Alan Rawsthorne was born on 2 May 1905 in Haslingden, Lancashire. He spent a period of training as a dentist, and not until his early twenties did he take up music seriously. He then entered the Royal Manchester College of Music, studying piano, composition, and cello. In 1930 he went abroad and continued his studies, including piano under Egon Petri. On his return to England he taught from 1932 to 1934 at Dartington Hall, there writing music for the School of Dance-Mime. He settled in London in 1935 and three years later gained international recognition through a performance of his Theme and Variations for two violins at the London Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. The same Society, just at the outbreak of war, produced his Symphonic Studies at the Warsaw Festival, a work which subsequently won a firm place in the orchestral repertoire.
After the war – during which Rawsthorne served in the Army – he devoted the bulk of his time to composition, and although he was not a prolific composer, his output was substantial. Notable among his post-war compositions are the two violin concertos; the Cello Concerto, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society; the Second Piano Concerto – probably the most popular of his major works – three symphonies; the second and third string quartets; the sonatas for violin & piano, and cello & piano; the Quintet for Piano and Wind; the Quintet for Piano and Strings; and the Ballade for piano written for John Ogden. He also composed a good deal of incidental music for stage and film as well as a ballet for Covent Garden, Madame Chrysanthème.
Rawsthorne was awarded the CBE in 1961, and was made an Honorary Doctor of Music by Liverpool, Essex, and Belfast Universities. He died in Cambridge on 24 July 1971, but his elegant and beautifully crafted music continues to be enjoyed by both performers and listeners. There is an active Rawsthorne Society which disseminates information about the composer, and encourages recordings.
In 2007 the Rawsthorne Trust commissioned Edward Harper to re-orchestrate Rawsthorne’s setting of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. The score and parts of the choral work, originally commissioned by the BBC, were destroyed when Rawsthorne’s flat was bombed in 1940. The première of the newly reconstructed work took place in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in March 2008.
QUINTET FOR PIANO, OBOE, CLARINET, HORN, AND BASSOON (1963)
The first performance of Alan Rawsthorne’s Quintet for Wind and Piano took place in the spring of 1963.
The piece was commissioned by the BBC specifically for its prestigious Thursday Invitation Concerts series. While specific individual ensemble configurations varied for the live broadcast broadcast, the primary musicians associated with the debut and subsequent definitive early recordings of the piece included prominent British instrumentalists of the era:
- Sidney Sutcliffe (Oboe)
- Bernard Walton (Clarinet)
- Alan Civil (Horn)
- Roger Birnstingl (Bassoon)
- David Parkhouse (Piano
1966
HARSH-TONED MUSIC ENTERTAINS
By Sally Trethowan
The last of the festival “Music of Britain” chamber concerts given in the Basil Kirk memorial studio last night offered some of the most complex and insistently dissonant music of the whole series. Yet each of the three works was so excellently performed that some measure of the composers musical thought in each case intense and highly individual must surely have impressed the general music lover no matter how unsympathetic he might have been to the harsh contemporary harmonic language. The first work “Quintet for wind and piano” by Alan Rawsthorne, was perhaps the most earnest in intention, and also the most abstruse and uncompromising. Much of it was concerned with working out, in terms of spasmodic tempi, unremitting dissonance and often exciting and original blends of wind colour, two moods, one apparently serene but masking disquieting emotional currents; the other desperately merry. This difficult music was persuasively presented by Alice Carrard (piano), Peter Randall (oboe), Jack Harrison (clarinet), Brian Pope (bassoon) and Neil Pearson (French horn). After this, Trevor Jones’s happy blend of whimsy lyricism and drama in his “Cantata Zoologica” was immensely entertaining. It was given a premiere late last year by the W.A. Bach Society choir and quintet and it was performed last night by the same artists except that the conductor on this occasion was Laughton Harris and the narrator was Neville Teede. Mr Harris’s cogent grasp, poetically and musically of the work was incisively conveyed through the unerring accuracy of his beat to which the choir and instrumentalists responded with brilliant execution. Mr Harris also conducted the final concerto for wind Quintet and two pianos (eight hands) by Malcolm Williamson. The wind players were joined by flautist Owen Fisenden and pianist Madame Carrard by fellow soloist Allyne Tilsed, Stephen Dornan and Michael Cole. This work exhibited complex interplay of tone colour. The finale, where the piano parts exploded in figuration of a Bartokian ferocity and aliveness was, I think, unrivalled in the festival music for sheer excitement of performance. [1]
| 8.3.1966 | Alan Rawsthorne Quintet for Piano, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn, and Bassoon (1963) AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE | Jack Harrison (clarinet) Alice Carrard (piano), Peter Randall (oboe), Brian Pope (bassoon) and Neil Pierson (French horn) | Festival of Perth: “Music of Britain” series Basil Kirke Studio A.B.C. Western Australia |
QUARTET FOR CLARINET AND STRINGS
The Quartet for Clarinet and Strings (composed in 1948) by Alan Rawsthorne was written for and dedicated to the celebrated British clarinettist Frederick Thurston.
The piece received its first performance in London in November 1948 by the following musicians:
- Frederick Thurston (Clarinet)
- Harry Blech (Violin)
- Keith Cummings (Viola)
- Douglas Cameron (Cello)
Chamber Group off to a Good Start
By Derek Moore Morgan
23rd April 1979
The recently formed Wigmore Ensemble made its first public appearance last night with a delightfully varied program at the Octagon Theatre. A flexible group with no fixed numbers, it has the practical advantage of being able to present music of widely different genres some of which inevitably gets left on the shelf because it doesn’t quite fit a specific mould such as the string quartet or Trio. This was a University of W.A. music Society recital. The performers were Graham Wood and Ashley Arbuckle (violins), John Dean (viola), Jill Cole (cello), Neil Fisenden (flute), Jack Harrison (clarinet) and Anthony Madewell (harp). The final item, Ravel’s atmospheric and beautifully crafted “Introduction and Allegro” brought all the players together to produce a nice degree of sonority and delicacy capturing much of the subtlety of the masterpiece. Starting with the Mozart Quartet for Flute and Strings in D major a mellifluous example of the composer’s earliest style, the players gave us a bright indication of the bubbling and effervescent Gatty of the Rondo finale. The British composer Frank Bridge, himself a viola player, wrote a whole body of telling string music. His little known Trio (Rhapsody) from 1928 proved to be a forward looking piece for the difficult unless usual combination of two violins and viola, with mysterious opening and closing sections surrounding an energetic central portion. The Italian composer Malpiero’s “Sonata a cinque” (1936) is an appealing piece of writing which hangs on the air like a haunting elergy. Anthony Maydwell’s expressive harp playing came to the fore here. The Quartet for clarinet and strings by Rawsthorne is another piece of chamber music which is deftly written and manipulates varying moods. Jack Harrison’s neatly inflected clarinet tone was well handled.
[1] The West Australian Wednesday March 9 1966 page 17