Duncan Honeybourne with Leora Cohen
Release Date: 05 July 2024
Label: Prima Facie
Packaging Type: Digipak
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 7141148050892
Genres: Classical
Description
This album restores to the world the solo piano and chamber music of a long-forgotten, enigmatic figure. Jessy Lilian Reason, nee Wolton, born in London in 1878, was the daughter of a wealthy hop merchant.
In 1902, in Cornwall, she married a gentleman of private means twenty years her senior, with whom she settled firstly in Devon and later in Tonbridge, Kent. In the late 1920s the couple made a final move, to Reading, where Jessy died in 1938.
In May 1992 the writer Alan Poulton discovered a large haul of manuscripts in a Leicester junk shop. He purchased the collection and took it home in two suitcases. In the 2020 Covid lockdown, now retired and with time on his hands, he set about exploring and cataloguing the manuscripts, and researching the life of the woman who had penned the 70 handwritten works in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Reason's oeuvre ranges from a significant output of songs and piano pieces, through chamber music to full orchestral and choral compositions. The paperwork accompanying the collection reveals that Mrs Reason studied composition with the renowned composer and conductor Eugene Goossens, some fifteen years her junior. How much of Reason's music was performed during her lifetime is unclear: all that has come to light as yet is a performance of a single song at London's Wigmore Hall and a song cycle given at a minor concert in West London, all in the early 1920s.
This disc presents Reason's complete solo piano output, together with a sequence of three Poems for violin and piano. All demonstrate her distinctive impressionistic style: richly romantic; passionately lyrical; densely chromatic; intensely perfumed. Reason, clearly, was a highly gifted woman: long forgotten, whose mysterious tale presents us with more questions than answers but whose music speaks to us across the decades with an irresistible fervour and sincerity.
Tracklisting
Xuefei Yang, Johannes Moser, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Or
Kenneth Hamilton
Kenneth Hamilton
Michael Cretu
Laura Serra
The Choir of Robinson College, Cambridge & Will Sims
Helen Cawthorne
David Daly, Duncan Honeybourne, Ondrej Vrabec, Daniel Wiesner, Graham Walker, David Trippett
Karolos
Daniel Di Prinzio, Ihor Kordiuk
Nora von Marschall
Isabel Schicketanz
The Counterpoints
Narratio Quartet
Danbi Um; Juho Pohjonen
Lea Suter
