Simon Callaghan on Sterndale Bennett

The British pianist Simon Callaghan continues his adventurous exploration of neglected repertoire on his latest album of piano concertos by William Sterndale Bennett - a recent Presto Recording of the Week. I enjoyed a long chat with Simon about the background behind this album, the wider considerations behind his focus on less well-known repertoire, the honour of being part of a historic series of recordings and the joy of chamber music.  

Simon, what was it that first brought you to Sterndale Bennett? 

I've been thinking about this a lot ahead of talking to you, and I realised that it's almost twenty years since I made his acquaintance: the first recording I ever made was Sterndale Bennett's F minor sonata. I don't know whether I just had a kind of youthful stupidity in even attempting that piece, which is extremely difficult - and the recording circumstances were far from ideal - but that was my first introduction to his music. I've played that piece quite a lot (sometimes even from memory, which itself is a challenge), and I think it's a masterpiece.

I've also played some of his chamber music, including the sextet and the cello sonata, which I was going to say is lamentably rarely played...but I just think we should be hearing it all much more often, especially the concertos. It's become a bit of a mission. 

It takes quite some detective work doesn't it, working on music like this?

I've had a few conversations with people recently about this, and it's always interesting when someone says that they've enjoyed a recording - that's really lovely, but they invariably have no idea about all that's taken place to actually get to that point. I suppose this project was an extreme version of that, in that the manuscript scores of Piano Concerto No. 6 and the two-piano concerto have been talked about for so many years; whenever I meet British music enthusiasts they've always said there's no idea where the score could be, but it'd be such a treat to finally hear the sixth concerto. 

I don't quite know the intricacies of the background, but for some reason they weren't made available for a very long time; luckily, a couple of years ago, they ended up at the Bodleian Library. I should say that Barry Sterndale Bennett has been wonderful, and without him this wouldn't have happened. He enabled us to get hold of the source material, which was very exciting because if you look on Unsung Composers or similar online forums these sources are talked about endlessly, so I feel honoured that I was able to make this recording. 

And of course I'm thankful that Martin Yates was interested enough and honoured us all with his collaboration on this project, because he's a wizard. If you could see the manuscript of the sixth concerto, there are many passages where either there just is one line in the flute and the rest of the orchestration isn't there, or there's one hand of a kind of skeleton piano part, and it's certainly not something that I had ever dreamed of being able to do. Somehow Martin turned this into a really great piece, but also a very authentic piece which has all of Bennett's many trademarks; what's also fascinating is there's seemingly none of Martin in the completion at all. It all feels so authentic, and even the difficulties that we experience in playing Bennett are also there!

How big a challenge is it to be able to programme some of this music in concert, especially with something like the concertos? Would the ideal be to get out there with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, who are already familiar with the music? 

Absolutely, and I'm gently pushing in that direction. I've spoken to a few orchestra managers about this, one of whom who shall remain nameless...I told them about this recording and said 'They're all really good pieces on this album, the fourth concerto is a masterpiece. The sixth concerto definitely needs to be heard, if for nothing else, for its kind of novelty value, but it is also a great piece'.

I presented a contextual programme with a Mendelssohn piece to start and perhaps a Schumann symphony, something to kind of lessen the blow of a name that people may not have heard; the response I got was actually laughter, which I found kind of rude and also a little narrow-minded. The idea was brushed to one side, so I said Why not just listen to the pieces and maybe rethink?'. I feel like a bit of a nuisance, but I keep trying to push this.

I think it's good to feel like a nuisance sometimes when it comes to programming. The question interests me as to how this situation of obscurity has happened, because it's clear that Mendelssohn had huge admiration for Sterndale Bennett. I've wondered whether it's part of a culture of bowing down to the Austro-German and European tradition and undermining our own a little. 

Whenever you read about Bennett, it's a common opinion that because he went on to do so much teaching that either his work deteriorated - or perhaps his time to compose, to practice and all those kind of things were inevitably brushed to one side because he took on so much responsibility. But apart from that, what you say about the Austro-German tradition is probably right in that if people were invited to the premiere of a lost piano concerto by Mendelssohn that had been in a family archive for years and had recently been recorded for the first time, it could probably sell out a concert hall...and yet with Bennett, it wouldn't be the same.

I was just reading the liner notes by Rosemary Furman, which I think are amazing, which start by quoting Schumann: "were there many artists like Sterndale Bennett, all fears for the future progress of our art would be silenced." I think that's a pretty good endorsement!

