Molly Gebrian & Danny Holt: Trailblazers: Sonatas by Bosmans, Smyth, and Pejacevic
Acis

Violist Molly Gebrian is more than just a performer on this nearly seventy-minute recording with pianist Danny Holt. As the three sonatas were originally written for cello, she crafted new arrangements and also liner notes that provide illuminating commentaries on the composers and the works. The term “trailblazers” is no misnomer, by the way: Henriëtte Bosmans, Ethel Smyth, and Dora Pejacevic fearlessly challenged the social mores and expectations of their time and embraced without apology who they were. Not only did they leave a significant mark as composers, the choices they made in other aspects of their lives are inspiring for offering templates others might follow.

In her notes, Gebrian recounts how she serendipitously discovered the album content when YouTube's auto-play feature presented Pejacevic's cello sonata after another piece the violist had sought out. Captivated by a composer whose work until that moment she didn't know, Gebrian found herself as charmed by the Bosmans and Smyth cello sonatas that appeared next. Gebrian's unfamiliarity with all three composers prompted her to wonder why works of such obvious merit weren't better known and regularly performed. At that moment, she committed herself to recording the sonatas and set about creating transcriptions. In doing so, she not only gave herself new material to perform, she added to the repertoire of late-Romantic sonatas from which her fellow violists might select.

Gebrian's text also provides fascinating insight into the transcription process. She notes, for example, that Smyth's was the easiest as it merely involved raising the viola part an octave above the cello's. A bigger issue involved pizzicato for the fact that, in her estimation, it sounds resonant and powerful on the cello but flimsy and weak on the viola. As a solution, Gebrian elected to play pizzicato chords with the bow rather than fingers to give the music the impact the composer intended. Her descriptions of how other technical issues were handled are as informative.

Dutch composer Bosmans (1895–1952) came from a musical family—her dad a cellist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and her mom a conservatory piano teacher—and began piano lessons early. WWII-related developments complicated the life and career paths of the half-Jewish Bosmans, but after the war's end she resumed composing. Openly bisexual, her partner in the 1920s was cellist Frieda Belinfante, who inspired the writing of many a Bosmans work. The one transcribed by Gebrian, the Sonata in A minor, was created in 1919 and exemplifies the Romantic style of the composer's early output.

The father of English composer Smyth (1858–1944) was adamantly opposed to her desire to study music, but she overcame his opposition to study music in Leipzig where she later met Brahms, Clara Schumann, and Tchaikovsky. During the 1910s, the fiercely independent and bisexual Smyth became heavily involved in the British women's suffrage movement (she'd returned to England in 1890) and in addition to composing established herself as a writer and even worked as an assistant radiologist during WWI. Similar to the cello sonata by Bosmans, Smyth's was composed in 1887 and thus written during her late twenties.

Although Pejacevic (1885-1923) was born into a Croatian upper-class family (her father was a count and her mother a Hungarian baroness), she was contemptuous of the aristocracy and, consistent with that, worked as a volunteer nurse during WWI and at her death requested a commoner's burial. Pejacevic was essentially self-taught as a composer but received recognition during her lifetime for her works, which numbered 106 when she died from kidney failure at the age of thirty-eight a month after giving birth to her son.

Each of the sonatas challenges the performers in multiple ways. Many movements, for instance, are in the seven-minute range, which demands the musicians sustain high levels of concentration and poise for extended durations. With Holt as her partner, Gebrian does precisely that and more. As attested to be their visceral rendering of the Bosmans sonata, the duo distinguishes their performances with playing that's passionate yet precise. After the broad sweep of the allegro establishes the piece memorably, the calmer second movement amplifies the work's lyrical side and the slow third an even more serene character until the rousing fourth, marked “Allegro molto e con fuoco,” brings the piece to a spirited close.

Opening at a rapid pace, Smyth's Sonata in A minor, Op. 5 moves from a radiant allegro to an enveloping and occasionally funereal adagio that Gebrian rightly characterizes as “Brahmsian”; the joyful, uninhibited romp of the concluding “Allegro vivace e grazioso” registers even more intensely when heard in the wake of the slow movement. Pejacevic's Sonata in E Minor, Op. 35 (1913, revised 1915) is as zestful as Smyth's and, as its rhapsodic opening allegro shows, melodically enticing too. The graceful scherzo is no less engaging, while the melancholy of the slow movement is articulated sensitively by the duo. One final surprise arrives in the folk-tinged exuberance of the closing allegro. A cantabile dimension is also vividly present in the writing that the musicians amplify in an inspired, twenty-eight-minute performance.

Gebrian is as multi-faceted as the composers featured on Trailblazers: not only is she a professional violist, she's a neuroscientist with degrees from Oberlin College and Conservatory, New England Conservatory of Music, and Rice University. The disciplines intertwine in her life and research, given that her area of expertise has to do with the roles learning and memory play in practicing and performing. Interestingly, just as Trailblazers shines a light on composers deserving of greater recognition, a recent solo album by Holt, Piano Music of Mike Garson, does the same by giving attention to a composer many remember most as the pianist who contributed to David Bowie's great Aladdin Sane album and others.

May 2024