Box of frogs!

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

A surprising number of composers have been unfairly neglected because of the Nazi regime in Germany. Though the rest of the world did not consciously take cues from the Nazis, the status of Germany and Austria in the classical music world meant composers who were banned by the Nazis tended to fall into neglect elsewhere as well, purely through public attention being directed to other composers. Jewish composers were especially likely to disappear from concert programs, of course, but other groups suffered as well. Women had only begun to gain acceptance as composers at the end of the 19th century and some female composers were starting to see their pieces programmed regularly by the 1930s; the Nazi ideology, which demanded traditional gender roles, set them back half a century almost overnight in continental Europe.

That was the fate of the Dutch composer Henriette Bosmans (1895-1952), who was part of the "wrong" groups throughout her career. For most of her life, the highly conservative Dutch musical establishment tended to view local composers as inferior, which made it difficult for Dutch composers to get exposure. Ironically, it was the Nazi German occupation of the Netherlands that gave many Dutch composers their big break: Dutch orchestras began to play more Dutch music as a means of protesting the occupation. The occupiers tolerated it -- with exceptions. Bosmans was one of them. Not only was she a woman, she was of partial Jewish descent and openly bisexual. Though she managed to escape arrest throughout the occupation, her music was banned from public performance in 1941 and she was banned from performing as a pianist in 1942. As a result, her music disappeared from concert halls just as Dutch music saw a great resurgence.

Although Bosmans did not play the cello herself, many pieces she composed before 1930 featured it as a solo instrument -- perhaps not coincidentally, her father had been principal cellist of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, but died of tuberculosis before she was a year old. Bosmans' Cello Sonata, composed in 1919, was one of these pieces. (It was completed a month before Elgar's Cello Concerto, with which it seems to share some musical vocabulary.) A passionate late-Romantic virtuoso piece, it features the cello in a "vocal" role in the first three movements. A stormy finale in 5/4 time circles back to conclude with an intensified version of the opening theme of the entire sonata.

Movements:
I. Allegro maestoso
II. Un poco allegretto (9:26)
III. Adagio (14:04)
IV. Allegro molto e con fuoco (17:41)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Or, shall we say... Bloch Friday?

Appropriately for Thanksgiving weekend, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was an immigrant to the United States, where he was the founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music and was instrumental in developing the San Francisco Conservatory of Music into a leading music school. He is widely considered to be his native Switzerland's greatest composer, and is especially noted for his many pieces that draw from his Jewish heritage.

Surprisingly, though his own primary instrument was the violin, Bloch only ever composed one violin concerto, a remarkable piece that has somehow remained one of his more rarely performed works. Unusually for him, the main musical inspirations for his concerto were not Judaic but Native American; this may have contributed to its obscurity as Bloch has been remembered largely as a Jewish composer.

Bloch began work on his violin concerto in 1930, when he had extensive, underappreciated contacts with Native American tribes. In the 1920s, his daughter Suzanne (later a professor at Juilliard herself) was romantically involved for several years with a Canadian Ojibwe chief named Charlie Potts, which led to a lifelong friendship between Ernest Bloch and Potts. From 1928 to 1930, while living in San Francisco, Bloch attended synagogue with a man named Solomon Bibo who had become a member of the Acoma Pueblo tribe through marriage and subsequently been elected to serve as the tribe's chief for four years. (To this day, Bibo remains the only person without Native American ancestry to lead any Native American tribe.) By the time Bloch met him, Bibo's voice had been one of those recorded by ethnomusicologists seeking to preserve the Southwest's Native American songs. Beyond his friendships with Charlie Potts and Solomon Bibo, Bloch spent a fair amount of time transcribing Native American music during vacations in upstate New York.

In Bloch's concerto, the themes are original rather than Native American, but incorporate elements characteristic to the music of specific tribes. Bloch attempted to construct themes that could have come from Native American musicians, which was the same approach that he took to his Judaic music. Although Bloch never identified any of the source material he used, his imitation of Native American musical styles was comprehensive enough that most of the themes are identifiably inspired by either Ojibwe or Pueblo music. The first movement, alternately heroic and meditative, incorporates melodies that draw from northern Ojibwe singing styles, beginning with its opening orchestral fanfare. This is followed by a serene yet plaintive slow movement that unusually omits the orchestral strings almost entirely. The third movement brings the piece together as the violin reflects on and sometimes dances around themes heard in the first two movements.

