COMPOSERS: Bridge
LABELS: Somm
ALBUM TITLE: Benchmark Bridge
WORKS: Piano Sonata; The Hour Glass; Vignettes de Marseille; Three Skhes; Capriccio No. 1; Capriccio No. 2
PERFORMER: Mark Bebbington (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: SOMMCD 056
Just months after Naxos’s release
of Volume 1 of Ashley Wass’s
complete piano music of Frank
Bridge (reviewed in June), here is
Mark Bebbington’s from Somm.
Although his first volume has just
one work in common with Wass’s
– the 1919-20 suite The Hour
Glass – I get the strong impression
that Bebbington’s set will perhaps
be the one to have. Adept and
sympathetic Bridgean though Wass
is, Bebbington seems consistently
to probe deeper into the music’s
expressive core. Greater fluidity
of tempo, subtler pedalling and
phrasing, a wider range of colour
and dynamics all characterise
Bebbington’s approach, giving us a
darker but also more innately poetic
Bridge – more of a virtuoso, too:
Bebbington throws off the two early
Capriccios (1905) as if they were
Rachmaninov, and brings a fine
sense of Francophile flamboyance
to the rarely-heard Vignettes de
Marseille (1925).
The main work here is the grim
and haunted Sonata (1921-24),
Bridge’s painful and profound
response to the Great War. This is
an epic performance, making the
most of the work’s mingled violence
and crepuscular moods. Bebbington
seems more flexible and mercurial in
his approach than does Peter Jacobs
on Volume 3 of his complete Bridge piano music (Continuum), and he
is aided by a recording of superior
range and resonance. Kathryn Stott’s
version for Conifer is no longer
available, and as a result I would say
this is by a short head the benchmark
performance of this superb work.
Certainly a promising start to what
is likely to be an absorbing series.