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Holbrooke Piano Music
Posted by Jeffrey Lague on August 24, 2022, 12:44 pm
Simon Callaghan's excellent,recent disc of Holbrooke's piano music has attracted some welcome attention from reviewers and commentators but a couple of bits of information circulating about some of the pieces needs correcting. It's been stated that the "Bridal Ballad" and "Ariel" nocturnes were probably original works or based on unknown sources; this is not so as the first of these originates from a movement of Holbrooke's "Diabolique" Quintet and the second is an arrangement of one of the Auld Lang Syne variations.
Some years ago I wrote an article for the BMS on Holbrooke's piano music in which I ventured the opinion that the Second Sonata "Destiny" was a completely original work. Within the last few months I have been shown an original manuscript, the property of the Holbrooke estate, of a band work by the composer entitled "The Song of LLywelyn" which is clearly substantially the same music as the opening pages of the second movement of the sonata. As anyone who has tried to work their way through the maze of Holbrooke's catalogues knows it's very difficult to ascertain just when individual works were written, but it seems to me that the band piece preceded the sonata.
I got to speculating that both pieces might have had a common origin in a larger work , possibly based on the subject of the thirteenth century Welsh king, LLywelyn the Great. We know that a fire at Holbrooke's cottage in Wales destroyed some important work he was engaged on - important enough for the composer to have made an effort to attempt to get into the blazing building to rescue it - could it have been such a piece and could the discordant, chaotic music that disrupts the melodic content of the sonata's finale be remnants of battle music from a projected opera/cantata or, perhaps, the sound-representation of a more-recent conflagration that destroyed such a work ? As I've indicated...it's just speculation.