Sleevenotes from Prima Facie Records PFCD242 Three Sonatas by Sam Rudd-Jones

THREE SONATAS

This project is possible because of generous support from PRS Foundation’s The Open
Fund, Oliver Quick, Hinrichsen Foundation, Vaughan Williams Foundation, The Finzi Trust,
The Bliss Trust, as well as family and friends.
Sam Rudd-Jones would also like to give special thanks to Richard Causton.

Recorded at Stapleford Granary Concert Hall on 19 & 20 March 2024
Produced and engineered by David Lefeber
Edited and mastered by David Lefeber
Booklet edited by John Fallas
Cover artwork by Pedro Juárez Rosselló
Ⓟ 2024 Sam Rudd-Jones under licence to Prima Facie Records
© 2024 Sam Rudd-Jones under licence to Prima Facie Records
Catalogue Number PFCD242
Prima Facie Records primafacie.ascrecords.com

Three Sonatas (2019–23)
Darragh Morgan violin · Kate Romano clarinet · Huw Watkins piano
I. Prologue [1:25]
II. Violin Sonata [8:03]
III. Interlude 1 [0:58]
IV. Clarinet Sonata [8:49]
V. Interlude 2 [1:12]
VI. Trio Sonata [9:33]
VII. Epilogue [1:57]

Variations (2023) [13:22]
Darragh Morgan violin

Jeux d’eau (2022) [10:43]
Sam Rudd-Jones piano

Hardy in Love (2016–18)
Ed Lyon tenor · Huw Watkins piano
I. At the Word ‘Farewell’ [6:35]
II. How Great my Grief [3:48]
III. The Voice [5:59]

Total playing time [72:28]

Note on Rhythm by Sam Rudd-Jones

Much of the rhythm in my compositionscomes from contemporary electronic music. This music is built from grooves, which are repeating rhythmic patterns that encourage dance. Using grooves has been a common preoccupation for recent classical music, but trying to groove as hard as an electronic work is futile: the latter’s aggressively compressed drums and total rhythmic precision give it a propulsiveness that acoustic music simply cannot achieve. Transplanting these grooves from drum machines to melodic instruments creates enough distance for the borrowing to be worthwhile,and sidesteps the unflattering direct comparison between the danceability of the two styles. For me the true utility of a groove is that its regularity creates an easily intelligible structure, on which one can hang more unorthodox approaches to harmony and timbre.

The groove I use most often is the archetypal drum pattern of trap music (the dominant style of hip-hop musicfor the last ten years). It has loud clap or snare sounds on the second and fourth beats which anchor the groove. This ‘two and four’ placement is common to most popular music, though usually the true anchoring element is a bass part that falls predominantly on the beat. In trap music the bass part is instead built from dotted notes, meaning it lands on the beat only at the very start of each bar. This gives the groove its characteristic bounce, which is, to my ears, a pleasingly unfamiliar effect in acoustic classical music. The trap pattern is easiest heard at the start of the development section of Three Sonatas –VI. Trio Sonata (from 3:15). In that piece it is also heard in the second subject of the Violin Sonata (from 1:06 and similar), ‘Interlude 2’, and the last minute of the ‘Epilogue’. The same pattern features in Variations (from 2:37 and similar).

Electronic music is a fruitful source not only of specific grooves, but also of entirely novel approaches to rhythm. Autechre’s 1998 track ‘Fold4,Wrap5’ decelerates continuously throughout its four-minute duration (halving in speed 46 times in a row, a cumulative factor of about 100 trillion), but never seems to come to a stop. This magical effect is called a Risset rhythm, a technique by which a texture can be made to limitlessly accelerate or decelerate. I was so mesmerised by ‘Fold4,Wrap5’ that I used the effect throughout Three Sonatas – II. ViolinSonata. It is a highly expressive technique that warps our basic sense of musical time: I imagine it as a 21st-century rubato. It has become a basic part of my rhythmic language, and it is present in the climaxes of both Jeux d’eau (from 7:10) and Variations (from 10:10).

‘… music, expressing itself’ by John Fallas

‘Almost all of my music is about nothing,’ declares Sam Rudd-Jones. ‘I like music because it is the most abstract of all the art forms.’

Composers have often made such statements, and have equally often been met with scepticism from critics and listeners: can this music really mean nothing? Is he protesting too much? What does he have to hide? At the same time,it is undeniable that abstraction has its own special appeal, and that many of the musical techniques of both classicism and modernism are peculiarly well adapted to realise structures in sound that exist at a remove from the forms of worldly meaning characteristic of the literary and visual arts.

