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Rebecca Clarke: Music for Cello & Piano
Review | "What [Rebecca Clarke] did, she did extremely well, resulting in tautly structured music full of ardour and complexity." Gramophone, September 2016 “The disc is essential for anyone with an interest in British music.” Clarke was Stanford’s first female pupil and an orchestral musician on a par with the men in what seemed to be a man’s world … This CD, so wonderfully and emotionally played by Raphael Wallfisch and John York also includes the Rhapsody for cello and piano. I agree with John York, in his excellent notes, who says that this is probably Clarke’s masterpiece. Wallfisch and York, as you might expect, make a great partnership and they know the music inside out especially the Sonata. As a consequence of York’s involvement with Clarke’s music he has composed Dialogue with Rebecca Clarke, which although it is very much its own piece does quote some fragments of her work. Stylistically it seems to me the sort of work Clarke herself might well have enjoyed using some of whole tone harmonies and repetitive rhythms one finds in her Cello Rhapsody and in the much better known Piano Trio. Gary Higginson, MusicWeb-International.com Clarke carried out the cello version with the help of her colleague and friend, cellist May Mukle, something of a trailblazing figure among British cellists of her day, though she left behind pitifully little in the way of recordings. Wallfisch and York play this nicely up to tempo and it sounds idiomatic in this version, forming an interesting addition to the cello sonata literature … I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still is a musical love letter from Clarke to her Scottish husband, James Friskin. Like the Sonata, it’s rare to hear it for the cello. The Passacaglia on an Old English Tune was written a few years earlier and has a passionate intensity about it at a fast tempo. The Epilogue is an early work, dating from around 1921 and is finely judged here in respect of tempo and bow weight. Finally, there is another surprise in the shape of John York’s own Dialogue with Rebecca Clarke, written in 2007, an ingenious and exciting work that draws on themes from the Viola/Cello Sonata. It was written for the Moldovan violist Mikhail Mouller. York, incidentally, is creating a performing edition of the Rhapsody in collaboration with the Rebecca Clarke Estate. |
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