Sir Donald Tovey (1875-1940)
Sonata for two Cellos in G major (1912)
Sonata for solo Cello in D major, Op.30 (c.1912)
Sonata for Cello and Piano in F major, Op.4 (1900)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Prelude in C minor, BWV999 arr. Donald Tovey (1887)
Alice Neary (cello)
Kate Gould (2nd cello)
Gretel Dowdeswell (piano)
rec. 2008, Potton Hall, Suffolk
TOCCATA CLASSUCS TOCC0497 [88]
This is the third volume in Toccata’s series devoted to Tovey’s chamber music and it also tips the scales at 88 minutes, which is a record timing in my own listening experience. It’s not inappropriate given that Tovey generally sculpted on a broader canvas than many other composers, and the three major works here are themselves certainly not guilty of pithiness.
The Sonata for two cellos was composed in 1912 during an ultimately fractious holiday Tovey spent with Casals south of Barcelona. The cause of the quarrel seems to be in some doubt, but it clearly had something to do with Suggia, Casals’ erstwhile pupil and now girlfriend – though she styled herself ‘Casals-Suggia’ they were not married. The sonata was a gift from Tovey to the tempestuous cellists and it’s finely crafted to explore the entwining, lustrous nature of the two instruments, and that demands control of its sense of motion both forward and delayed. The second movement is a set of variations on a Catalan folk song, The Sailor, and its refined sense of longing encodes a quietly haunting intimacy. No wonder, after his break-up with Suggia, Casals was never to play it. Tovey, as ever the great technician, then unleashes a fugal finale which contains a series of vertiginous dynamics. Alice Neary and Kate Gould play with eloquence and control of the music’s shifting patterns. This isn’t a world première recording as Marcy Rosen and Frances Rowell were there first in a Bridge CD released in 2008.
The Sonata for solo cello was also composed around 1912 and unlike the Sonata for two cellos evokes some Bachian elements as well as some late-Romanticism. Its buoyancy ensures that its length, 34 minutes, doesn’t seem excessive though there is a long 16-minute Passacaglia finale, before which we find a strangely interior and expressive Allegretto that flows wave-like in a fragmentary fashion. As for the Passacaglia it’s a set of variations that encodes a quotation from Bach’s Chaconne as well as more fiery and sweepingly virtuosic passages. It sounds unremittingly taxing, almost Regerian in some elements of its complexity, and Neary plays it with admirable stamina, tonal richness and technical finesse.
The Cello Sonata is an earlier work, dating from 1900 when Tovey was 25 years old. Here we find Tovey the Brahmsian in full plumage with an intensity of declamation underpinned by a stirring piano part, strongly played by Gretel Dowdeswell. Conscious of structure as he is, everything here is finely proportioned, ending in a rollicking finale in which sweet lyricism contrasts with a rougher hewn dance. The first ever recording of Tovey’s 1887 arrangement of Bach’s Prelude in C minor is also here. He was 12 or 13 when he wrote it, and fundamentally precocious.
With an expertly judged recording and customarily fine, and extensive, booklet notes this disc continues the Tovey chamber music series in some style.
Jonathan Woolf
