Mr Grew, may I recommend most strongly Tasmin Little's recording of the violin sonatas of Delius.. with the pianist Piers Lane. It is truly magnificent and includes the fantastic ( my favourite) posthumous sonata that I used in my clip.
It is readily available and I do hope you will buy and enjoy!!
Madame A
Madame A may be interested to know that our own version of Delius's
Sonatas 1 to 3 is an LP recording made by Ralph Holmes and Eric Fenby (here depicted) in 1972.
The piano used was Delius's own, bequeathed to Fenby. Fenby makes on the back of the record a number of interesting points, of which here a sample:
"Delius wrote, in all, four sonatas for violin and piano, the earliest in 1892 and the last in 1930. The sonata of 1892, a work in three separate movements, remained in MS being rejected as derivative and immature. Thus we are left with three sonatas numbered as on this record in order of composition and publication. No.1 was begun in 1905 and put aside (as was his habit) when the music did not come naturally. It was not until World War I, however, when major projects were abandoned, that he took up the sonata again. Like No.2 it plays without a break; there are traces of influences not yet absorbed, but there is a bigness and spaciousness of design not to be found in Nos.2 and 3.
"No works by Delius have been more maligned; they are treated as oddities unworthy of notice. They belong to a time when the term sonata still aroused certain expectations of dramatic interplay of themes. These expectations are not fulfilled in Delius's conception of sonata. Pedantry is much to blame in presenting sonata form as a blue-print which is sacrosanct. Haydn and Mozart would have scoffed at this notion! Delius, approaching and withdrawing as he pleased from the periphery of this enclosure of thought, is obviously not to every taste. Whereas classical composers have sometimes replaced development of themes by bringing in completely new subject matter in movements purporting to be sonata, Delius relies almost
entirely on a succession of episodes to give continuity. This, and the element of surprise in some of these lovely byways of of music make these sonatas, to my mind, unique. It has been said that 'it is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination.' Now there are innumerable sonatas with clear ideas, but how many are affecting to the imagination? This, I feel is where Delius excels. We may tire, perhaps, of his oneness of mood. But if we ourselves are in that mood, he never fails to project that mood in sounds so unmistakably his own that by his very genius he makes them our own. All these sonatas reveal his gift in sustaining lines of lyrical flow, more akin to prose than verse. His melodic direction is sure and firm and moves with that unconscious skill which comes when genius has found itself. There are passages of weak invention, but the cumulative effects of his paragraphs evoke a genuine musical experience of differing quality in each sonata. We hear, too, as in No.3 that he could write a good tune when he chose. The 3rd sonata is interesting in the key relationships of the movements. I remember thinking as he finished dictating the final bars of the first movement, 'Surely he has ended in the wrong key!' Not till we came to the close of the last movement did I sense the truth of his intuition, centering, diverging, then centering again on two adjacent notes — D and E! The juxtaposition of keys is less elusive in No.2 and radiates from a central C. There is even a hint of recapitulation in his harking back to the opening theme at the close of this single movement work. The slow sections, to me, are sheer magic; simple and telling in exquisite play with reiterated notes and the leap of a fourth! And they say that Delius was lacking in craftsmanship!
"Nevertheless, the lay-out and figuration of his piano parts can be exasperating to performers. I saw that his own, long, elegant fingers must have had an enormous stretch. This probably accounts for the particular problems to be faced in No.1. Tactful suggestions (prompted by the smallness of my own hand-stretch) induced him to shape more manageable arpeggios at awkward places in No.3. Delius was not a pianist — nor am I — but had been an accomplished violinist in his youth. Apart from some terrifying leaps from the depths to the highest reaches of the instrument, the writing for violin is deftly placed. Great players of the past — Sammons and Tertis — have told of their love of the purely musical qualities of these sonatas and how, on returning to them again and again, they have always found them fresh.
"It was typical of Delius that he felt it rather an insult to players to plaster his scores with dynamics or bowings; provided they played the notes he had written he preferred to leave such matters to them. There is no one way of playing his music, but I have often heard him condemn a performer as having no feeling for his phrasing. In this he must bear some blame himself for he gives little guidance to the player in making his sense of flow as clear and meaningful as he intended it. 'But, surely,' he would say, 'a really musical person
must feel it
my way!' Inflection is the secret of phrasing in Delius as Beecham discovered to our delight. Moving to the operative note in a phrase; a little lingering without breaking the continuity and the poetry at once begins to bloom.
"These three most singular sonatas would themselves, in my opinion, have made the reputation of a lesser composer. There is a peculiar power about them — for instance, the sweep of the opening of No.1 — which could only come from a mind that had already achieved excellence in the larger forms of composition."
He is somewhat dismissive of the early B major, but probably the real reason behind that is that it would not fit on the recording. We like his snide remark about "there is even a hint of recapitulation"! Also it seems his definition of the word "pianist" was not the rest of the world's - for was it not precisely he playing the piano so well on this recording?
