JOHN IRELAND

Volume 2 contains one of Ireland’s undeniable masterpieces – Sarnia: An island Sequence which is Ireland’s evocation of, and tribute to Guernsey, an island where he had achieved possibly the greatest happiness and contentedness in his life. The composer took up residence in Guernsey late in 1930 and his affection for the Channel Islands never waned. He began composing Sarnia (the Roman name for Guernsey) in 1919. The first piece, Le Catioroc, evokes a prehistoric stone burial chamber. The brooding desolation, gradually gives way to a dancelike middle section evoking the Witches’ Sabbath, the music full of dotted rhythms and swaying figures. The mood of the second piece, In a May Morning  is serene and sunny, Ireland at his most contented. The third piece, Song of the Springtides, takes the listener straight into a springtide seascape in which flowing arpeggios lead to a middle section, calmato in E flat, in which the tempo slows, and the emotion is one of oceanic calm.

Forty years earlier, while still a student of Stanford at the Royal College of Music in London, Ireland wrote Sea idyll. As with many of his student works, however, he was not satisfied with it and withdrew it from circulation. Alan Rowlands recorded the three pieces for LP on Lyrita in 1970 and Eric Parkin later recorded the first movement for Chandos. This is the first complete recording on CD.

This CD also includes A Downland Suite in four movements. The Elegy and Menuet are among Ireland’s most popular compositions, the Elegy having  an Elgarian flavour in its melodic structure and the charming Menuet having something of a bucolic feel.  The Suite started life as the test piece, in 1932, for the National Brass Band Championship of Great Britain and this is the first recording of the arrangement for piano.

The Greenways Suite dates from 1938 and comprises three pieces of differing character: The Cherry Tree, Cypress and The Palm and May. It was written for the pianist Harriet Cohen. The Darkened Valley (1922) is prefaced by a quotation from William Blake: (“Walking along the darkened valley With silent Melancholy”)  The two pieces For Remembrance and Amberley Wild Brooks were written in 1921. The first is a sombre elegy. Amberley Wild Brooks is an area of wet grassland, streams and ditches just north of Amberley, a picturesque village overlooked by the South Downs in West Sussex. This is one of Ireland’s most inspired piano pieces, an exuberant musical watercolour in the same vein as The Island Spell. Villanella was written in the early 1900s as an organ work. Although Ireland had become a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists by the age of 16, and made his living as an organist and choir master for 25 years, he wrote surprisingly little organ music. This charming salon piece has the feel of an Edwardian miniature and it here receives its first recording in the arrangement for piano, which Ireland made in 1912.

The American composer, pianist and teacher Robert Helps (1928-2001) taught music and composition at the University of South Florida at Tampa. He loved and admired English music of the first half of the 20th century, in particular Ireland and Bax, and in 1995 he produced what he called a ‘free and strict’ transcription for piano of Ireland’s setting of ‘Love is a sickness full of woes’ by Samuel Daniel (c. 1562-1619). He wrote it for two music students who were in the throes of an unhappy love affair. We include it here as a beautiful and expressive tribute from one composer to another.olume 2 contains one of Ireland’s undeniable masterpieces – Sarnia: An island Sequence which is Ireland’s evocation of, and tribute to Guernsey, an island where he had achieved possibly the greatest happiness and contentedness in his life. The composer took up residence in Guernsey late in 1930 and his affection for the Channel Islands never waned. He began composing Sarnia (the Roman name for Guernsey) in 1919. The first piece, Le Catioroc, evokes a prehistoric stone burial chamber. The brooding desolation, gradually gives way to a dancelike middle section evoking the Witches’ Sabbath, the music full of dotted rhythms and swaying figures. The mood of the second piece, In a May Morning  is serene and sunny, Ireland at his most contented. The third piece, Song of the Springtides, takes the listener straight into a springtide seascape in which flowing arpeggios lead to a middle section, calmato in E flat, in which the tempo slows, and the emotion is one of oceanic calm.