Sir Donald Tovey (1875–1940), long hailed as one of the finest writers on music in English, saw himself primarily as a composer. His occasionally turbulent friendship with Pau Casals was the spur for a monumental concerto and one of his three cello sonatas: for solo cello, two cellos and cello with piano. The cello was the ideal instrument for Tovey’s Brahmsian musical language, with its long, singing lines unfolding in effortless counterpoint – though the huge passacaglia that ends the solo sonata also demands a virtuoso technique. The brief Bach arrangement recorded here for the first time arose when the twelve-year-old Tovey added a cello line to one of Bach’s best-known preludes, originally for lute.
The exploration of Sir Donald Tovey’s music on Toccata Classics continues apace with two highly contrasted works: the bright, Classically oriented Variations on a Theme by Gluck, Op. 28, for flute and string quartet written in 1913 and the Piano Quintet from thirteen years earlier – an expansive, Brahmsian work of symphonic scale: it is almost an hour in length.
The new recording from EM Records features works by Edward Elgar, whose fiery and technically complex tudes caractristiques date from the early part of his career; and Donald Francis Tovey, who, in his emotionally wideranging Sonata eroica, pays homage to Bach. The disc also presents a selection of the Virtuosic Studies by Albert Sammons, the violinist who made benchmark recordings of Elgar's Violin Sonata and Concerto and who made a highly significant contribution to British violin-playing in the early years of the twentieth century. These are being recorded here for the first time.
Two first recordings of concertos by a Scot (Mackenzie) who settled in England as Principal of the Royal Academy of Music and an Englishman (Tovey) who settled in Scotland as a Professor at Edinburgh University's Reid School of Music.
Mackenzie's Scottish Concerto, premiered by no less a man than Paderewski in 1897, is a colourful and entertaining work which uses several Scottish themes in a fundamentally Lisztian design.