William Alwyn (1905–1985)
Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 • Sonata alla Toccata • Derby Day
William Alwyn shares his centenary year with Tippett,
Rawsthorne, Lambert and Seiber, but, as an
instrumentalist, composer, conductor, teacher and
committee member, he arguably had a greater all-round
influence on twentieth-century British musical life than
any of them. Born in Northampton, he showed an early
interest in music and as a young child started to learn the
piccolo. At the age of fifteen he entered the Royal
Academy of Music in London as a flute student, later
winning scholarships that enabled him to continue his
instrumental training while studying composition. He
wrote a large number of works while establishing a
career as a virtuoso flautist, and in 1926 he was
appointed Professor of Composition at the Academy.
The following year he joined the London Symphony
Orchestra to play third flute and piccolo (his first
engagement was at the Three Choirs Festival, where he
took part in a performance of The Dream of Gerontius
conducted by Elgar) and also had his first major
orchestral work, the Five Preludes for Orchestra,
performed at a Promenade Concert in London. In 1938
he took the radical step of withdrawing all his
compositions, believing them to be technically
unsatisfactory and insufficiently personal in style. After
a second period of musical study, this time with the
scores of composers he revered, he gradually built up a
body of ‘mature’ works that includes five symphonies,
concertos, operas, more than two hundred film scores,
and much instrumental, chamber and vocal music.
Alwyn, whose name is familiar to many through his
teaching works for the piano, had an enduring love of
the instrument. ‘The very touch of my fingers on its
keyboard is a joy in itself’, he wrote, ‘and its
possibilities and sonorities are infinite’. Yet his largescale
piano works are rarely performed, partly because
of their demands for a virtuoso technique.
The Piano Concerto No. 1 dates from 1930 and was
inspired by the musicianship of Clifford Curzon (1907-
1982), Alwyn’s fellow-student at the Royal Academy of
Music and a lifelong friend. Curzon gave the first
performance in December 1931, with the composer
conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. One
of the most innovative of Alwyn’s early works, the
concerto is cast in a single movement that nevertheless
falls into four recognisable sections. The first, Allegro
deciso, which has a toccata-like opening, is soon
followed by what is effectively the concerto’s slow
movement, marked Adagio tranquillo, a gently
rhapsodic development of musical ideas already
presented. After a return to the mood and tempo of the
concerto’s opening, a restatement of the work’s first
main theme quickly builds to an orchestral climax. This
quietens into the Epilogue, Adagio molto e tranquillo,
the introspective beauty of which echoes that of the
work’s second section and brings the concerto to a
peaceful conclusion.
By the time he wrote the Sonata alla toccata fifteen
years later, Alwyn was using the discipline of neoclassicism
to structure his mature compositional style,
but, typically, he refused to allow his natural lyricism to
be straitjacketed. This ‘virtuoso piece for agile fingers’,
as he described it, therefore begins with a proud C major
presentation of its thematic material, followed by a
series of variations in toccata form, before eventually
breaking free from all stylistic constraints to end ‘in a
mood of uninhibited romanticism’. The sonata was
written for Denis Matthews (1919-1988), who gave the
first performance at the 1953 Cheltenham Festival.
The works that open and close the programme on
this disc, though quite different in scale and idiom, are
closely connected through circumstance. In 1960 the
BBC commissioned Alwyn’s Piano Concerto No. 2, to
be given its first performance at that year’s season of
Promenade Concerts by the Dutch pianist Cor de Groot
(1914-1993). The result was an exuberant and
deliberately crowd-pleasing work that is on a much
larger scale than its predecessor. Only months before the
performance, however, de Groot’s right arm was
suddenly paralysed and his concert career brought to a
temporary halt. The premičre was cancelled, and the
concerto then virtually forgotten. Alwyn later revised it
by excising the second movement and inserting a short
orchestral passage to link the first and third, but the
concerto was never heard in his lifetime – indeed, it still
awaits a public performance.
Alwyn’s second wife, the composer Doreen
Carwithen (1922-2003), believed strongly that the
beautiful central Andante should be restored, and it is
her reconstruction of the Concerto, which also features a
revised conclusion of the first movement, that is heard
on this recording. Such is the epic sweep of the work
that it might almost be interpreted as Alwyn’s homage to
Rachmaninov. After a brief crescendo on the brass, the
piano introduces a series of virtuosic octave flurries that
immediately establish the heroic nature of the Concerto,
and the melodies that follow are typically Alwynian in
their breadth and passion. But the movement is also full
of incident and surprise, such as the quiet ending, after a
long piano cadenza, that leads directly into the central
Andante. The mood of this second movement is mostly
calm and reflective, and its orchestral textures are at
times reduced to almost chamber-music proportions.
This movement, like the first, ends peacefully, with
gentle, chorale-like progressions for unaccompanied
piano.
In contrast, the finale returns to the brilliance of the
concerto’s opening but now introduces jazz
syncopations, played with dissonant abandon by the
pianist before being taken up by the full orchestra. A
calmer central section suddenly leads into a broad,
expressive melody on unison strings before the strident
brass rhythms of the movement’s opening bars reappear.
After a long, virtuosic piano cadenza the
orchestra leads the music to a breathless close that
features a final, unexpected harmonic twist.
Having been forced to abandon the concerto, Alwyn
was asked to substitute a short, lively piece with which
the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir
Malcolm Sargent, could open a Promenade Concert that
season. The result was the Overture Derby Day, a
brilliant and bustling work that uses the composer’s own
version of twelve-tone technique. This is not as dry or
academic as it may sound, for Alwyn, like his
contemporary Samuel Barber, was an unashamed
Romantic whose adoption of the twelve-tone row was
grounded in tonality. At pains to point out that this
technique was merely his stimulus to composition rather
than an end in itself, Alwyn preferred his music to
appeal to the heart rather than to the head – because of
its melodic and harmonic richness rather than the
mathematical precision of its structure. Derby Day was
supposedly inspired by the painting of the same name by
William Powell Frith, a Victorian artist who excelled in
crowd scenes, but in fact the title was not assigned until
after the work was written. ‘It seemed aptly to describe
the excitement and vitality of the piece’, Alwyn
admitted, before pointing out that composers are
inspired by pictorial ideas much less often than we
might suspect.
Andrew Palmer