Bloch completed his concerto in 1938, and it premiered the same year with Joseph Szigeti as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra. Szigeti continued to perform the concerto for the rest of his career. But despite the reputations of both Bloch and Szigeti, it did not catch on. It was likely overshadowed by Bloch's fame as a proponent of Jewish music. At the composer's death in 1959, Szigeti remained the only violinist who had ever played it, and performances remained extremely rare until the 1990s.

Movements:
I. Allegro deciso
II. Andante (20:10)
III. Deciso (26:18)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Ignaz Brüll (1846-1907) was one of the most prominent members of Johannes Brahms's circle of musical friends. An excellent pianist, he was Brahms's preferred partner for four-hand piano pieces, and in 1897 he was a pallbearer at Brahms's funeral. He was a popular composer in his day; his operas, as well as his two piano concertos, were performed frequently in Germany and Austria for decades. But he was forgotten quickly in the 1930s: his music was banned by the Nazis because he was Jewish, and he was not well-known enough outside Germany and Austria for his reputation to survive. Only a handful of recordings of his music were made prior to 1999, when a new recording of his piano concertos began a sustained revival of interest in Brüll.

Brüll was born in Prostějov, in the modern-day Czech Republic, but his family moved to Vienna when he was one year old. His parents were both avid amateur musicians: his mother was a pianist and his father was a baritone singer. He did not start learning music at an especially early age, but when he did start, he learned extraordinarily quickly. From his first piano lessons at age eight, he progressed to studying with Vienna Conservatory professor Julius Epstein at ten. At fifteen he received his first public performance as a composer, with Epstein performing the young Brüll's first piano concerto. Brüll himself kept the concerto in his repertoire as a concert pianist for his entire career. While known early on as a pianist, Brüll especially loved the theater and chose to compose operas for most of his career. He was catapulted to widespread fame by his second opera, Das goldene Kreuz (The Golden Cross), in 1875. Not long after, he married Marie Schosberg, a banker's daughter and socialite, and their home became the preferred venue for the Brahms circle's private concerts in Vienna. He ceased touring as a pianist and focused on composition; having composed only sporadically before 1880, he became a prolific composer for the rest of his life.

Though he was mostly an opera composer, Brüll produced a number of finely crafted pieces for the concert hall as well. His only symphony was composed in 1880, the year before his final concert tour as a pianist and around that time that he began to perform frequently in salon concerts with Brahms. Brahms had completed his own first two symphonies only a few years earlier. Perhaps not surprisingly, Brüll's symphony is rather Brahmsian, flowing and introspective, though not composed on as grand a scale. As with Brahms's first symphony, Brüll made the last movement the most substantial, with an extended slow introduction. Also interestingly, there is no true slow movement, but instead a rather relaxed "Allegretto molto moderato" second movement; the slowest part of the entire symphony is the introduction to the finale!

Movements:

I. Molto moderato
II. Allegretto molto moderato (8:54)
III. Scherzo: Allegro assai (13:55)
IV. Molto moderato - Allegro assai (18:51)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Charles Stanford was one of the most influential teachers in British music history: his list of students read like a who's-who of 20th century British composers, including both Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Asked about his most promising student, though, Stanford named Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) without the slightest hesitation. He qualified that evaluation, though: he said Gurney had the potential to be "the biggest of them all," but was "unteachable."

