Duncan Honeybourne - British Piano Sonatas by Gordon Jacob, Arnold Cooke and Nicholas Marshall (2024) Hi-Res

This recital, recorded with the generous support of the Ida Carroll Trust, brings together three gritty and dramatic piano sonatas by British composers. Pianist Duncan Honeybourne, well known for his advocacy of 20th and 21st century British piano music, writes:

"It seems to me that these three sonatas stand well together. All are muscular, lyrical, assertive and impassioned, each with a real sense of organic growth and structural cohesion. All three composers had fully mastered their craft by the time they penned these mature and substantial works. It shows in the sureness of technique and the effectiveness and economy of the writing."

Honeybourne describes the 1956 Piano Sonata of Gordon Jacob as "a work of enticing lyricism and infectious joie de vivre. I find the astringent chromaticism invigorating and the modal-inflected harmonies of the reflective episodes breathe a very English brand of warm-hearted introspection."

Arnold Cooke's chamber music is currently enjoying a revival, and his Piano Sonata no.2, composed in 1965, is incisive, impassioned and lyrical. Premiered at the 1966 Cheltenham Festival by Duncan Honeybourne's former teacher Rosemarie Wright, Honeybourne prepared it from Cooke's handwritten manuscript, which he inherited after Wright's death in 2020. He comments particularly on "the threnodic slow movement...warm-breathed and superbly lyrical, generating a powerful climax which is built up chromatically and enriched with an almost orchestral use of the piano's resources." The driving Finale ends with "a brilliant, vigorous, scurrying coda and bare, pounding octaves."

The Piano Sonata by Nicholas Marshall was premiered in 2022 by Duncan Honeybourne, who describes it as "by any reckoning the most severe and uncompromising of the three sonatas. Yet it is shot through with moments of lyricism, even tenderness, and eruptions of almost ecstatic passion." Marshall read music at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and studied composition with Anthony Milner at the Royal College of Music, and with Sir Lennox Berkeley. His output includes incidental music for radio plays in addition to orchestral, choral and chamber music, and two CDs devoted entirely to his music have been commercially released.

Nicholas Marshall's late aunt, the violinist Rosemary Rapaport, was a lifelong friend of Arnold Cooke and it was for her that Cooke composed his Violin Sonata no.2. Thus, a delightful personal coincidence cements the juxtaposition of the two composers' works on this release.