Piano Sonata (‘broken branches’)

‘My sonata,’ Stephen Hough writes,‘is constructed of 16 small, inconclusive sections and I wanted a title which would pull these fragments together.    The work is one unit uneasily fragmented, not a series of vignettes or album leaves – saplings existing comfortably in their own space – but broken branches from one a single tree (or forest). They are “broken branches” in three senses: firstly, as described above, fragments of fragility, related in theme but incomplete and damaged; secondly, I wanted the piece to be an oblique tribute to Janáček’s cycle On an Overgrown Path; and thirdly in a spiritual dimension: ‘“I am the Vine, you are the Branches. Cut off from me you can do nothing”’, said Christ to his disciples in St. John’s Gospel. The climax of this Sonata is a section called “non credo”, based on material from the Credo of my Missa Mirabilis which explores issues of unbelief, doubt and despair in the context of the concrete affirmations of the Nicene Creed.    The penultimate section, a wordless but metrically exact setting of the 6^th century text “Crux Fidelis”, reveals another “branch’”– the wood of the Cross – and the doubt and despair of God in Christ. The Sonata begins with a “Prelude (Autumn)” and ends with a “Postlude (Spring)”.    The music is identical in both except that the anguish of the former’s G sharp minor is blanched into G major at    the end of the piece.    Branches begin their lives anew in the Spring, and nothing is so broken that it cannot be healed.’