Gurney never achieved the level of fame that his teacher thought him capable of, but for a different reason. His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. He left the Royal College of Music and enlisted as a private soldier in 1915. He was wounded in the shoulder April 1917, recovered and returned to the front, was gassed in September of the same year, and spent much of the rest of the war in a hospital. In March 1918, still hospitalized, he suffered a serious breakdown, attributed to "deferred shell shock." Gurney nonetheless seemed to thrive for a time after the war, returning to the Royal College of Music to complete his studies under Vaughan Williams and composing prolifically for the better part of four years. Some of his music was performed and received critical praise. But underneath his furious creative activity, his mental health continued to worsen. His family had him declared insane in 1922, and he was confined to psychiatric hospitals for the rest of his life with what is believed to have been bipolar disorder and PTSD with psychotic symptoms. Though he continued to play the piano, he almost completely ceased composing. His existing work was forgotten, with two-thirds of his musical output remaining unpublished today.

Today, Gurney is far better known as a poet than as a musician. While serving in the military, he wrote some highly acclaimed poetry that presented an wry, unglamorous view of his wartime experiences. Decades later, he would be one of sixteen Great War poets named on a memorial in Westminster Abbey.

A Gloucestershire Rhapsody was Gurney's most substantial surviving piece of music. While all his other works were completed quickly, this piece took him two full years to compose. He began work on it shortly after his discharge from the army, and finished it in 1921, not long before mental illness ended his career. Though Gurney attempted to have the piece performed, his deteriorating mental health prevented any performance in his lifetime. The premiere did not take place until 2010, nearly ninety years later.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

This week's feature is again chamber music, this time by English composer Madeleine Dring (1923-1977), a multi-talented composer who was perhaps better known as a stage actress and singer. She was trained primarily as a composer, entering the Royal College of Music as a composition student at 14, but had a lifelong love for the theater as well -- many of her early compositions were incidental music for theater, radio, and television, and by the time she graduated from the RCM she was regularly appearing in theater productions herself.

Dring has sometimes been described as a "British Gershwin" because, like Gershwin, she spent most of her career writing musical theater and cabaret songs but also produced a number of "serious" pieces for the concert hall. This was in part a result of her theatrical bent, but also stemmed to some degree from her frustration with the musical establishment; in a decade-long correspondence with American composer Eugene Hemmer, she complained of feeling cut off from her fellow composers because of her lack of interest in avant-garde music. The resulting crisis of confidence led her to compose mainly for herself and people close to her: her songs were largely written for herself to perform, and most of her chamber music was composed for her husband Roger Lord, who was principal oboist of the London Symphony Orchestra. Much of her music was not published until the 1990s or later, despite her own efforts during her life and her husband's persistence after her death.

Dring's Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano is probably her most frequently-performed piece. It was composed in 1968, and premiered in New York that year with London Symphony Orchestra principal players Peter Lloyd and Roger Lord on flute and oboe respectively and Andre Previn on piano. The first two measures grab the listener's attention immediately and kick off a quirky and charming first movement full of slightly-off-kilter harmonies and rhythmic wit. The second movement contrasts the first with a beautiful simplicity, an extended oboe solo introducing a theme that develops as a relaxed conversation among the trio. Closing out the piece is an irreverent third movement that features a virtuosic double cadenza for the flute and oboe.

Movements:
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante semplice (3:13)
III. Allegro giocoso (8:06)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

This week's piece reflects the summer we've had -- or at least the title does.

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II involved music commissioned from many of the UK's leading composers; the list of composers reads like a who's-who of mid-20th-century British music, and pieces such as William Walton's Orb and Sceptre March have remained in the concert repertoire to this day. Among the composers commissioned for the event was exactly one woman, Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003). Carwithen was known mainly as a film composer; her music was commissioned not for the coronation itself but for the official film that was subsequently produced.

The daughter of a music teacher, Doreen Mary Carwithen started playing music at an early age. She began learning piano and violin under her mother's tutelage at four, switched to cello at school, and was playing in local orchestras while still in high school. Composing came later; she began teaching herself composition in her teens by following scores while listening to BBC music broadcasts, and produced her first compositions of any kind at 16. She won a scholarship to study cello performance at the Royal Academy of Music in 1941, and while there, changed her focus to composition and became the first woman accepted into the Royal Academy's newly-established film scoring program.