There's a number of people out there playing less well-known composers, and so you would think that concert promoters and orchestra managers would perhaps be listening more and taking notice. 

I'm sure it's a financial consideration as well. If we put the Beethoven Emperor into a Proms concert, for example, ticket sales will be good regardless of who's playing it. To put Sterndale Bennett No. 4 in, we'd have to get Yuja Wang to play it. It needs some really stellar people to stand behind these pieces, and I often think of somebody like Martha Argerich. If she played a Sterndale Bennett concerto that would probably put it back into the repertoire properly, which would be such a valuable thing for someone in that position to do - even if they only played it once.

How useful do you think it would be for some of this music to be brought into pedagogy alongside the established repertoire? 

It's probably useful in pedagogy, but also wherever you're at in your career. I think there are a couple of selling points, and one of them is that there's no precedent. With something like Bennett's PIano Concerto No. 6, it's not possible to go and listen to how somebody else plays it because it doesn't exist! With some of the more obscure things like Roger Sacheverell Coke, Joseph Holbrooke or William Bush, if nobody has recorded them it really kind of gets the creative juices flowing. I'm not saying that people don't think when they play Chopin or Beethoven, but the shadows of Argerich, Michelangeli et al are always there at the back of our minds. We can't get away from that, try as we might.

Honestly, that is why I've wanted to record so much in this area. I'm playing Chopin's PIano Concerto No. 1 next year, and someone was asking if I had plans to record it. It would be a fantastic experience, but with so many extraordinary recordings by people like Argerich and Pollini out there I would feel a bit odd saying 'Well here's mine!'. I love that independence, that lack of precedent, the inspiration of having to do all of that background research and preparation for lesser-known works. I'd love to record Chopin, but I'm not sure I would necessarily go back to the manuscript or read more about Chopin's life in preparation, because we all know it - whereas with Bennett or Bowen or Reinecke, I really had to do that work at the coal-face because I didn't know anything.

I didn't play so much lesser-known music as a student, but I think it can help in terms of having confidence in your own performance. I teach at the Royal Northern College of Music and my students are all interested in it, but some of them fall into the trap of thinking they've only got three months until the final recital, so it's probably easier to just play the third Chopin ballade rather than learn some York Bowen preludes. But with the Bowen you wouldn't go onto the stage thinking 'Three other people have played this this year and that teacher on the panel has recorded it, and I'm not sure if I'll play it quite as they want...' I had a student play Arensky for the College Concerto Competition recently, and that was great because honestly I didn't know that piece either - and someone else played the Ireland piano concerto, which is a terrific piece.

Hyperion recently announced the first of two box sets, collecting together the Romantic Piano Concerto Series. It must feel incredible to have been involved in one of the biggest recording projects of all time, and to have recorded the final volume in the series.

It's really an honour, and it's thanks to [label director] Simon Perry, because he didn't know anything about the Sacheverell Coke concertos I was proposing, and I don't think he'd ever heard me play. I approached him with that project, and he just took a punt. I'm really pleased that it worked out, and then the same with the Rheinberger and Scholz and Reinecke and Sauer concertos.

I meet people all over the place who love that series. People may not have heard of me for any other reason, but they'll tell me how much they enjoyed a particular volume; it's such a wide-reaching and cherished set of recordings. I understand why it has to come to an end, but it's been so valuable: aside from making recordings of these pieces available it's also helped to expand the concert repertoire. Each time I was over in Switzerland recording the Reinecke concertos we performed one of the pieces as well, which was probably their first outing in I don't know how many years!

Looking forward at your concert schedule, it's predominantly chamber music.

I suppose it's because I don't like being lonely! But of course these composers that we've been talking about also wrote chamber music as well as solo piano repertoire and concertos, and it's nice to shine a light on that too. 

I'm very excited that I was asked to curate the chamber music series for the Leeds concert season in 2026/27. Each series has to have a theme, and so my interest in this neglected repertoire will run through it, alongside very mainstream pieces in order to keep everybody happy. We'll have big, wonderful Mendelssohn pieces, for example, but each concert must also have something in it by a British composer or a female composer, or something which has been neglected for whatever reason, like the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor nonet, which I really love. We're also doing some music for two pianos by Germaine Tailleferre and Madeleine Dring, and I think probably the Ethel Smyth cello sonata. 

It's so satisfying to find connections between the lesser known and the better known, and the hope is that the colleagues who come to join us will discover something they love and go on to play it elsewhere. It's all about building things gradually.