In the second half of the 1830s, Felix Mendelssohn found himself stretched by his many musical responsibilities. He took his groundbreaking 1836 oratorio St. Paul on tour, effectively reviving the presentation of large-scale narrative works that married the sacred and secular. He performed at festivals throughout Germany and served as the director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. He also curated a series of “historical concerts” focused on music of the past by the likes of J. S. Bach and Beethoven, a novel programming strategy for that era. In October 1837, his brother Paul, a banker and skilled amateur cellist, complained of being anxious in his free time, and Felix wrote back expressing ambivalence about success and always being busy: “The more I find what are termed encouragement and recognition in my vocation, the more restless and unsettled does it become in my hands, and I cannot deny that I often long for that rest of which you complain … It seems, however, that this is not to be, and I should be ungrateful were I dissatisfied with my life as it is.”
In that same letter to his brother, Felix made a promise to Paul, perhaps hoping to give him something to look forward to in his restlessness: “I also intend soon to compose a sonata for cello and piano for you—by my beard, I will!” Back in 1829, Felix had written Paul some variations for cello and piano, but the three-movement Sonata in B-flat Major he completed in 1838 represented an altogether more ambitious proposition. Like the variations, this new piece was much indebted to the sonatas and short works written by Beethoven for these instruments. But Mendelssohn combined the sense of strict structure and rhythm we find in Beethoven’s music with an intuition for the cello’s singing capacities. The result was heartwarming, witty, and uplifting—surely a boon to Paul’s spirits.
The Cello Sonata in B-flat Major starts with a long line played in octaves between the cello and both hands of the keyboard. It is almost austere in its purity, more like a reservoir of intervals than a true melody. At the end of the string of notes, the piano plays a little rhythmic hook, a snappy, dotted figure. From this playful hint, Mendelssohn builds the ebullient first movement of his sonata. The Andante is a graceful, minor-key dance based on that same dotted figure. For the finale, Mendelssohn returns to the austere shape from the opening of the piece, but he harmonizes it and gives it a new rhythmic character so that it becomes a sweet, nostalgic ditty. We hear this melody again and again over the course of the movement, as if the entire work has served to prepare the listener for this tune, before the music subsides in quiet cascades in the piano.
In 1905, Gabriel Fauré assumed the position of director of the Paris Conservatoire. The post gave him widespread exposure and brought some fame to his music, but also left him somewhat overloaded. After World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, he was less able to travel and he found that he had more time to devote to writing new pieces. Fauré claimed to be resistant to many of the premonitions of modernism found in the music of fellow French composers like Debussy and Ravel. Indeed, much of what he wrote up until his death in 1924 was in a touching, though slightly distant, late-Romantic style: His works tend to display long, satisfying melodies; colorful, chromatic harmonies; and relatively clear, Classical forms. But some of his pieces from the 1910s involve the changeable characters, rhythmic instability, and melodic fragmentation that we have come to associate with music of the early 20th century.
Fauré started his First Cello Sonata in May 1917 and completed it over the summer while on a retreat to southeastern France with his partner Marguerite Hasselmans. He dedicated the piece to her brother Louis Hasselmans—a conductor, cellist, and good friend of the composer—though the work was first performed at the concert series of the Société Nationale de Musique by Gérard Hekking and Alfred Cortot. He had written several shorter works for the cello earlier in his career, including the famous Élégie, which started its life in 1880 as the slow movement of a never-finished multi-movement composition and has become a milestone piece for advanced cello students. The D-Minor Cello Sonata is of a very different nature: flighty, with rough edges and unpredictable movement forms. It captures some of the horror and uncertainty of its year of composition, as well as the modernist tendencies that crept into Fauré’s music toward the end of his career.
For the opening theme of his First Cello Sonata, Fauré reached back to a symphony he attempted to write in the 1880s and then discarded. In its original form, the melody is a swashbuckling orchestral statement with accents on every note, but in this late sonata, the tune is placed over ambiguous rhythms and given a tense, pointillistic quality. The music remains unsettled in terms of pulse and harmony until the very end of the movement, when, in a striking coda, the cello repeats a fluttering bass figure, which the piano alternately casts in diabolical and angelic shades. In the second movement, the cello plays a continuous line that hardly ever resolves, while Fauré toys with a seemingly infinite variety of piano accompaniment rhythms and textures. The composer apparently struggled to come up with an ending to the piece. He decided on an easy-going Allegro commodo in D major, with a plaintive melody whose rhythmic articulations almost sound like speech.
British violinist and composer Natalie Klouda was born in Suffolk and received her early training at the Yehudi Menuhin School, where she was greatly influenced by Menuhin. A project to write compositions for his 80th birthday engaged her passion for both chamber music performance and composition.
