Suite No.2 Op.71 for piano duet (1923)

Allegro

Barcarolle

Moto Perpetuo

Having been described by no less an authority than Camille Saint-Saëns as “the most remarkable of the young British composers,” York Bowen should have had a brilliant career ahead of him. He was only 19 at the time and still a student of piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, but he had just played his First Piano Concerto at the Proms and was to go on composing prolifically, while sustaining parallel careers as pianist and teacher, for the next fifty years or so. Music was to undergo several revolutions during the first two or three decades of the 20th century, however. He, on the other hand, would not or could not modify his late-romantic style to take contemporary developments into account. The more music changed, the less relevant he seemed and, although he had his adherents, he effectively sidelined himself from the English mainstream for the rest of his life.

The situation is illustrated in a small way by Bowen’s two suites for piano duet. In 1918, when the First Suite Op.52 won a competition organised by Musical Opinion, his music, attractive but unchallenging as it was, clearly did not seem impossibly out of touch. The Rite of Spring and the First World War had not yet registered their effect on British music. But five years later, in the fashion-conscious 1920s, the Second Suite Op.71 must have seemed distinctly old-fashioned to the arbiters of taste of the day. There is a small development in style here, however, not least in the dissonances which add a glittering surface to the multi-faceted texture of the opening Allegro. While the following Barcarolle remains fundamentally conventional in its rocking rhythms and floating melodic line, it is always interesting for it teasingly oblique, chromatic harmonies and the complex interchange between the four hands. The Moto Perpetuo is brilliantly written for the medium and not a little witty both rhythmically and harmonically. Now that we can hear Bowen’s music for what it essentially is, rather than for what it represents in terms of fashion, it will surely continue to sustain the current revival of interest.