The Pre-Raphaelite Cello

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 Webberas 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!