Carwithen's career took off rapidly beginning in 1947. That year the London Philharmonic formed a Music Advisory Committee whose express purpose was to select lesser-known pieces to premiere, and the committee's very first selection was Carwithen's concert overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another), which she had composed two years earlier. The piece premiered in March 1947 under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult. Thus, Doreen Carwithen had the highly unusual distinction of making her public debut as an orchestral composer with a world-renowned conductor leading a major orchestra. Not surprisingly, Carwithen composed the bulk of her music for films and only a few pieces for the concert hall.

Carwithen was all but forgotten, and then rediscovered, within her own lifetime. Like a number of other film composers of her generation, she was both frustrated with film studio deadlines and unsatisfied with being known only for her film scores, and in the 1960s she retired from film scoring in order to focus on art music. As both a woman and a composer regarded as "only" a film composer, she found opportunities for performance and publication hard to come by. After she married fellow composer William Alwyn in 1975, she stopped composing entirely and for many years devoted herself entirely to promoting her husband's work. It was only in the late 1990s, more than a decade after Alwyn's death, that Carwithen returned to composing. She composed most of what was intended to be her third string quartet, and began sketching a first symphony, but abandoned both after being paralyzed by a severe stroke in 1999. In her final years, though unable to continue composing, she was able to take an active role advising conductors in making recordings of most of her art music.

While not associated with any stage production, ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) was inspired by John Masefield's 1926 novel of the same acronymic name, which centers around an Englishman caught up in an ill-fated Central American revolution. The novel, in turn, derived its title from anarchist writer Elbert Hubbard's remark, "Life is just one damn thing after another." Carwithen's overture, while showing no sign of Latin American influence, foreshadows her career as a film composer in its bold cinematic gestures.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Two days after Independence Day, it seems only fitting to honor a neglected American composer.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) was eulogized as an American Mozart or Schubert in the days and weeks after his death. After years of obscurity, he had suddenly come across sensational success in the year 1919, earning critical acclaim for one premiere after another, mostly by major orchestras, from March onward. His crowning glory came in November and December of that year: a performance of his tone poem "The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan" by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in late November and an all-Griffes concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra in mid-December had critics proclaiming him the great American composer of his generation. But Griffes did not live to enjoy his new-found fame. Seriously ill, he was unable to attend those November and December concerts. He was hospitalized for influenza that December, and though he lived long enough to read the glowing reviews, he succumbed to secondary infections in early 1920, one of the last victims of the global flu pandemic of 1918-19.

But while Griffes's untimely death was a clear parallel to Mozart and Schubert, he was neither a child prodigy nor a prolific composer like his predecessors. He was born in a working-class family in Elmira, New York; early in his life his only musical education was sporadic piano lessons from his elder sister. It was only in his mid-teens that, having progressed beyond his sister's ability to teach him, he began to receive free piano lessons from Mary Selena Broughton, a professor at Elmira College. Eventually, with Griffes's family unable to afford to pay for advanced training, Broughton loaned him the money to travel to Berlin to continue his studies. Though he arrived in Berlin as a piano student in 1903, Griffes found himself increasingly drawn to composition, and by 1905 was exclusively studying composition under Engelbert Humperdinck. But without rich parents, a patron, or any sort of grant to support him, he was forced to cut short his stay in Europe when his money ran out in 1907. He applied for teaching jobs all over the United States, and was hired as a music teacher at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, where he would work for the rest of his life. A full-time teacher who by that time was supporting his widowed mother and his unmarried younger sister, he was both chronically short of funds and chronically short of time. His overwork was made worse by his inability to hire a copyist once his orchestral music started getting performances; he would stay up late at night hand-copying parts. Under those circumstances, it is surprising that he composed as much as he did!

His fall into obscurity was rapid after his death. His younger sister Marguerite, who received all his personal papers, was largely responsible. Charles Griffes had kept meticulous diaries throughout his life, and these diaries dealt honestly with his sexual orientation, detailing his regular patronage of New York's gay bathhouses and long-term relationship with a New York policeman. His sister, fearing scandal, destroyed some of his diaries and withheld all his papers (including musical scores) from public view until 1954. With the exception of "The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan," Griffes's orchestral works received few performances in the decades after his death. Most were unpublished and were available only in the form of handwritten copies in the libraries of individual orchestras.