Stravinsky gave the claim its most notoriously provocative formulation in his 1936 book An Autobiography, where he asserted that ‘music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all’. Later, in 1959, he rephrased the remark to propose, rather, that ‘music expresses itself’. As the musicologist Daniel Chua has pointed out: ‘In both cases, the composer is saying the same thing – it just depends whether your aesthetic glass is half full or half empty. Music, in expressing itself,is “powerless to express anything” other than itself.’

Rudd-Jones’s choice of titles for at least two of the three instrumental works on this album confirms the relevance of such thoughts. The literary theorist Gérard Genette drew a useful distinction between what he called ‘rhematic’ titles, which refer to or describe a work itself – often in terms of its form or genre – and ‘thematic’ titles, which point outside the work to describe its subject matter. (Rhematic titles are more common in music than in literature, perhaps in keeping with Rudd-Jones’s observation about music’s potential for abstraction.) In their overall work and constituent movement titles (‘Sonata’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Prologue/Epilogue’, ‘Variations’), Three Sonatas and the solo violin piece which follows it never ‘point outside’. The title of the solo piano piece is a more complex case: ostensibly programmatic (‘jeux d’eau’ are fountains and other water features, as in an ornamental garden), in fact it may equally be understood as referring to other musical works with the same or a similar title – Ravel’s Jeux d’eau of 1901, Liszt’s Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este of 1883 – and to a whole associated Romantic and post-Romantic history of ‘watery’ piano music. If Three Sonatas, too, points towards a history of works with shared (albeit here more firmly rhematic) titles, it does so with a mixture of obliqueness and directness that may serve to remind us that generic and formal designations, as much as more illustrative or programmatic titles, are ambiguous tools. Listeners as much as composers are bound to interpret them partly in relation to the music they accompany into being, but partly too in connection with an inevitably personal awareness of expressive and formal traditions.

On first inspection, Three Sonatas seems designed to attenuate such historical associations as far as possible. Each of the three ‘sonatas’ is a single movement following the broad outlines of a classical sonata form – with, despite the modernity of the harmonic language, a strikingly traditional contrast between, in each case, an active first and a more lyrical second subject group (or vice versa, in the case of the Clarinet Sonata). But where such a movement would traditionally have launched a work which also contained a slow movement, a scherzo and a concluding movement of tangibly finale-like character – a work, moreover, which maintained the same instrumentation and number of players throughout – here the three main movements follow a scheme of instrumental permutations which is further developed (or deconstructed?) in the four shorter movements which frame them. These latter parts of the piece represent a deliberate dialling-back of musical content, and function like scene changes in a play, or palate cleansers between the courses of a meal.

At one level, the clarity of this schematic design leaves little room for doubt about the composer’s intentions, while the vividly contrasted thematic identities reinforce the sense of music which is defined by its internal relationships rather than by any appeal to external referents. Yet the very vividness of the material may seem to encourage – or at least permit – more polyvalent modes of listening. Is there not perhaps the ghost of a traditional three- or four-movement sonata here after all, with the alternately lyrical and playful Clarinet Sonata (thus representing both slow movement and scherzo?) at the centre, enclosed by the ardent, forward-driving Violin Sonata and the lively, somewhat sonata rondo-like Trio Sonata? A similarly dissident hearing might focus on the expressive associations of certain intervals: the wide open fifths, warm thirds and alternately descending and ascending semitones that permeate the Clarinet Sonata; the octave-reinforced falling semitones of the Trio Sonata’s first thematic group. As the latter movement proceeds, it is hard not to hear it as expressing things beyond music – though those things can only be personal to each listener. What might be shared, ultimately, is the experience of their subsequent dissolution in the ‘Epilogue’. The piece retreats back into its frame, as if in disavowal of whatever expressive meanings it may have accumulated.

In Variations – the only work on the album not to include Rudd-Jones’s own instrument, the piano – he set out to use a strict formal design to give not only structural but also harmonic coherence to an extended stretch of writing for solo violin. An ‘Introduction’ defines an A major/D minor-ish tonal space, as well as exhibiting a fondness for disguised fragments of canonic writing which runs through all the works presented here. The ‘Theme’ itself ranges widely in register while never losing its harmonic bearings, and manages to seem both surprising and inevitable at the same time.

