Alec Rowley (1892-1958)
Toccata – “The Two Worlds” (1934)
Two Album Leaves, Op 16 (1916) No 1: A Memory (Moderato con espressione) (1914):
No 2: Souvenir (Allegretto) (1911)
Piano Sonata No 1 (Sonate pour piano) (1939)
Nocturne No 1 in B minor (1932)
Nocturne No 2 in D-flat (1932)
Seven Preludes (on all the intervals) (1930)
Canzonetta, Op 50 No 1 (1939)
Piano Sonata No 2 in D (1949)
Suite for Piano (1946)
John Lenehan (piano)
rec. 2021, St George’s Headstone, Harrow, UK
DUTTON EPOCH CDLX7401 SACD [75]
It’s possible you’ll know Alec Rowley’s name from his teaching and student pieces or, if you’re a more specialised cove, from his organ works. It’s more likely that he’s just a name, if that. Back in 2005, though, his Concerto in D major for piano, strings and percussion, Op 49 received a recording (review) and as long ago as 1928 William Murdoch recorded The Rambling Sailor, one of the test pieces (review) for that year’s Daily Express National Piano Playing Competition (those were the days).
Now we have a sequence of first recordings of solo piano works that should satisfy the tastes of those interested in British piano scores with an occasional French slant; piano music that shares an affinity with John Ireland and is more capricious and wider-reaching than Orlando Morgan and Felix Swinstead. Rowley’s impulses can be felt in the Toccata of 1934, a piece that shows genuine inner lyricism as well as demanding quick fingers that invites awareness of Debussy. Programming the Toccata first cements his allegiances as the succeeding diptych of Album Leaves reaches back to 1911 and 1914 and his student years. The first Leaf is a warm and dreamy A Memory though the Souvenir is a more standard effusion dating from his late teens.
The two Nocturnes offer contrasting virtues. Booklet writer Robert Matthew-Walker holds the B minor in especially high esteem though it is very brief at 2:36. The D-flat Nocturne is somewhat longer and wears its lyricism proudly if also more floridly. In 1930 he wrote Seven Preludes (on all the intervals), an instructive sequence that explores the intervals – seconds, thirds, fourths and so on. Despite the ostensible didactic nature of these pieces, Rowley manages to vest them with resilient character, whether in the extroversion of the study on thirds or that on sixths which sounds very much like an English folk song. The bell pealing octaves end the Preludes in ringing, virtuoso fashion.
The two Piano Sonatas date from a decade apart. The first was composed in 1939 and published by Durand in Paris. It’s notably clean and crisp and its uncluttered directness surely aligns it with more contemporary French models - Poulenc, perhaps in the finale. The central movement is unusually grave but texturally speaking never becomes dense. The Second Sonata of 1949 is again compact and in three movements. Its opening movement reprises the dappled lyricism to be heard in the Canzonetta and the finale once more offers fresh clean-limbed writing. The final work is the entertaining, rather neo-classical Suite for Piano of 1946, in five movements
Rowley’s furrow was tilled somewhere between Ireland and Poulenc, English Pastoralism and Debussian impressionism. There was no place here for Rachmaninovian late-Romantic flourish or for Prokofiev’s brittleness. Unpretentious but never simple, Rowley made a small yet significant addition to British piano music of his time. John Lenehan’s technical and stylistic acuity in this barely-explored repertoire is laudable and he ensures that all these stylistic influences are held in just balance, enhancing still further the delights of this finely recorded and documented disc.
Jonathan Woolf