Griffes's style was eclectic. He is sometimes described as an Impressionist, but he in fact studied scores from a wide range of composers throughout his life and constantly added to his musical language. His earliest compositions were conservative and owed much to Brahms, but he soon assimilated influences first from Richard Strauss, then from the French Impressionists, Russian Romantics, Asian musical traditions, and finally from modernists including Schoenberg and Prokofiev. An avid amateur painter and photographer as well as a musician, he frequently expressed a desire to evoke visual imagery with his music. His Symphonische Phantasie dates from his last months in Germany, when he was exploring the music of Debussy and Ravel while retaining a strong sense of the late Romantic idiom in which he had been steeped. During Griffes's life, it was performed only in a two-piano reduction that Griffes prepared in 1910, while the original orchestral version had to wait until the late 1960s for its premiere.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Since I'm both a musician and a soccer fan, one of the highlights of the World Cup for me is hearing the national anthems. Some are musically much more interesting than others, of course; one reason I'm enjoying Iceland's appearance is that the Icelandic national anthem is one of my favorites. But today I'm looking farther back, to the second international match I ever attended and the first for which I got into the stadium in time for the national anthems. Back in 2002, I was in the stadium when DaMarcus Beasley scored his first international goal, a late winner against South Korea in Pasadena, California. But before the match, I was intrigued by the South Korean national anthem "Aegukga," especially the rather Brahmsian use of shifting barlines in its opening phrase. Investigating further, I learned that South Korea's national anthem was once sung to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne" and had been adopted in that form by the Korean government in exile; the present music was composed in the 1930s by a Korean composer who believed "Auld Lang Syne" unfit for use as a national anthem, and adopted (with the same lyrics) by the newly formed South Korean government in 1948.

It turns out the story is even more fascinating than that: though intended from the start as a national anthem, "Aegukga" was first heard in public not as a stand-alone song but as a choral component in a larger symphonic poem. And it was first heard not in Korea or even in China (where the Korean government in exile was located), but in Dublin, Ireland. The composer, Ahn Eak-Tai (1906-1965), was one of the earliest notable Korean composers in the Western tradition, the first Asian principal player in a professional orchestra outside Asia, and the first Asian music director of a professional orchestra outside Asia.

Ahn Eak-Tai was born in Pyongyang several years before Japan took control of the Korean Peninsula. He was introduced to Western music while in elementary school, when his eldest brother, who had gone to Tokyo for higher education, brought back a violin and phonograph records from Japan. Ahn Eak-Tai began learning the violin then; in middle school he switched first to trumpet and then to cello, which would remain his primary instrument for the rest of his life. In 1919, he joined his brother in Tokyo, where in 1926 he was part of the first-ever entering class at the newly founded Tokyo Conservatory of Music. Upon graduation in 1930, he returned to Pyongyang briefly. But after the Japanese police forced him to cancel a scheduled recital because of his involvement in pro-independence protests, he realized it would be difficult to continue his career in Korea, and departed for advanced studies in the United states shortly afterward. He would not return to Korea for 25 years. Ahn's first stop in the United States was Cincinnati, where he studied composition at the Cincinnati College of Music. During his first year there, he auditioned for and won the principal cello seat in the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, becoming the first Asian to hold a principal player's seat in any orchestra outside Asia. In 1932 he transferred to the Curtis Institute of Music; as a student there he played in the Philadelphia Orchestra and got his first conducting job as choir director at a local church.

It was in Philadelphia that Ahn composed the first version of his Symphonic Fantasia Korea, which won a competition sponsored by the New York Philharmonic. Ahn conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere at Carnegie Hall. It was a dismal failure, as many of the musicians refused to follow his direction; angered by what he saw as deliberate sabotage, Ahn threw down his baton and left the stage in the middle of the piece. Somewhat surprisingly, there was no backlash against him, as fellow conductors saw his actions as justified and rose to his defense. Ahn received recommendations to continue his studies in Europe, and left in 1936 to study first in Vienna and then in Budapest under Zoltán Kodály. Kodály encouraged him to be unapologetic about incorporating Asian folk music and departing from Western harmonies in his compositions, and inspired him to begin revising the Symphonic Fantasia Korea.

