The Pre-Raphaelite Cello

SOMM Recordings is proud to announce a recital disc from cellist Adrian
Bradbury and pianist Andrew West titled The Pre-Raphaelite Cello – at once
ground-breaking and celebratory, and rich with first recordings. The curiosity
piqued by the album’s unusual name will be amply rewarded with the fascinating
story of the artistic threads this programme weaves together and their relevance
to important commemorations being observed this year.
The idea was conceived and devised by pianist Oliver Davies (1938–2020) *, and the
recording is dedicated to his memory. It is a tribute to the renowned British cellist
Beatrice Harrison and her association with the composers of The Frankfurt
Gang whose music she championed. And the occasion of this tribute is the 100th
anniversary of the Nightingale Broadcast, one of the earliest ever made by the
BBC from a remote location: on 19 May 1924 Beatrice sat and played her cello in
the garden of “Foyle Riding” (the family home at Oxted), duetting with the local
nightingales before a microphone that carried them over the airwaves to more
than a million listeners and enchanted a nation.
The composers in Beatrice’s circle included a multi-year cohort of anglophone
composition students under Iwan Knorr at Frankfurt before the turn of the 20th
century. Englishmen Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott and the Australian Percy
Grainger belonged to this Frankfurt Gang, who remained close friends after their
student days in Germany and who adopted the Pre-Raphaelite banner from the
like-minded brotherhood of English painters and poets, distinguishing themselves
musically from other British composers through a focus on emotion rather than
musical architecture. They were among the composers inspired by Beatrice’s
musicianship, and their works on this album were arranged for her or played and
loved by her. These are prefaced on the programme by cello-piano pieces from
Iwan Knorr (the composition professor who unites the Gang) and Hugo Becker
(Beatrice’s cello teacher from the age of 15).
• The album launch will feature a concert by the artists at Foyle Riding on
19 May 2024, the exact centenary of the first Nightingale Broadcast.
• The programme includes 10 first recordings, among them Beatrice’s favourite
encore, L’Amour de moy, Quilter’s arrangement of a medieval French chanson
about a nightingale, which the composer refused to publish so that it would
remain hers alone. Many of these manuscripts lay undiscovered in the Harrison
archive and were saved from the family barn at Hollesley Farm (including parts
with Beatrice’s fingerings) by Harrison Sisters’ Trust Chairman David Candlin.
• The Harrison Sisters’ Trust, which has provided generous funding and archival
support for the recording, has received cellist Julian Lloyd Webber as its new
President. Julian performed the 1992 concert honouring the centenary of Beatrice’s
birth, when her sister Margaret Harrison joined him on the piano for Cyril Scott’s
Pastoral and Reel, a work that features on this recording.
• The month of May will also see publication of the second edition of The Cello
and the Nightingales: The Life of Beatrice Harrison (Canongate Canons) edited by
Patricia Cleveland-Peck, with a new introduction by Maria Popova.
• The BBC is producing its own commemoration of the Nightingale Broadcast
centenary with a Radio 3 documentary that will revisit the event, the music and
associated lore such as the recently debunked claim that variety act Madame
Saberon (the music hall siffleuse Maude Gould) had stood in for the nightingales!