Sonata for viola and piano: ‘The Towers of Man’ by composer and pianist Francis Pott

William Hedley, International Record Review, March 2015 wrote of the recording for  EM Records, EMRCD 028 (released 16 December 2014):

The name of the composition refers to two towers on the Isle of Man. …This background information is interesting, but you don’t have to know it to enjoy this superb sonata. …The finale is a virtuoso tour de force. These few words are sadly inadequate to evoke the power of this dramatic and superbly wrought work. …The composer is …clearly a formidable pianist. No praise is too high for Yuko Inoue, whose viola sings with magnificent, throbbing intensity throughout its range and throughout the work. …This is music of great beauty and integrity, and the performance fully does it justice. It would be criminal to let it pass you by.

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Link to the Viola Sonata page within the composer’s personal website:

https://www.francispott.com/sonata-for-viola-and-piano/

 Link to Composers Edition, page for ordering score:

https://composersedition.com/francis-pott-sonata/

 Link to EM Records, page for ordering CD:

https://em-records.com/discs/emr-cd028-details.html

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Pott writes about his sonata …

In August 2009 my ‘Cello Sonata was performed at the Isle of Man Festival in Port Erin by Raphael Wallfisch and Stephen Coombs. Intrigued by the mysterious outline of Milner’s Tower on Bradda Head, guarding the bay directly opposite Port Erin’s Arts Centre and concert hall, I walked up to it on a sunny, blustery afternoon. By the time I returned, a companion sonata for viola and piano had been born out of turbulent weather, dramatic scenery and the strange magnetism of the tower, at once tantalising and forbidding.
The tower was built in 1871 to commemorate the generosity of William Milner, an affluent Liverpool safe maker and philanthropist. He had moved to the Isle of Man in 1860 following a tragic accident in Burnley, where a public demonstration of the fireproof strength of one of his safes resulted in the death of a young boy. Overlooking open water and dramatic headlands on its seaward side, Milner’s Tower acknowledged in particular his support of impoverished Port Erin fishermen – although, driven by remorse over the Burnley incident, his charitable acts extended into many areas of local life. Indeed, upon learning of the tower plan (supposed to be a secret), the town’s benefactor weighed in yet again and helped to finance his own monument. In recognition of Milner’s industrial product (something of which he might possibly have preferred not to be reminded), his Tower is shaped like a safe key, with a single pointed turret in one corner. In strong winds, its hollow and resonant interior space turns it into a huge, eerie musical instrument producing singular and unsettling tones from within, though no attempt has been made to respond to this in the Viola Sonata.
A few miles north of Port Erin on the western coast of Man, another strange building stands on cliffs above the small cathedral city and harbour of Peel. Erected by Thomas Corrin in 1806, this forbidding, four-storey edifice is topped by a flat roof behind a four-foot wall boasting crenellated battlements. Nowadays sealed against intrusion, the tower originally commemorated Corrin’s wife, who had died during childbirth in January of that year, and also two children who may possibly – judging by the sequence of events – have been stillborn twins, though I have been unable to verify the date of the second child’s demise. Corrin laid their bodies to rest in a tiny, strange cemetery of their own, a short step from the tower. Thereafter, unable to tear himself away from the spot which had become the focus of his grief, he took to reading endlessly in an upper room: a pursuit from which he was compelled to desist when shipping began perilously to mistake his nocturnal lighting arrangements for the Peel water break signal.
One source claims that Corrin’s Tower was given by Corrin himself to the Board of Trade in 1840; another that it was purchased by the Manx Government for the princely sum of £57, since by that time fishermen had changed their tune and were protesting against proposed demolition of the building, which they had come to value as a landmark. Corrin himself died in 1845. This strange tragicomedy continued when his fervent wish to lie alongside his departed wife and children was denied. A surviving son, Robert Corrin, refused to countenance burial of his father on unconsecrated ground, so Thomas was laid to rest in the church yard of Kirk Patrick. The saga does not end there, however: for friends later abducted Thomas’s body and reburied it under cover of darkness in the cliff-top cemetery, whereupon they had the ground consecrated and Robert finally bowed to their collective will.
Just off the south-westerly tip of the island lies ‘The Calf of Man’, so called because it appears to rest in the lee of its parent land mass (kalfr is also the old Norse word for a smaller island lying alongside a larger one) – although in fact this position causes it to bear the brunt of formidable ocean gales. Two warning lights on The Calf first came into commission in 1819. Sited on high cliffs, these overlooked the treacherous Chicken Rock, a concealed outcrop a mile and a half out to sea. Despite their height above sea level, the lights were frequently thwarted by fog. In 1866 plans were set in train for a new lighthouse on Chicken Rock itself. The dangers involved in its construction were immense, with work halted outside the calmer summer months and restricted in any case to five-hour periods of low tide. The Chicken Rock lighthouse, a forbidding 150-foot granite tower with only 4,000 square feet exposed at low water, did not begin operations until New Year’s Day 1875, when it was occupied by a team of three men who worked in rotation with a relief assistant stationed on land. This system continued until 23rd December 1960, when an uncontrollable fire took hold in the tower’s kitchen area. The three keepers were forced to climb up to the lantern room and abseil 150 feet in the face of appalling weather conditions and mountainous seas. Lifeboats put out from Port Erin and Port St Mary, but at first rescue proved impossible and the lifeboatmen were in as much peril as those whom they were trying to reach. Over four hours passed before the third man was saved. After this the lighthouse was converted to automatic, unmanned operation. A new lighthouse on The Calf was opened in 1968.
The Sonata makes little attempt to respond to these environmental and historical details in narrative or programmatic terms, but, rather, seeks to convey the emotional and dramatic impact of three particular places and their past upon a visitor seeing them for the first time. Cast in fairly conventional sonata form but with a slightly condensed recapitulation, the opening movement [subtitled Milner’s Tower] presents a dramatic and unrepentantly romantic first theme, contrasting this eventually with a pair of secondary subjects which share certain of its melodic contours and become intertwined with it in the course of a discursive central development section. In contrast, the second movement, subtitled Corrin’s Lament, imagines the eponymous builder of the Tower on the cliffs above Peel, seeking consolation as he reads by candlelight far into the small hours of the night. The score is inscribed here with the following lines by the Chilean 20th-century poet Pablo Neruda, not for any significance in their being in Spanish but because they happen to convey exactly the emotions one imagines haunting the Tower’s solitary occupant:
Las tres aves del mar, tres rayos, tres tijeras,
Cruzaron por el cielo frio…

