Frank Bridge ‒ Piano Sonata, H.160 

Frank Bridge (1879 - 1941), Piano Sonata, H.160 (1921 - 1924)
Performed by Ashley Wass
The characteristics of Bridge’s late style are foreshadowed in the sonata. There is dissonance arising from bi-tonal and intensely chromatic harmony; the phrase structure differs from the smoothness of his earlier music, reflecting the more complex harmony, with balanced musical sentences replaced by phrases of varied lengths; lastly there are rapidly alternating changes of mood and intensity. What is also manifest throughout is a technical mastery in his command of the overall formal structure and in his writing for the instrument.
The first movement is cast in sonata form, and like many of Bridge’s works it begins with a slow introduction in which the germs of the entire work are introduced, then subsequently developed by an organic process. Here there are two main ideas: the first a brooding processional that grows from a repeated note, with ominous doom-laden chords below; the second a consoling melodic phrase, quintessentially Bridge in character, marked by a grace note. The latter may be thought of as motto theme since allusions are made to it in all three movements. Harmonically the music is ambiguous in its tonality and frequently bi-tonal which adds to the tension of the fast music that now erupts. As it lurches from one climax to another, amidst the evident anguish and pain, moments of solace and consolation based on the motto theme fleetingly appear, but time and again the battle is rejoined until the processional finally reappears as at the opening, but now with the repeated notes hammered out fortississimo as if in railing despair, before a fast coda halts the movement tersely.
The still slow movement, arch-form in structure, offers a haven of calm amidst the slaughter, an elegy mourning not only the waste of life, but equally the futility of war. Overall the chromaticism is less intense than the outer movements although initially, in the sombre opening paragraph the harmony still inhabits the dark world of the first movement. It gives way to a tender melody of elusive beauty which is heard initially in a sparse single line over soft chords. With a central section the music becomes more elegiac and brings fleeting hints of the motto theme, before the tender theme, now elaborated, returns followed by the opening music, and a peaceful coda alluding again to the main melody now shrouded within chords.
In the finale, after the briefest of introductions, the strife returns with a menacing march of destruction, which vividly evokes archive newsreel images of wave upon wave of soldiers going over the top of the trenches, only to be mercilessly mown down. In between its two main appearances, an expressive theme is developed and the motto theme is heard again, but now a mangled, distorted version of its former self, as the music hurtles to two vehement climaxes. At the end the music returns full circle with the reappearance of the processional amidst swaying chords like tolling bells. The motto makes its final appearance but now drained of all hope and the sonata ends in a mood of utter bleakness.
(NAXOS)