Ellicott: Piano Trio No.1

[mikehopf]

Last Sunday's concert byTrio Anima Mundi featured the first performance of Rosalind Ellicott's Piano Trio No.1 in G.  It was a bold and lively work quite Brahmsian in parts.
A recording of the work should be available towards the end of the year coupled with trios by Coleridge Taylor, Henry Warner and Cliffe Forrester. I must admit to knowing nothing about the last two composers. Kenji Fujimura, the leader of the trio, paid special tribute to Unsung Composers who were instrumental in his obtaining the full score.Trio Anima Mundi specialise in turn of the century ( 19th/20th) British piano trios and would welcome suggestions by our members as to future repertoire.

[Gareth Vaughan]

Ernest Austin wrote 5 piano trios. Nos. 2,4 and 5 are in the BL. I have not been able to locate 1 or 3. Ethel Barns wrote a charming Adagio in F minor for piano trio. The Piano Trio no. 1, Op. 20 by William Fenney is available at IMSLP and strikes me as an engaging work. Some of these might be worth exploring. Frederic Cowen also wrote some piano trios but I have not seen them and do not know if they have survived.

[mikehopf]

Great minds think alike, Gareth. Kenji is indeed looking to record trios by Ernest Austin together with trios by Leo Livens, Alec Rowley, Theodore Dubois and Ernest Guiraud.
I know nothing about Livens and Rowley.

[Gareth Vaughan]

I wish MOST FERVENTLY that I could interest him in the 3 piano trios of Litolff. They are, IMHO, brilliant compositions - really well-crafted, interesting, and melodic. Litolff is greatly underestimated. All are available on IMSLP.

[Gareth Vaughan]

I should add that both Livens and Rowley are known to me but I had no idea either had written a piano trio. The music of both these composers is delightful, so I am looking forward to hearing what has been unearthed.

[Santo Neuenwelt]

Yes, it is certainly a shame that no one has recorded the Litolff piano since the Mirecourt did Op.47 on an LP long ago. We would reprint and stimulate interest in them if someone would only record them.

IMSLP put a "complete" copy of Austin's Piano Trio No.4 on their website. Unfortunately, it is not complete. One of the pages from the violin part is missing. We reported but nothing was ever done about it. It was recorded by the Summerhayes Piano Trio on Meridian along with Ellicott No.2, the Verne-Bredt Phantasy Trio and and Thomas Dunhill's Piano Trio in C Major WoO from 1900

Hiller's Piano Trio No.6, Op.186 was recently released. It's gorgeous and just reinforces the fact that his chamber music with piano and strings is far superior to his string quartets. Would that his other piano trios saw the light of day.

[Santo Neuenwelt]

With regard to Ellicott No.2, we asked the BL to make a copy for us but their price was such that we could never hope to recover it, let alone ever make a profit, in our lifetime...Thank you BL.

[eschiss1]

I've put a report in (one has to put {{missing}} in a part of the page.) I don't know where it was scanned from (it says "Unknown") though I'm guessing the editor uploaded it from his own collection and forgot to put his name in.

(Of course worse comes to weisswurst, one can try pasting in a page retypeset from the piano score. Will have to see. Am contacting the uploader ("Schalltrichter").)

[Gareth Vaughan]

You have all my sympathy, Santo. The BL's prices are an outrage. I know three or four musicians personally, excluding myself, who have complained to them about this, pointing out that they are doing no favours to the music they are supposed to be protecting for posterity, but it falls on deaf ears.

[Gareth Vaughan]

I see that both the RCM and Manchester University have copies of Ellicott's second trio. Either of these should be happy to make you a copy at considerably less than the cost from BL.

[eschiss1]

Hrm. Re the Austin, the best solution may yet prove to be to retypeset the violin part, or that/those movements of it (I need to double-check exactly where the break is), from its equivalent in the piano score, and "paste it in"; inelegant, but it will result in a complete violin part... hopefully this isn't one of those works where the parts contain much (e.g. expression) information not also present in the score. It seems offhand that only the LoC in the US and a few British libraries, near as I can determine, as libraries go, have this work.

Wait wait... Mr. Neuenwelt? Which page of the violin part of Austin #4 is missing? I see a repeated page no.3 but the pages go "1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6".  There is no page no.7 because the violin part ends with the D major conclusion @ page no.6 anyway? Cello part seems fine... if the piano part is funky, mind, we have much more serious trouble...

[eschiss1]

"We reported but nothing was ever done about it."

actually, I see, looking through the _file history_, that p.2 of the violin part _was_ missing. But this problem was fixed back a whole year ago by the same uploader (Schalltrichter). He has now gone and uploaded a version without the duplicated page 3. This may take a couple of days to process... (grump, grump, admittedly I chose to waste my time on this without checking to see for myself if there was still a problem...)

[Santo Neuenwelt]

 Thanks Eric! We looked for a while, probably for about a year and then gave up. Good work.

And Gareth thanks also. I will tell Diana Ambach who was going to get it for us about this.

[Yeates]

The recording of the Piano Trio No.1 by Ellicott has been announced for release in January 2020
https://divineartrecords.com/forthcoming/