Simon Callaghan - Clarke & Busch: Complete Piano Music (2022)

In his obituary of William Busch, the writer and broadcaster John Amis observed that ‘His music is distinguished by its sensibility and warmth with a strong sense of form and a fine texture, linear rather than harmonic. It is tragic that he should have died when he was writing at the height of his powers and at a time when his gifts were beginning to receive recognition. Recognition will not cease now, for his work has permanent values’. Over forty year later, in a series of radio programs entitled ‘Forgotten Reputations’, Amis warned that ‘Of all the musicians of the ’30s and ’40s… William Busch is the most likely to be forgotten’. The current release preserves an important part of his creative legacy and seeks to ensure that his music lives on. Though some of Rebecca Clarke’s most successful pieces feature the piano, such as her Viola Sonata (1919) and Piano Trio (1921) and her writing for the instrument in those scores is both idiomatic and inventive, she only wrote a handful of solo piano pieces, all featured on this release.