh edited three of these to make a third set of Miniature
Pastorals; like the two sets that Bridge himself published, these represent an elegant
simplification of his mature idiom, though unlike those earlier sets they bear no titles or

3-2

accompanying drawings to set the mind working in any programmatic direction. The
opening piece, an Andante molto tranquillo, is a wistful tune in G minor; there follows a
little buzzing B minor scherzo, Allegro con moto; while the final A minor Allegretto
vivace has the character of a vigorous yet courtly minuet.
Bridge had made fair copies of these three pieces, but Paul Hindmarsh has recently
discovered three more, in sketch form, among the many uncatalogued pages of Bridge
material in the Frank Bridge Collection at the Royal College of Music in London. He has
combined them with a march that Bridge seems to have sketched for the Miniature
Pastorals, and has edited them (for publication in 1990 by Thames Publishing) under
the title of Miniature Suite, christening the individual movements Chorale,
Impromptu, Caprice and March. Although, like the Pastorals, they date from April
1921, they are technically more difficult than any of the three sets of childrens pieces
(which may be why Bridge decided not to make use of them). The Chorale could also be
seen as a sketch for a funeral march, since fanfare and drum-roll effects frame and
punctuate its passages of quiet quasi-organum. The lifting Impromptu, marked
Andante tranquillo, is closely related to the first piece of Miniature Pastorals Set 3 but
barer and wispier in texture - perhaps a first attempt, or a parallel but alternative line of
development of the same thought. The dexterous and skittish Caprice is perhaps the
most interesting movement, adventurous enough in texture and harmony for a more
ambitious piece - although Bridge in fact left this unfinished and Paul Hindmarsh has
had to complete it (as a fantasy arch-form incorporating music jotted down elsewhere
on the manuscript). The truculent little March is rhythmically repetitive but spiky and
angular, and quite inventive harmonically.
From this same rich year of 1921 comes Hearts Ease, published in 1922 together with
Dainty Rogue (from that year) as the first two of Three Lyrics; the third number, The
Hedgerow, did not follow until 1924. The Lyrics therefore framed the composition of
the Piano Sonata, but one has to look very closely to catch any reflection of its
anguished spirit (that is much more apparent in Retrospect, written two months before
The Hedgerow, and recorded on CCD1016). The tiny Hearts Ease (which Bridge also

3-3

arranged for violin and piano) could be a miniature of much earlier than 1921 were it not
for its extreme purity of expression - a serene, folk-like tune with the simplest of
accompaniments, descending from the heights of the keyboard and vanishing up there
again at the end. Dainty Rogue is more characteristic of his mature style in its
chromatic side-slips, but remains a skittish, scurrying scherzo. The Hedgerow,
composed in June 1924 after the Piano Sonata, is perhaps the deepest of these three
pieces, and seems to play wistful games with that works harmonic toughness, using
passing dissonance and chomatic alteration as a spice for what might otherwise be
warmly diatonic thoughts. It certainly uses the widest range of textures, producing
shadows and half-lights far removed from the pristine simplicity of Hearts Ease.
Nevertheless, all these works are dwarfed (in scale, importance and intensity, if not in
technique) by Bridges solitary Piano Sonata, a masterwork achieved with great pains
...every now and then I thought Id give up the whole work and bum it, he wrote to
Elizabeth Coolidge just after its completion). Written at intervals between Easter 1921
and March 1924, it is dedicated to the memory of Bridges friend, the composer Ernest
Farrar, killed in action in France in 1917. Myra Hess gave the first performances in
London and New York in 1925-6; Mother important early advocate was Alan Bush, who
even introduced the work in Berlin in 1931. A sustained dramatic outburst of anger and
painful elegy, the Sonata represents the dark creative epiphany of all the progressive and
radical forces that had gradually been re-shaping Bridges musical personality since
almost the beginning of the Great War. It bitterly divided critical opinions on the
significance of his modernist stylistic evolution, and divided they stayed for the rest of
his career.
Though it unquestionably derives from the pianistic traditions and rhetoric of the
heroic 19th-century sonata (ultimately, perhaps, the Liszt B minor), what makes Bridges
Sonata so remarkable is his determined and systematic attempt to forge an eloquent and
coherent musical language out of harmonic and textured features he had previously
treated more as available options for colour and contrast in music that still paid court to
the conventions of tonality. The result is an expanded and dissonant harmonic idiom

