Première of Harpsichord Suite

The young harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis gave what is believed to have been the world premiere of Lennox Berkeley’s Suite for the Harpsichord at a recital sponsored by Southampton University Music Department and the Lennox Berkeley Society at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire on 15 October 2016.

In a spirited and revealing introduction, Christopher Lewis said he found it extraordinary that a work written for harpsichord by a prominent young English composer, at the very moment when Arnold Dolmetsch in England and Wanda Landowska in Paris were reviving interest in baroque keyboard instruments, should have lain unplayed and forgotten for eighty-six years. It was written, he went on, in the summer of 1930, when Berkeley was halfway through his six years of study with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. At the heart of her musical philosophy lay the work of Bach and Stravinsky, so it wasn’t surprising that Berkeley’s Suite should contain traces of both.

The Suite is in five distinct movements lasting about a quarter of an hour in all, starting with a powerful ‘Lento’ and ending with a tuneful ‘March’. The work is dedicated to the talented amateur harpsichordist Vere Pilkington (later Chairman of Sotheby’s), for whom Berkeley had written a number of other harpsichord works while they were both undergraduates sharing rooms at Oxford in the twenties. (On his twenty-first birthday on 1 January 1926 Pilkington was given a harpsichord by his father, and it is likely that Berkeley’s first harpsichord piece, Mr Pilkington’s Toye, dating from the autumn of that year, was written specifically for that instrument.)

Christopher played the Suite on a two-manual Goble harpsichord, on hire from Trinity Laban Conservatoire. His programme also included Five Diversions for Keyboard by Peter Dickinson, who had guided Christopher towards the Berkeley autograph score at the British Library, and advised him in the preparation of a performing edition, which has now been published by Chester’s. The programme began and ended with music by Orlando Gibbons and also included four pieces by Berkeley’s friend and contemporary Herbert Howells – one of them dedicated to the harpsichord maker Thomas Goff.

Before the recital Christopher’s fellow PhD student at Southampton University, Kate Hawnt, gave a revealing talk about Mottisfont’s links with the early twentieth-century harpsichord revival. In 1934 the house was bought by the banker Gilbert Russell and his wife Maud, and it was there, after the war, that their younger son, Raymond, started what was to become one of the most significant collections of early keyboard instruments in Britain. The collection was later bequeathed to the University of Edinburgh, and is now housed in St. Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh.

Raymond Russell was an accomplished harpsichord player, and passionately keen to see a return of the traditions of making and playing early keyboard instruments. He became an acknowledged expert in this field and wrote the catalogue for the collection of keyboard instruments in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Five years before his early death in 1959, he published The Harpsichord and Clavichord – an Introductory Survey, in which many of his own acquisitions, now in the Raymond Russell Collection, are illustrated.

Following the death of Gilbert Russell, his widow gave Mottisfont to the National Trust in 1957, but continued to live there till her death in 1982. Lennox and Freda Berkeley were frequent guests, on one occasion with Thomas Goff and the amateur pianist Burnet Pavitt (to whom Berkeley dedicated his Palm Court Waltz and the Symphony No 4).