English music from the early 1900s to the 1930s seems to be strewn with composers whose early careers intimated great things but whose names now only appear either in passing or as foot-notes in biographies of the survivors of this period. How many, I wonder, have actually heard music by composers such as Montague Phillips, Arthur Hervey, Harry Farjeon, Paul Corder, Arthur Hinton, W. H. Bell or even the teacher of many of these, Frederick Corder? Yet all at some point were highly regarded. Of the Corder pupils several names have survived, most notably Arnold Bax and to a much lesser degree York Bowen, but it was the much less familiar name of Benjamin J. Dale, that during his student years at the Royal Academy of Music commanded the most attention and whose career seemed set for great things.
Dale enrolled at the Royal Academy on the same day as Bax. He was 14 and had already made his mark as a composer with a performance at London's Portman Rooms of his orchestral overture, Horatius. Several works followed during his student years (including an Organ Sonata and a Piano Trio) but it was the Piano Sonata, recorded here, that catapulted Dale to the status of celebrity which after a somewhat controversial first performance by Mark Hambourg was taken up by fellow pupils Dame Myra Hess and Irene Scharrer and later by Benno Moiseiwitsch in 1919. After revivals by York Bowen and Frank Merrick in 1935 and 1936 the work drifted out of concert life and has since become only a tantalizing name to enthusiasts of English music.
Listening to the work today one can see it as the product of a young composer who was very much in command of the contemporary idiom of his day; one who had thoroughly assimilated the late nineteenth-century romantic school of pianism into a language that is at the same time both original and eclectic. Original in that the principal melodic ideas of both the sonata-allegro first movement and the unusual variation-form second movement reveal a high degree of individuality. Eclectic in that these are frequently couched in a keyboard rhetoric that unavoidably tugs the music back to the late nineteenth century rather than letting it freewheel into new grounds. Quite involuntarily I found myself playing the 'spot-the-influence' game during the first hearing; the Lisztian bridge passages at 4A23B and at 11A00B in the first movement for example could easily have dropped straight out of the B minor Sonata, and in the second movement there are many passages that clearly owe much to Brahms and Schumann not to mention a clear quote from Balakirev's Islamey at 00A16B (track 10) in the finale: Molto allegro.
However, not all the familiar passages are in-herited; Rachmaninov's Corelli Variations can be heard in Var. No. 4 (though in point of fact this was still some 30 years away) and I can't help wondering how familiar Richard Addinsell might have been with this work as the theme on which the variations are based sounds note-for-note like the main theme of the Warsaw Concerto of 1941. One could go on spotting influences and precursors in the Sonata, but this is still a highly enjoyable and rewarding work.
The two fill-ups, Night Fancies and Prunella are slighter fare compared to the epic canvas of the sonata, but are attractive examples of their genre and well worth exploring; the former reminding me at times of William Baines—another composer long overdue for revival. Superb performances from Peter Jacobs, and beautifully recorded in the atmospheric acoustics of Rosslyn Hill Chapel in north London.'