3-4

resembling that of Viennese Expressionism (as displayed in Bergs exactlycontemporary Wozzeck). The basis of the idiom owes much to several obsessivelyexploited features: melodic and harmonic use of seconds, sevenths, tritones and ninths,
the superimposition of fourths and fifths, and the creation of complex chords by the
combination of orthodox but tenuously-related triads. Perhaps the most characteristic
example of the latter is the chord that results from superimposing a major triad over a
minor one whose root is a whole tone lower: this creates a sonority that is immediately
recognizable as Tate Bridge. Such procedures can be regarded as bitonal, but the effect
is not so much that of combined and opposed keys as a continual, painful refraction and
distortion of the traditional elements of tonality. And the melodic language is similarly
fractured, approaching that state which Schoenberg once defined as musical prose.
The three movements are played without a break. The first - in a species of Bridges
favourite fantasy arch form - is prefaced by a Lento ma non troppo introduction
beginning with solemn, tolling G-sharps, and presently takes wing in a wiry, muscular,
simmering Allegro energico. The G-sharps become an important motif in their own right,
and development is seamlessly and complexly organic. The slow movement, Andante
ben moderato, is a plangent elegy that seems to speak in highly personal terms of the
composers grief and bitterness at the senselessness of war and the loss of his friend.
After the briefest of slow introductions the finale, Allegro non troppo, develops as an
acerbic yet aspiring march whose themes distantly recall those of the first movement,
and actual first-movement material eventually reappears, leading to a stormy and bitter
coda that transfigures and aggrandizes the Sonatas very opening: a remarkable close to
a remarkable work.
Graziella, dating from 1926, is a complex piece, elusive in mood, its elegant yet
tonally wayward melody coloured by shifting harmonic half-lights. Despite the salon
character of the title, and a few apparent concessions to the conventions of the
character piece, Bridge here totally transends his original salon style, to produce a
statement at once highly personal and enigmatic, as if to hint at the manifold
complexities underlying every human character.

3-5

The arrangement of Bachs Komm, susser Tod (from the Schemelli Gesangbuch)
was made in June 1931 as Bridges contribution to that remarkable collaborative
anthology of the best and worst in contemporary British ideas of piano transcription, A
Bach Book for Harriet Cohen; it was first performed by her, along with the other
contributions (which included Bach items by Bax, Vaughan Williams, Lambert, Berners,
Walton and others), at the Wigmore Hall in October 1932. If the jewel of the book remains
Vaughan Williamss expansive, glowing Choral and Choral Prelude on Ach, bleib bei
Uns, Bridges serene chorale-setting is one of the best of the others, relatively restrained
and essentialized in its approach to Bachs original, apart from the pianistic arpeggios
of the central section. In 1936 he made a version of this transcription for string orchestra.

1990 by Calum MacDonald

Peter Jacobs has been an enthusiastic advocate for English piano music for
several years, often playing pieces by composers whose neglect has been
unjustified. His long list of recordings bears witness to this - four records of
sonatas by Harold Truscott, the major works of John Foulds, Alan Bush (the 24
Preludes, etc.,), Balfour Gardiner, Thomas Wilson, Vaughan Williams, and
others. One of his most successful records has been a recital of pieces by Billy
Mayerl, and recently he has begun to explore the neglected French repertoire.
His disc of the six sonatinas of Maurice Emmanuel has been critically acclaimed.
Peter Jacobs has always had a deep affection and respect for the music of
Frank Bridge, and gave the first performance, in 1979, of his Dramatic Fantasia.
He believes that Bridges body of piano music (more than 50 pieces, plus the
Sonata) represents what is probably the finest achievement by any English
composer in this field, and that Bridges deep musical and spiritual development
is intimately reflected in these works.

3-7