International Piano

This eminently worthwhile release from the Australian Trio Anima Mundi opens the window on a neglected corpus of English chamber music, the coal-smoke nostalgia of Muriel Draper’s Music at Midnight a rustle away.

Boughton’s Celtic Prelude (1921) wends a thoughtful journey, bearing repetition. Climaxing in a ruddy setting ‘Twankydillo; from a 1719 text, Pills to Purge Melancholy, Forrester’s Folk Song Fantasy (Cobbett Competition, 1917), evokes lanes and yarrowed Sussex hedgerows.

Warner’s Trio (Coolidge Prize, 1921) is crafted and transparently spicy/impish, with a deft central scherzo. Primarily a violist, he could turn an efficient set-piece. Going too often through the motions, Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s early effort (1893) catches the attention less. Contrastingly, Rosalind Ellicott’s First (1889), the discovery of this album, is a full-blown vision with a comely central Adagio. Weaving notes, casting spells, generating tension, structure building was her strength. No Victorian drapes here.

If there’s a message that comes across from these period-specific works on either side of the First World War, it’s that the Stanford/Elgar/Bantock/VW example wasn’t the only English one; that the folksong revival was to take many forms; and that the Mendelssohn/ Brahms/Leipzig school wasn’t the Holy Grail for all. Escape was possible.

—Ateş Orga