Bridge that gap

[Serial_Apologist]

Wandering through utube searching for a link for Frank Bridge's 1932 Violin Sonata to send to a friend, I had the extraordinarily good fortune to come across this one - a performance of another of my favourite Bridge works (indeed a favourite among all chamber music), the Piano Trio No 2 of 1929, in a 1963 performance pairing the composer's most famous pupil on the piano with Yehudi Menuhin and cellist Maurice Gendron. It's a pity that for so historic a recording the sound quality is a bit scratchy, but for me the music makes up for it, and I'd like to share the both:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCB1Vo4AwiY

The Violin Sonata is in the same chromatically advanced idiom with which Bridge was in his unique way at the time propelling English music into line with certain strains of Continental modernism. There are are echoes of Berg, Bartok and Szymanowsky as well as the earlier Ravel and Faure influences Bridge shared with his more conservative contemporaries, especially Ireland, and the closing returns to more diatonic, though still chromatically inflected harmonies, that relieve the pensive, even tragic utterances in both works, offer some of the most ecstatically sun-filled feelings of release that I know of in music. What more can one want?

The below is a wonderful rendering of the Sonata, and the write-up really suns up what Bridge was about well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ZjcLmhmwk

I love most English music of the pre-WW2 era, but in my estimation Frank Bridge is right up there with RVW and Gustav Holst.

[EdgeleyRob]

Wandering through utube searching for a link for Frank Bridge's 1932 Violin Sonata to send to a friend, I had the extraordinarily good fortune to come across this one - a performance of another of my favourite Bridge works (indeed a favourite among all chamber music), the Piano Trio No 2 of 1929, in a 1963 performance pairing the composer's most famous pupil on the piano with Yehudi Menuhin and cellist Maurice Gendron. It's a pity that for so historic a recording the sound quality is a bit scratchy, but for me the music makes up for it, and I'd like to share the both:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCB1Vo4AwiY

The Violin Sonata is in the same chromatically advanced idiom with which Bridge was in his unique way at the time propelling English music into line with certain strains of Continental modernism. There are are echoes of Berg, Bartok and Szymanowsky as well as the earlier Ravel and Faure influences Bridge shared with his more conservative contemporaries, especially Ireland, and the closing returns to more diatonic, though still chromatically inflected harmonies, that relieve the pensive, even tragic utterances in both works, offer some of the most ecstatically sun-filled feelings of release that I know of in music. What more can one want?

The below is a wonderful rendering of the Sonata, and the write-up really suns up what Bridge was about well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ZjcLmhmwk

I love most English music of the pre-WW2 era, but in my estimation Frank Bridge is right up there with RVW and Gustav Holst.

Many thanks for those links S_A,and a great post.
I don't know the terminology for the writing in those 1930s chamber pieces,I know you're a fan of the 4th Quartet,astonishing music.
One of the greatest English composers,maybe the tiniest of tads just behind RVW

[Serial_Apologist]

Many thanks for those links S_A,and a great post.
I don't know the terminology for the writing in those 1930s chamber pieces,I know you're a fan of the 4th Quartet,astonishing music.
One of the greatest English composers,maybe the tiniest of tads just behind RVW

Thanks ER.

Yes it was the fourth quartet I was initially after, really, as I think it was one of Bridge's most substantial works, and in all but the joyous finale, arguably the closest his harmonic language came to that of the free atonal Schoenberg. I have to agree that it might be exaggerating to place Bridge in similar accolade terms to those of Vaughan Williams; notwithstanding his natural ease with organic sonata-type developmental structures, rather as with Medtner, he might not have succeeded in evolving a comparably robust symphonic idiom: the movement for strings composed as part of a projected symphony right at the end of his life being more of the nature of an Elegy-type single movement work. One might of course feel one could claim the same for Holst's early slow movement Elegy for William Morris, except that the lattter was a work from early in Holst's career and stylistically uncharacteristic of the composer's mature manner.

[EdgeleyRob]

Thanks ER.

Yes it was the fourth quartet I was initially after, really, as I think it was one of Bridge's most substantial works, and in all but the joyous finale, arguably the closest his harmonic language came to that of the free atonal Schoenberg. I have to agree that it might be exaggerating to place Bridge in similar accolade terms to those of Vaughan Williams; notwithstanding his natural ease with organic sonata-type developmental structures, rather as with Medtner, he might not have succeeded in evolving a comparably robust symphonic idiom: the movement for strings composed as part of a projected symphony right at the end of his life being more of the nature of an Elegy-type single movement work. One might of course feel one could claim the same for Holst's early slow movement Elegy for William Morris, except that the lattter was a work from early in Holst's career and stylistically uncharacteristic of the composer's mature manner.

Brilliant.

The finale of No 4 gets me every time,shivers and butterflies.
I'm not sure why but I find the 'English' sounding bits in the last movement (and in the minuet) unnerving somehow (in a good way),coming after that astonishing 1st movement
Not sure if that makes sense,but it's what I mean,I think !

[Roehre]

...
One of the greatest English composers,maybe the tiniest of tads just behind RVW

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm not sure why but I find the 'English' sounding bits in the last movement (and in the minuet) unnerving somehow (in a good way),coming after that astonishing 1st movement
Not sure if that makes sense,but it's what I mean,I think !

I remember someone once wrote that in listening to Schoenberg's music in chronological order from, say, the 1905 string quartet to the Five Orchestral Pieces, crossing the tonal-atonal threshold may at first take a bit of getting used to, but that once one has acclimatised oneself to that new harmonic cosmos, it is the occasional harmonic resolution that pops up which then comes to sound out of place. I always feel it's a personal achievement to have been able to make that leap, and actually feel quite sorry for those unable to do so, thinking they are missing out on another of music's possibilities. I would imagine that this is a general principle in getting to appreciate such music, and why many today (including quite a few contemporary composers) find Berg's music the easiest of the Second Vienese trinity to take, with its rounded thirds seeming only just over the border* of some tonal/atonal divide, like Alice reflected through her looking glass.

[Roehre]

I remember someone once wrote that in listening to Schoenberg's music in chronological order from, say, the 1905 string quartet to the Five Orchestral Pieces, crossing the tonal-atonal threshold may at first take a bit of getting used to, but that once one has acclimatised oneself to that new harmonic cosmos, it is the occasional harmonic resolution that pops up which then comes to sound out of place. I always feel it's a personal achievement to have been able to make that leap, and actually feel quite sorry for those unable to do so, thinking they are missing out on another of music's possibilities. I would imagine that this is a general principle in getting to appreciate such music, and why many today (including quite a few contemporary composers) find Berg's music the easiest of the Second Vienese trinity to take, with its rounded thirds seeming only just over the border* of some tonal/atonal divide, like Alice reflected through her looking glass.

The summer of 1976 was for me exactly as described.
Starting with Mahler IX and Adagio X in 1974, Webern's Symphony, Ives' 4th Symphony and Schönberg's Kammersymphonie did for me the job of crossing that line in that summer.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The summer of 1976 was for me exactly as described.
Starting with Mahler IX and Adagio X in 1974, Webern's Symphony, Ives' 4th Symphony and Schönberg's Kammersymphonie did for me the job of crossing that line in that summer.

A couple of months earlier for me - with the broadcast one Saturday morning of a Robert Meyer Children's Concert including Webern's Op6 Orchestral pieces conducted by Bernard Keefe. An unforgettable life-improver for me.