Ireland Fantasy Sonata – Clarinet and Piano Works

John Ireland occupies one of those awkward positions in English music — too individual to be lumped comfortably with the pastoral school, too rooted in a particular emotional climate to travel easily beyond these shores. He was formed by London, by the fog and grime of it, by the countryside of Sussex and the Channel Islands, by an inner life that was complicated, private, and shot through with unresolved tensions — religious, sexual, philosophical. All of that bleeds into the music, which at its best has a bittersweet intensity unlike anything else in the British repertoire.

The Fantasy Sonata for clarinet and piano is a case in point. Ireland wrote it in 1943, dedicated it to Frederick Thurston — the great clarinettist of that generation, who gave the premiere at the Wigmore Hall in January 1944 with Kendall Taylor at the piano — and then essentially stopped composing major works. Nearly twenty years of life remained, but the creative spring had gone quiet. So this piece carries a particular weight: a summing up, an autumnal reckoning.

The form is deceptive. Fourteen minutes, nominally a single span — but what Ireland actually builds is something closer to a compressed three-movement sonata, the sections interlocked rather than simply juxtaposed. The lineage the Cobbett Phantasie competitions established is there in the background, that old English “fancy” lurking behind the modern façade. Ireland absorbed it and transformed it into something harmonically richer and emotionally more ambiguous than any competition piece ever dreamed of being.

Linda Merrick and Julian Hellaby play it beautifully. Merrick’s tone in the opening pages has exactly the right quality — a kind of willed restraint, as though the music is being held back from something it can’t quite name. The “tranquilo” passage that functions as the slow movement’s emotional center is genuinely touching here, the clarinet’s line floating above Hellaby’s spare accompaniment with an intimacy that feels earned rather than manufactured. There are moments in this work that suggest Brahms — the late clarinet sonatas are not far off — and there are others, especially in the more assertive passages, where something harder and more angular intrudes, almost jazzy in its syncopated edge, which brings to mind Ireland’s Piano Concerto of 1930. Merrick and Hellaby understand this stylistic range and move through it without making the seams show.

The Housman songs are another matter — or rather, a more compressed one. Only two pieces from The Land of Lost Content appear here: “The Lent Lily” and “Vain Desire.” One wishes for more. Ireland’s Housman settings rank among the finest English song cycles of the century, and these two songs, well sung as they are, leave you wanting the full arc of the cycle. Still, “The Lent Lily” in particular — that opening song with its modal freshness — lands with genuine freshness.

“Santa Chiara,” the setting of Arthur Symons’s poem about Palm Sunday in Naples, is something else entirely. The text evokes the blue sea stretching toward Sorrento, the wind off the water, the strange conflation of Christian ritual and Mediterranean sensuousness — and Ireland responds to it with music that sits uneasily between devotion and doubt. He was that kind of man. The song has a quality of sorrow that doesn’t resolve into consolation, which is exactly right.

The Rhapsody of 1915 is the most demanding piece here — a substantial piano work conceived in the shadow of the First World War, with all the darkness that implies. Ireland was in his mid-thirties, not yet at the peak of his reputation, and the piece shows him wrestling openly with large-scale form. Two themes drive it: one rugged and combative, the other more lyrical, more yielding. Hellaby handles the rhetorical demands of this “symphonic poem for piano” with confidence and textural clarity, though a few of the more turbulent climaxes might have used another degree of ferocity. There is real music here — not a footnote in the Ireland catalogue but a genuine statement.

This is not a flashy disc. It doesn’t position itself as a definitive survey or a revisionist argument. What it offers instead is committed, intelligent musicianship in the service of a composer who deserves far more attention than the mainstream repertoire has ever given him. Recommended without reservation.