Gurney
Piano Sonatas Nos 1 and 3; Piano Sonata No. 2 – Adagio; Five Preludes; Autumn
George Rowley (piano)
Naxos 8.574479 74:48 mins
In his pioneering book of 1978, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney, Michael Hurd deservedly praised the songs of this tortured composer and poet, but didn’t mince words about the instrumental music. ‘The quantity is there,’ he wrote, ‘but quality is largely absent.’ Sonatas and quartets begin with ‘excellent ideas’, then ‘degenerate into note-spinning’. I was fully prepared to disagree, but the music and to some extent George Rowley’s performances just didn’t let me. It’s not a matter of the audible influences (Chopin, Scriabin, Schumann and others) weighing upon individual pieces, whether written early in Gurney’s composing life (the first sonata is from 1910) or in the peak years a decade later. But structural flaws persistently undermine enjoyment: good ideas get overworked, or stifled by too much padding, particularly unfortunate in the gloomy landscapes of the more individualistic third sonata. Most of the shorter pieces, as expected, are more convincing, with interesting Scriabin-esque wanderings in the Preludes of 1919, though even an earlier programmatic morsel like the misty and mellow Autumn begins strongly only to develop a wobble.
Music smacking of effort rather than sustained inspiration needs particularly sensitive handling to make it come alive. British pianist George Rowley is clearly sympathetic to the cause, though his rather plain approach to the notes doesn’t help those passages where repeated phrases or constant semiquavers can easily seem tricks to fill out a blank page rather than essential elements in the composer’s train of thought. Gurney’s songs, darkly intense, remain his best advertisement. Geoff Brown