By the time Ahn completed his studies, war was on the horizon. He remained in Axis nations throughout the Second World War. Having impressed when filling in for Richard Strauss on short notice to conduct a concert in Budapest, he became Strauss's cover conductor, and Strauss's recommendation earned him frequent guest conducting appearances with the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra and the Conservatoire Orchestra in Paris. After the war, he sought to return to the United States, but his association with Strauss, who had worked with the Nazi regime, frustrated his attempts to find a conducting job in America. (Ahn was only able to find conducting engagements in the United States after it became evident that Strauss had not shared the Nazis' ideology.) With no job prospects in the United States, and having married a Spanish woman, he settled on the island of Mallorca, where he founded the Orquesta Sinfónica de Palma de Mallorca. He remained in Palma de Mallorca, serving as music director of the orchestra there until his death in 1965. Eventually he made his return to Korean musical life as well, beginning in 1955 as a guest conductor with the Seoul Philharmonic and subsequently making frequent guest conducting appearances with South Korean orchestras. Late in his life, he regarded himself as a musical ambassador not only for Korea but also for his adopted home, drawing from the folk music of the Balearic Islands for several compositions including his recently-rediscovered symphonic poem Mallorca.

As for the Symphonic Fantasia Korea, Ahn's revisions lengthened the piece greatly, to nearly half an hour in length. The largest addition was a choral component; the last seven or eight minutes of the piece are a choral fantasy on the melody that Ahn composed for "Aegukga" -- he already intended for it to serve as a national anthem when he wrote the melody, but it would be heard first as part of this piece. Other changes included thinning out the orchestration in places where the lush Romantic harmonies of the original version detracted from folk themes. The Symphonic Fantasia Korea premiered in Dublin, Ireland in February 1938; the location was deliberately chosen because Ahn saw a kinship between the long English occupation of Ireland and the ongoing Japanese occupation in Korea. Interestingly, Ahn had intended to use an English translation of the lyrics for the Symphonic Fantasia; it was the Irish choir director who persuaded him to use the original Korean text. After its first performance, Ahn conducted the piece several more times, including in his 1955 return to Korea. Otherwise, even after the adoption of Ahn's theme as a national anthem, the larger piece that from which the anthem was taken saw only occasional performances in Spain and South Korea. Only recently, after the rediscovery of some of Ahn's other scores, has Symphonic Fantasia Korea has seen somewhat of a revival.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Last week featured a violin concerto allegedly rediscovered through an Ouija board by violinist Jelly d'Arányi. This week's feature is a violin sonata dedicated to d’Arányi.

Frederick Kelly (1881-1916) may have been more notable as an athlete than as a musician. Born in Sydney, Australia, he was sent to England to study at Eton College and went on to complete undergraduate and graduate degrees in history at Oxford. While at Oxford, he became known as one of the leading rowers of the day: he was a member of the Oxford crew, won two of England's three premier single sculling events as an individual rower, and won an Olympic gold medal in 1908 as part of Great Britain's eights crew. He was also an outstanding amateur pianist and composer; he briefly studied piano at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt between his undergraduate and graduate degrees, played chamber music with luminaries including cellist Pablo Casals, and acted as an advisor to the Classical Concert Society for several years. It was in that last role that Kelly first met Jelly d'Arányi in 1909. By 1914, after d'Arányi had moved to London, the two were performing regularly as violin/piano duo partners. It is unclear how far their relationship went beyond that; d'Arányi was said to be smitten with Kelly, but Kelly, at least initially, seemed to view their relationship as platonic. Kelly's diaries, though extensive, provide no clues. (Notably, d'Arányi displayed Kelly's photograph prominently in her home for the rest of her life, and despite numerous proposals, never married.)

