York Bowen’s music has slowly gained attention on disc, principally through a superb 1995 recital by Stephen Hough for Hyperion and several releases on Chandos featuring Joop Celis. A hard-to-find release on the 3D Classics label with Marie-Catherine Girod is worth seeking out, along with a Lyrita reissue with the composer at the piano, late in his long life but still strong and frisky.
To follow up Danny Driver’s highly acclaimed Hyperion recording of Bowen’s Third and Fourth piano concertos, the label has recruited the young pianist to set down the composer’s six piano sonatas, all substantial works whose richly textured, harmonically lush, and utterly idiomatic keyboard writing evokes Rachmaninov and Medtner by way of Delius, Bax, Ireland, and Scott, with a few Impressionist finishing touches and, arguably, a little Gershwin.
The playing is terrific. More than in Joop Celis’ pioneering recording of the Sixth sonata, Driver’s energy and intelligent sense of direction give palpable shape and dramatic contrast to the Finale alla toccata. If he doesn’t quite dispatch the Fifth sonata first movement’s rapid chords with Stephen Hough’s impeccable accentuation and poise, his fluent lyricism fits the central movement’s Andante semplice directive like a glove. However, the first three, previously unrecorded sonatas allow us to trace Bowen’s stylistic development.
As the booklet notes astutely point out, the First sonata’s opening movement bears traces of Grieg’s own early Op. 7 sonata and a few patterns that seem awkwardly modeled after Chopin’s B minor sonata first movement, while the second movement’s short-breathed main thematic statement wouldn’t be out of place within MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches. Bowen is still finding his way in the Second sonata, although he’s already leaning toward the fuller textures characterizing the mature, more harmonically complex style that begins to assert itself in the Third sonata.
No doubt that Driver’s rock-solid technique and natural sympathy for Bowen’s coruscating idiom is what the good folks at Hyperion had in mind for this fascinating and valuable release. While listeners new to Bowen first should investigate Hough’s disc, with its balanced mix of larger and smaller works, this release surely will attract collectors who like to travel Romantic piano music’s unjustly obscure byways.
