Gurney and Elgar Violin Sonatas – Marshall-Luck

Ivor Gurney wrote his Violin Sonata in E flat major in the shadow of two catastrophes — the war that shattered his nerves, and the mental collapse that was already, by 1918, beginning to close over him like weather. He would spend his last fifteen years in an asylum at Dartford, writing poems on scraps of paper, some of them addressed to Beethoven. That a work of this scope and ambition survived at all, unpublished and essentially unplayed for a century, tells you something about how carelessly the English musical establishment treated its own wounded.

So a premiere recording of a piece running well past half an hour is, by any reckoning, an occasion. Rupert Marshall-Luck, who did the unglamorous work of untangling Gurney’s manuscript and sorting out bowings the composer himself may never have finalized, deserves credit that goes beyond mere annotation. This was an act of restoration, almost archaeological.

Is the sonata a masterpiece? No, not quite, and I don’t think it wants to pretend to be one. The first movement sprawls a bit on first hearing, its paragraphs stitched together in ways that feel provisional rather than inevitable. Live with it, though, and the logic emerges: Gurney is threading the same intervallic cells through wildly different textures, Brahms filtered through a very English reticence. The second movement is over almost before it begins, barely a scherzo, more a sketch, but its opening bars, violin plucking out a spare pizzicato beneath the piano’s tune, have a startling tenderness, like someone humming to themselves in an empty room.

The slow movement is where the piece earns its claim on your attention. Marshall-Luck plays it with a long bow and unhurried vibrato, letting the melody breathe without ever letting it sag, and Matthew Rickard’s piano writing underneath, dense with inner voices, never once muddies. This is where Gurney the song composer and Gurney the sonata composer meet and, for six or seven minutes, reconcile completely. The finale can’t quite match that intensity, few finales can after a slow movement like this, but it does the necessary work of gathering up the earlier material and giving it a satisfying, if not triumphant, sendoff.

I’ll say plainly: my own private ranking of English violin sonatas still puts Rubbra’s Second and Moeran’s ahead of this one. But that’s a high bar, and Gurney’s sonata belongs in the conversation now in a way it simply could not before this album existed.

Lionel Sainsbury’s Soliloquy for solo violin, op. 21, is the disc’s quiet surprise. Seven minutes, no piano, nowhere to hide. Sainsbury, a name I confess I didn’t know before this release, which is my loss, writes for the instrument with an old-fashioned trust in melody and double-stop sonority rather than the extended techniques that so many composers reach for when they sit down to write unaccompanied violin music. There’s a whiff of Rubbra’s Variations on a Phrygian Theme in its harmonic language, and a whiff too of Bloch’s Baal Shem music in its cantorial intensity. Marshall-Luck plays it as if he’s known it for decades. It leaves a bigger mark than seven minutes has any right to.

Then, Elgar. The Violin Sonata in E minor, op. 82, is not exactly starved for advocates on disc: Kennedy, McAslan, Tasmin Little, Daniel Hope have all left their mark on it, and each brings something different to the sonata’s peculiar late-autumn ache. This new account holds its own in that company and then some. Marshall-Luck leans into the work’s wistfulness, that particular Elgarian nostalgia, half nobilmente, half heartbreak, without ever letting the first movement’s more turbulent writing curdle into sentimentality. Rickard’s piano playing throughout has weight without thickness. You can hear every strand of Elgar’s often busy keyboard writing without the sound ever turning to sludge, which is not nothing in a work premiered, let us not forget, in the same year as the Cello Concerto, by musicians grieving a war that had not yet ended.

Taken as a whole, this disc does exactly what a good reissue-plus-premiere project should: it makes you hear the familiar piece freshly by placing it beside the unfamiliar one. Anyone with an interest in British music of this vintage, and there ought to be more of you than there are, should hear it without delay.