Herbert Howells’ choral works refracted the light of Anglican music and paved the way for the likes of Leighton to keep, in that tradition, the door to spiritual doubt ajar. His work for solo piano is, however, hardly known. This does not necessarily point to his relative deficiency in the medium so much as demonstrate how we, perhaps unfairly, measure him by his choral output alone. Matthew Schellhorn gives us an opportunity to reckon whether we have been right in doing so.
While there is indeed much on this disc to enjoy, it serves also as a useful survey of Howells’ maturation in the medium. The works are more or less chronologically ordered; Howells wrote the ‘The Arab Song’ in 1908, and the last work on the album, his Sonatina, was published in 1971. Naturally, not all of this music bears the stamp of the ‘Howells style’ that we know from the sacred music he composed later in life. Nevertheless, not only is it interesting to find the pieces which one could easily guess are his, it is also satisfying to find in his earlier works both the influence of other composers - Brahms, Elgar, Fauré among others - as well as forays into a language that Howells had yet to fully develop. At any rate, the question is not whether Howells’ choral writing outshines that of his work for the keyboard: it does. Rather, the question is whether his piano works are in any event worth hearing. Whatever the answer, this disc at the very least shows that Schellhorn is, after fellow pianist Margaret Fingerhut before him, the one to make the case that it is.
The album opens with ‘Comme le cerf soupire’, tr. ‘Like the deer sighs’, whose old French melody sounds as though it might have been adapted from Kyrie plainchant. If Schellhorn meant to demonstrate from the outset the piano’s ability to sing on a single line, he has here succeeded. (If you are new to Schellhorn’s playing, this introduction doubles - possibly unintentionally - as a note-by-note preview of his style at its barest. See for yourself but in a word it’s sinuous.) With the melody’s return, Howells begins to add layers to the texture as though illuminating more of the space in which he situates us: cold and dim with a widely spaced F# minor chord, like a monk’s cell, or the long-abandoned drawing room of a grand house. Once Schellhorn finds a darling Bb first inversion sus chord - proving that composers employed it long before Lauridsen (while depending on it less!) - it is like we have discovered the place’s memory, and are here to stay. As things progress through this second iteration, so also does our sense of place deepen. The third brings tension and new demands; rising and falling cascades cross themselves repeatedly and unapologetically. This culminates in a kind of paralysis: Howells pins us with a half-diminished chord re-voiced around the melody note, a bell-like Bb that strikes two octaves above the pedal octave As and hangs in the air like a stalactite before he unclenches his grip and grants or finds some grim courage to reprieve us from this - presumably his - reckoning. The melody’s return is bloodied but there is a final sense of all having been borne, and it having been better, or necessary, to have borne it, even if to no ultimate avail.
Schellhorn executes the character of each note and chord with painstaking clarity. His interpretative decisions, both instinctive and premeditated, testify to the king of American song Thomas Hampson’s statement: ‘There is no limit to how hard you must work and how detailed you must be in every facet of what you do.’ Howells was, like Elgar and Britten, a composer who left no detail to chance, but Schellhorn’s license here is welcome.
‘Comme le cerf soupire’
‘Comme le cerf soupire’ is the exception to an otherwise unbroken order of works composed first to last; after it comes ‘The Arab’s Song’, which Howells penned on his sixteenth birthday. In hindsight, it is endearingly clear how talented the young Howells was: even here within a fairly square and familiar harmonic structure, Howells shows flair as well as an impatience for cliché with his mixing of two and three time in the left-hand, a preparation for the piece’s subsequent mazurka section.
One clear advantage of Howells’ piano writing is that it offers a glimpse of his playful side. Much of the album consists of several characterful miniatures and shorter pieces. A personal favourite is ‘Melody’, which may or may not owe something to Manuel de Falla. ‘The Sailor’s Tune’ is good fun, as is the spirited and well-captured ‘Promenade for Boys’. On the heroic end is the relatively well known, ‘The Chosen Tune’. As the one crossover from this disc with Margaret Fingerhut’s, it’s worth dipping into to compare the two approaches. Both performances are first-rate. Fingerhut’s pacing is faster and more even, and she rolls assuredly into the climax. But Schellhorn’s makes Fingerhut’s sound a touch by-the-book. His is the more romantic of the two; each is worth hearing but he finds more in the tune to cherish.
The Country Pageant is a collection of four tunes which Howells wrote in his middle age. When they are jaunty (‘Merry Andrew’s Procession’, ‘The Mummers’ Dance’) they sound a little like grade six exam pieces, though at the time they may have come across as less Associated Board and more like the charming expressions of lost parochialism that they are. Later on in the record is the ‘Minuet for Ursula’ that Howells composed for his daughter. Though also a kind of study - Howells meant for it to encourage Ursula at the piano - it is pretty and has in it a kind of naive symmetry. The third and by far the most mellifluous in the Pageant set is ‘There Was a Most Beautiful Lady’, which starts well but grows tediously pentatonic and at times a bit diffuse. There are, however, foreshadowings of the sort of chords that Howells would use forty years later in his choral masterpiece, ‘Take Him Earth For Cherishing’. (I would add that, by this point, it seems that Richard Rodney Bennett in his piano writing owes something to the older composer.)
The Little Book of Dances consciously takes inspiration, as has been said elsewhere, from the 16th century. ‘Minuet’ is pretty, but the ‘Pavane’ stands out from the other five. Schellhorn exerts an almost French level level of control over suspended notes. In particular, his touch on the low F# through the first and recurring descending passage is exquisite: in a miniature that is otherwise mannered it is a betrayal of something warmer, like a concupiscent look from under an intricate coiffure.
And so the record rolls on through various ditties, one of which, the ‘Promenade for Girls’ has a tune that takes a little after Debussy’s ‘The Little Shepherd’ from Children’s Corner, but isn’t as good. The ‘Promenade’ demonstrates the extent to which soft-edged, meandering, or otherwise rootless patterns can go too far: relentlessly lydian melodies that start winsomely enough risk growing tiresome.
Not so with the ‘Et nunc et semper’, which comes near the end. This is a return to the spiritual seriousness of ‘Comme le cerf soupire’ with added mysticism. There is, here, also a struggle, but we don’t reach the climax or apparent epiphany in the eye of its storm of minor ninths, and its afterglow stumped at least my expectations for it. At first, letting us rest in safer harmonic territory, Howells provides a balm for what he has just stretched and torn as if his thoughts themselves were despairing and straining at their own fabric. However, what follows is something that is more than a release of tension. It is as something gnomic and hermetic; a discovery at once clear and inscrutable. Listening, we feel like an explorer who, having gained the treasure hoard, slips into a smaller chamber enclosing a sealed mystery which once disclosed will be known only by personal report. This is not the final expression of an ardent feeling, but a quieter and less certain revelation: as Indiana Jones has it: ‘the cup of a carpenter’, et nunc et semper. Whether or not Schellhorn feels likewise, he neither hastens to the secret before we’re ready, nor does he delay it for his own indulgence; it is as though we find it with him.
Schellhorn makes his case well. There are some works on this disc for which two or three listens are more than enough; others may stand without shame next to pieces far better known in the piano repertory. The takeaway is that Howells was not a choral composer writing for keyboard. Rather, he was a composer who wrote through the mediums at his disposal in order to express whatever he needed to–whether as a boy flexing his early abilities, or a father fondly nudging his daughter toward the piano stool, or a parent forever thrown into grief and doubt after the loss of his son Michael. After hearing his piano music, and in particular these performances of it, one only finds more that is admirable in the composer, and likeable in the man.