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De Profundis Clamavi

Duncan Honeybourne (piano)

De Profundis Clamavi

De Profundis Clamavi

Duncan Honeybourne (piano)

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This release includes a digital booklet

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About

De Profundis Clamavi is a two-disc recording of English piano music, contrasting three dramatic sonatas with a vibrant selection of shorter pieces ranging from the sublimely poetic to the darkly rhapsodic.

Frank Bridge began writing his grandiose Piano Sonata exactly a century ago, in the wake of the First World War, and it is suffused with a mood of desolation and torment. Contemporary composer Richard Pantcheff's own sonata was completed in 2017 and evokes a similarly intense emotional landscape; hence the quote from Psalm 130 that gives the album its name ("Out of the deep have I called unto Thee, O Lord"). Also here making its first recorded appearance, the 1938 Sonata by Christopher Edmunds bubbles over with vivid pianistic colours, melting tenderness and an irresistible romantic warmth.

The three sonatas are complemented and contextualised by Parry's delicious Shulbrede Tunes - affectionate portraits of the composer's family and their Sussex home - plus the first recordings of two stunning romantic showpieces by a composer better known for his vocal writing, Cecil Armstrong Gibbs. Three unpublished - and previously unrecorded - gems by Edgar Bainton add further distinctiveness to the disc.

Many links of friendship and association underpin the selection of composers represented on the discs, and a special pedagogical thread connects the sonatas of Bridge and Pantcheff. The young Richard Pantcheff was mentored by Benjamin Britten, Bridge's most celebrated student, and Britten is represented by his captivating Night Piece, composed for the first Leeds International Piano Competition. Duncan Honeybourne studied the work with the competition's founder, Dame Fanny Waterman, who commissioned it in 1963 and died recently at the age of one hundred.

Honeybourne says: "It was a joy to devise this programme, featuring some masterpieces I've known for a long time and love dearly, alongside the stunning Pantcheff Sonata, which I premiered in 2019 in London at an English Music Festival concert. It is a special privilege to present the recorded premieres of some terrific pieces that have languished in manuscript for many decades, and I hope listeners will get as much pleasure from hearing these wonderful gems as I have from all the excavation and preparation. It's a great honour to bring them all together on this release."

Contents and tracklist

I. Allegro, fieramente e rubato
Track length7:53
II. Lento e mesto
Track length4:31
III. Allegro scherzoso (Poco rubato)
Track length4:53
No. 5, Wind oor die Branders
Track length4:16
No. 1, Shulbrede
Track length2:10
No. 2, Elizabeth
Track length2:04
No. 3, Dolly No. 1
Track length2:27
No. 4, Bogies and Sprites That Gambol by Nights
Track length2:50
No. 5, Matthew
Track length3:11
No. 6, Prior's Chamber by Firelight
Track length6:07
No. 7, Children's Pranks
Track length3:12
No. 8, Dolly No. 2
Track length3:47
No. 9, In the Garden with the Dew on the Grass
Track length2:24
No. 10, Father Playmate
Track length5:26
I. Lento ma non troppo - Andante ben moderato - Allegro energico
Track length16:04
II. Andante ben moderato
Track length9:43
III. Lento - Allegro non troppo
Track length9:57
I. Inquieto
Track length6:36
II. Elegia. Lento e tenebroso
Track length10:21
III. Alla vortice
Track length8:18
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