Por un minuto duerme con la noche del hombre.
…Soledad, dame el signo…

Hay sólo tu mirada para tanto vacío,
…Sólo tu amor para cerrar la sombra…
[Three birds of the sea, three flashes of light, three scissor-blades
intersecting the cold of the sky…

For a moment only, sleep here in the night of the living.
Loneliness, give me a sign…

All I have left is your face against the emptiness,
Your love to keep away the embrace of the dark…] [Composer’s translation]

The three birds are here imagined as the spirits of Corrin’s wife and two children. After a sombre beginning whose bell-like tolling bears a conscious resemblance to that of Le Gibet, the bleakly macabre centrepiece in Ravel’s iconic piano solo triptych Gaspard de la Nuit, the nocturnal stillness and the solitude of Corrin’s meditations are interrupted by a serene scherzo-like central section in which the prayer enshrined in Neruda’s lines is seemingly answered, Corrin is surrounded by consoling presences and his own spirit again takes wing with them for a brief space. A recurrent motif from the piano implies the continued presence of these ghostly visitants and the viola that of Corrin himself. There is also a reminiscence of material from the Sonata’s first movement. Gradually, however, the funereal tolling begins to be heard again, the viola returns to its former lamenting and the spirits depart. A plangent climax subsides into reminiscences of earlier music, including the opening subject of the first movement, and a final repetition of the ‘spirit’ motif dissolves to leave the bell sound still tolling, till this too becomes finally inaudible.
Unlike the first two movements, the third admits of no specific connection to a single place, and accordingly has no subtitle; but its primary content suggested itself during an afternoon walk in perfect weather to the ancient south-westerly village of Cregneash and beyond, to the coastal point opposite The Calf. There are other towers on the Manx coastline, such as the Herring Tower [1811] on the Langness Peninsular, another warning of local perils to shipping; but the Chicken Rock lighthouse’s turbulent history and its proximity to The Calf made it an apt focus for the third movement of the Sonata, even though the music synthesises new material with that of the preceding two movements and serves to blend into a single whole some of the key features of all three. The third movement starts with a rapid semiquaver theme from the viola, in which repeated notes in threes present an accelerated version of the tolling bell from movement two. A lengthy secondary subject recollects melodic contours from both preceding movements. The mood darkens until varied and energetic rhythmic activity serves to develop and explore aspects of the initial theme. A varied recapitulation of the movement’s first section leads to a more spacious climax than that of the secondary subject on its previous appearance, but further reminiscences of the Sonata’s opening theme disperse to reveal a sorrowful echo of Corrin, still lamenting his lost loved ones in a passage of introspection which recalls both the first and second movements. This is abruptly cut off by a return of the finale’s opening. The ensuing passage allows cross-rhythms which have been a recurrent feature of the movement to precipitate the music into a jig-like Stretto, still embracing hints of the work’s opening theme and finally achieving an affirmation of G, the tonality in which the Sonata began.

My Sonata seems a natural successor to earlier neo-romantic British works in the same general spirit, such as the two viola sonatas of York Bowen. It resembles these in its idiomatic piano writing (the piano being my own instrument) but differs from them in its cyclic use of raw materials, likewise in that beneath the expansive romanticism lies a good deal of motivic counterpoint. Bowen’s structures are far more episodic and non-developmental. Whereas his music leans often towards either Debussy or Rachmaninov, mine regularly reflects a longstanding enthusiasm for the Danish composer Carl Nielsen, and listeners may well be able to detect intermittent Nordic inflections within the Sonata’s harmonic language.

© FP, 2013/2025.