Mark Bebbington - Bridge: Piano Music, Vol. 3 (2014)

Mark Bebbington’s ongoing survey of the complete piano music of Frank Bridge for SOMM continues to attract worldwide interest to works of exceptional quality and creative adventure. The cycle’s third volume, coinciding with the composer’s 70th anniversary, reveals the full inventive range of Bridge’s keyboard miniatures, from the elegant Berceuse of his student years at the Royal College of Music to the Scriabinesque Hidden Fires of 1926 and expressionistic Gargoyle of 1928. Bebbington’s programme also includes A Dedication, with its unsettling intimations of grief for all those slaughtered during the First World War, and the Three Improvisations for left hand, written for the young pianist and organist Douglas Fox, whose lower right arm was amputated in 1917 after he was wounded fighting in France.