Recent premieres of her works have included her Piano Quintet, dedicated to violinist Alma Rosé and commissioned by the Brundibár Arts Festival 2022; and Piano Trio No. 2, commissioned by the Investec International Music Festival 2022 and premiered by the Sitkovetsky Piano Trio in May 2022 (which The Strad magazine listed as a Premiere of the Month).
Klouda’s Piano Trio No. 1, “Fantasy Triptych,” was commissioned and recorded by the Monte Piano Trio and was described by BBC Music Magazine as “a work with a future, no doubt.” It was also performed by the Kungsbacka Piano Trio at Kings Place for BBC Radio 3 in 2019.
During lockdown, Klouda was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to write Nightscapes 2020, a solo piano work that Isata Kanneh-Mason premiered at the Wigmore Hall and was broadcast as part of the celebrations for International Women’s Day in 2021.
Alongside her work as a composer, Klouda is co-director and founder of the Highgate International Chamber Music Festival and was a founding member of the award-winning Finzi Quartet.
This work has two contrasting movements, and the name and inspiration behind it pay homage to Isata and Sheku’s Antiguan and Welsh heritage.
In preparing to write this work, I explored the folklore, myths, and legends of Eryri/Snowdonia (the Mabinogion) as well as Antiguan and Caribbean folklore. I was struck by the powerful oral storytelling traditions of both places and how human experience has been passed down and deeply enhanced the audience’s connection to the landscapes and to peoples of long ago.
Tor Mordôn literally means “sea mount of light.” The name is derived from Brythonic languages and connects both Eryri and Antigua. The name combines three elements: the sense of enlightenment and inspiration that can be felt in the presence of the highest peaks, and the sea/oceans for linking continents and serving as the birthplace for those very peaks rising out of it. I chose the ancient Brythonic languages to highlight the vast swathes of time that can disappear through storytelling and the wonder that people can enjoy those same landscapes and stories millennia apart.
The first movement has a contemplative start and explores my journey in discovering various mythical characters as well as the human connection to experiencing the vastness in time and presence of mountains.
The second movement draws on the eccentric elements of the folktales as well as the more sinister drama and power of dramatic landscapes, which takes center stage right from the start.
This work is dedicated to Isata and Sheku’s grandfather, Arnold Mason. He himself played the violin growing up in Antigua and it was with interest and a quiet dedication that he listened to Isata and Sheku’s rehearsals and practice at their home in Nottingham during his visits.
—Natalie Klouda
Francis Poulenc was one of Les Six, a band of 20th-century Parisian composers who were greatly inspired by the ironic music of Erik Satie and the work of surrealist Jean Cocteau. Their pieces drew on everything from the popular songs that could be heard in music halls to modernist trends in rhythm and harmony to modal church music. In the 1930s, Poulenc became a devout Catholic after experiencing the sudden death of a good friend. Though his compositions continued to include a sense of fun and silliness, they also started to exhibit a serious, spiritual edge. During the Nazi occupation of France, he remained in Paris. Many of the pieces he wrote at the time looked like escapist fare on the surface—for example, Les animaux modèles, a ballet about animals—but contained subtle messages of resistance that could be detected by his French audience. By the end of the war, many saw his music as a patriotic lifeline, as one of his publishers expressed in 1944: “You play in the darkness that surrounds us, as someone sings in order not to be afraid.”
Poulenc admitted that he felt less emotionally connected to the sound of the violin and cello than he did to winds, piano, and voice. It took him several attempts and a literary inspiration (in the form of a few lines by Federico García Lorca) to get him to complete a Violin Sonata in 1943, and though it contains some brilliant ideas, it betrays his professed lack of confidence. There is far less trepidation in his Cello Sonata. He started sketching it in 1940 while staying with his cousins in Brive in Southern France, worked on it during the war years, and finally completed it in 1948 with a bit of help from cellist Pierre Fournier. He dedicated the piece to Fournier, and the two played it together many times on tour in the late 1940s and ’50s.
Fournier’s formidable technique allowed Poulenc to dabble in some windy cello writing. The first, third, and final movements are full of breathy trills and leap-filled melodies we could imagine being played by a clarinet. In the Ballabile (a lively ballet number, the name of which literally means “danceable,” though in this case it wouldn’t be simple), Poulenc throws in running ribbons of plucked notes. These elements make the sonata one of the most difficult in the standard repertoire; yet despite its challenges, it has the potential to sound quite natural and carefree. The sublime Cavatine shows what Poulenc does in his best pieces for any instrument. It’s a moment of perfect, somber stillness, far away from the humor and the circus-like antics of his faster movements and sections. Such departures sound as though a dilettantish dandy, during an evening of good food and too much wine, has paused to recall the sad things that have happened in his life and to mutter a short prayer.
—Nicky Swett
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