In any event, their musical partnership was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Kelly was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was eventually sent to the front as an infantry officer. At war, according to his fellow officer Arther Asquith, Kelly was "brave as a lion" but also eccentric, brushing his teeth as many as 12 times a day, wearing white gloves, and carrying around stray cats. During lulls in combat, he occasionally attempted to persuade German soldiers to surrender by playing Wagner. Through it all, he somehow managed to continue composing, working by candlelight late at night in his dugout. He was sent to Gallopoli, where he was inspired to compose a sonata for Jelly d'Arányi; as he worked he kept d'Arányi informed on his progress in regular letters to her. Though he composed the sonata while at war, Kelly evidently did not regard the sonata as a war composition. At one point, he wrote to d'Arányi: "The sonata is all there in my head but not yet on paper. You must not expect shell and rifle fire in it! It is rather a contrast to all that, being somewhat idyllic." Kelly was wounded twice during the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, but survived and completed the sonata days before the Allied evacuation in 1916. On leave in London, he played the sonata with d'Arányi. Later that year, Kelly went back to the front and was killed in the Battle of the Somme in November 1916. When he died, an unfinished piano sonata was found in his dugout.

D'Arányi played the Gallipoli sonata at Kelly's memorial service, the first public performance of the piece and the only one for over 90 years. It fell into obscurity until an Australian violinist and musicologist named Chris Latham, doing research at the National Library of Australia, noticed repeated references to a violin sonata in Kelly's diaries and could not find a manuscript anywhere in Kelly's papers. He eventually located some of Jelly d'Arányi's surviving relatives through Facebook, and learned that a great-niece in Italy still had the immaculately preserved manuscript. Latham flew to Florence, Italy to bring a copy back to Australia in 2010, and went on to give the second-ever performance in Canberra in 2011.

I. Allegro non troppo


II. Adagio con moto


III. Ground: Allegro non troppo

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) was the only female composer among Les Six, a loosely organized group of composers active in France in the 1920s whose best-known members were Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc. She studied under Ravel, but absorbed surprisingly little stylistic influence from him; Les Six in fact coalesced not around any particular style but as a reaction against the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.

Born Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse, she was forbidden by her father from studying music and was secretly taught to play the piano by her mother, then attended the Paris Conservatory secretly under the name Germaine Tailleferre, which she later made her legal name. Disowned by her father, she eked out a living performing and teaching, never achieving any financial security; she worked as a piano accompanist well into her 80s and composed until a few weeks before her death. Reviews of her music often showed openly sexist condescension -- when one of her pieces was premiered by the Boston Symphony, the Boston Globe's critic had more to say about the novelty of "a pretty girl" taking a bow as composer than about the music itself. Nevertheless, she persisted.

In 1917, with most concert halls closed for the duration of the First World War, Tailleferre and a group of other young composers began holding concerts of their chamber music in an art gallery in the Paris district of Montparnasse, and soon became known as Les Six. Their individual styles varied greatly ("Les Six" was perhaps more about marketing than it was an artistic movement), but they were all influenced by the modernist painters whose work surrounded them, and all pursued a more straightforward, cleaner aesthetic than the impressionists that came before them. The concerts ceased after the war, but Les Six continued to meet regularly at the celebrated Paris jazz club Le Boeuf sur le Toit. It was with Les Six that Tailleferre built her reputation. Her association with Les Six brought regular commissions, and made the 1920s and 1930s her most prolific years; her ballet Le Marchand d'Oiseaux was the most-performed ballet in France in the 1920s. Many of Tailleferre's scores from that era unfortunately disappeared for a number of years: when Nazi Germany invaded France, she departed for the United States, leaving all but a few of her scores behind; while they were eventually recovered, many were unpublished until after her death. After the Second World War, Tailleferre returned to France and resumed her career as primarily a film and television composer, but without the same level of notoriety she had enjoyed before the war.

Tailleferre's Piano Trio represents both the beginning and end of her career. The first and third movements were composed in 1916-17 and performed as a two-movement piece in the art gallery where Les Six first organized their concerts. The second and fourth movements were added in 1978, yet fit in surprisingly seamlessly, and similarly bring to mind the Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani paintings that surrounded the original trio's premiere in 1917.

Movements:
I. Allegro animato
II. Allegro vivace (4:05)
III. Moderato (7:24)
IV. Trés animé (10:56)