Nine successive variations then explore a wide variety of playing techniques (arco, pizzicato, sul ponticello, harmonics), textures (linear melody, double-stopping, fast figuration) and, in particular, different types of relationship between the main line of the music and decoration in the form of grace notes. Varying degrees of rubato are specified, too: a modest amount in the theme and first two variations, almost none in the increasingly virtuosic sequence from Variation 2 through to the Sarasate- like Variation 4, then strongly present in the slow sequence (Variations 5–7) at the work’s heart. Variation 8 picks out a series of accented notes from amid a flurry of scales and arpeggios, while Variation 9, after a slow beginning (with, again, traces of canonic writing in the double-stopped textures), revisits the constant, precisely measured accelerandi and ritardandi employed in the Violin Sonata. The work comes to a close with an elaborately decorated reprise of the ‘Theme’. The inspiration for Jeux d’eau arose from a passage midway through the Clarinet Sonata, featuring sustained melodic phrases in clarinet over tremolo piano harmonies, which suggested to Rudd-Jones the possibility of creating a similarly ‘liquid’ texture on the piano alone. The piece begins with high, weightless figuration – perhaps evoking droplets or spray, and clearly related in both texture and intervallic content to the right-hand opening of Ravel’s own Jeux d’eau. There presently arrives (rather in the manner of the second-subject material in the Violin and Trio Sonatas) a middle-register melody which shifts between the pianist’s two hands (slowly descending into the bass before re-emerging in the high treble) and which is increasingly surrounded by further figuration. (Increasingly, too, the melody itself incorporates single-note tremolos, as if the composer were seeking to remind us of all the various ways in which piano writing, like water, builds wholes and shapes from tiny particles not visible or audible as such.)

Two other types of material also feature: a rising and falling sequence of thick chords in both hands and, appearing twice in the middle of the piece, a three- part contrapuntal texture in which the music seems to be paradoxically still and moving at the same time, and in which the evocation of water (or, indeed, evocation of any kind) seems to be left far behind. The thick chords take over almost completely, made denser still by rhythmic offsetting between the two hands and by an increasing use of repetition and shorter note-values. The final two minutes return to a melody-plus- figuration texture, but one in which the figuration is now transparently thematic, using sped-up versions of the melodic figures it accompanies.

To step back four years to Hardy in Love, completed just before the composer’s nineteenth birthday and thus the earliest piece included here, is to find the Chua/ Stravinsky aesthetic glass more than half full. Rudd-Jones acknowledges that vocal music in general can hardly be said to be ‘about nothing’, and this short song cycle is no exception. It sets three poems by Thomas Hardy, two dating from after the death of his first wife Emma in 1912 – when, overcome by grief, he began to write obsessively about the woman he had largely neglected during her lifetime. The middle song sets an earlier poem which seems to allude directly to the speaker’s (and thus the poet’s?) unhappy marriage.

The temporal displacements underpinning this complex emotional landscape – grief in the midst of life, giving way to an obsessive love for a ghost – are perhaps echoed by a kind of dissociation in the settings, with direct and expressive vocal lines placed over elaborately contrapuntal accompaniments which look forward to the piano writing in the later instrumental works. In fact there are subtle motivic connections throughout, including again some half-hidden canonic relations both within the accompaniment and between piano and voice. Thus are the tensions and ironies of Hardy’s poetry both preserved and transcended in what we must finally experience as music, expressing words and – again and always – expressing itself.
© 2024 John Fallas

Hardy in Love: Texts

I. At the Word ‘Farewell’

She looked like a bird from a cloud
On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed
In the dim of dawn.
The candles alight in the room
For my parting meal
Made all things withoutdoors loom
Strange, ghostly, unreal.

The hour itself was a ghost,
And it seemed to me then
As of chances the chance furthermost
I should see her again.
I beheld not where all was so fleet
That a Plan of the past
Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet
Was in working at last:

No prelude did I there perceive
To a drama at all,
Or foreshadow what fortune might weave
From beginnings so small;
But I rose as if quicked by a spur
I was bound to obey,
And stepped through the casement to her
Still alone in the gray.

‘I am leaving you … Farewell!’ I said,
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
‘I soon must be gone!’
Even then the scale might have been turned

Against love by a feather,
– But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928),
from Moments of Vision (1917)

II. How Great my Grief (Triolet)

How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
– Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Nor memory shaped old times anew,
Nor loving-kindness helped to show thee
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee?
from Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

III. The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me,
call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who
was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you,
then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I
knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan
wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from
norward,
And the woman calling.
from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

Biographies

Violinist Darragh Morgan was born in Belfast in 1974. A renowned exponent of contemporary music, he has appeared widely as a soloist and concerto soloist; his numerous concerto appearances include world premieres by Sir John Tavener, Donnacha Dennehy, Brian Irvine, Joe Cutler and Chris Newman. A passionate chamber musician, Darragh is a founder member of the Fidelio Trio, who have been shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards and received two Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choices’ for their recordings. Darragh is married to the Fidelio Trio’s pianist Mary Dullea, with whom he often appears in duo recitals. He was for a number of years violinist with the award-winning Smith Quartet, and has collaborated with such distinguished musicians as Thomas Adès, Emmanuel Pahud, Darius Brubeck, Joanna MacGregor, Julian Bliss, Nicholas Daniel, John Tilbury, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and David Holmes.

Darragh regularly leads the London Sinfonietta, including recently in Singapore and Venice, and has also appeared with Ensemble Musikfabrik and as guest leader with Ensemble Modern, Athelas Sinfonietta, Remix Ensemble, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Red Note Ensemble, Aurora Orchestra, the Philharmonia, Oxford Philharmonic, English Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Macao Orchestra and Les Siècles. He is currently Director of the European Union Chamber Orchestra.

He has recorded over 75 albums for NMC, Resonus, Delphian, Signum, Diatribe, Metier, Da Capo, Centaur, Naxos and Col Legno, including significant recordings of music by Michael Finnissy, Gerald Barry, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and numerous other composers. Darragh has been a member of the string teaching faculty at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, of the chamber music faculty at the Royal College of Music, and has given masterclasses at Curtis Institute (Philadelphia), Peabody Institute (Baltimore), San Francisco Conservatory, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore) and Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing.

Kate Romano has a 25-year career as a chamber musician and solo clarinettist. She has given over 150 world premieres and her recordings are broadcast on UK and international radio. A natural story-teller and endlessly curious about the wider arts, Kate works across many different disciplines. She has written and broadcast extensively about music, mainly on BBC Radio 3, and has worked as a producer in opera and theatre. Kate was a senior member of staff at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama for 13 years and is currently CEO of Stapleford Granary Arts Centre in south Cambridge. She studied at the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD in composition from King’s College London.

Huw Watkins was born in Wales in 1976. He studied piano with Peter Lawson at Chetham’s School of Music, and composition with Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr and Julian Anderson at the University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. In 2001, he was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, and he has taught composition at both the RCM and the Royal Academy of Music.

As a composer, Watkins has long-standing relationships with the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, which have led to concertos for violin, cello (with his brother Paul Watkins as soloist), flute and piano. More recently he has written two symphonies for the Hallé Orchestra and Sir Mark Elder, the second of which won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for classical music in 2022.

He has also composed a wealth of chamber music, complementing his parallel career as a pianist. Commissions have come from the Nash Ensemble; the Belcea, Carducci and Calidore string quartets; and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which awarded him its Elise L. Stoeger Prize in 2016. Vocal works include In my Craft or Sullen Art (2007) for tenor and string quartet and the British Composer Award-winning Five Larkin Songs (2009–10) for soprano and piano. In 2017, Watkins was commissioned by King’s College, Cambridge, to write a carol for its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

As pianist, Watkins has appeared as concerto soloist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Britten Sinfonia and London Sinfonietta, and performs throughout Europe and North America as a soloist and chamber musician. Many composers have written concertos for him, including Philip Cashian, Tansy Davies and Helen Grime. He records for labels such as Signum, Chandos and BIS with regular collaborators Tamsin Waley-Cohen, Ruby Hughes and Adam Walker. Watkins was appointed MBE for services to music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2021.

Tenor Ed Lyon studied at St John’s College Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and National Opera Studio. He has a wide repertoire ranging from the Baroque to contemporary music, and has appeared in many of the world’s leading opera and concert venues.

Opera highlights have included the main role in Edison Denisov’s L’écume des jours (Stuttgart Opera), the title roles in Candide (Welsh National Opera) and Orfeo (Garsington Opera), Wagner at the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Janáček at Opera North, Handel for Scottish Opera, New Israeli Opera, Teatro Real (Madrid) and in Covent Garden, and Adès at the Salzburg Festival and ROH, as well as a staged production of The Diary of One Who Disappeared with Muziektheater Transparant. Concert work includes the Evangelist in Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the opening concert of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival and previously with The Bach Choir, St John Passion with the RLPO, Britten’s War Requiem in Hanover and Liverpool, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on tour in Europe and the US with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Elgar’s The Apostles with the Hallé under Sir Mark Elder, and performances of Messiah all around the world. He has also given solo recitals at Wigmore Hall.

His recording 17th-Century Playlist with Theatre of the Ayre on Delphian Records has received wide acclaim, as has his role in the premiere recording of Malcolm Arnold’s opera The Dancing Master for Resonus Classics.