Bantock - Sapphic Poem (Urtext Edition)

Granville Bantock’s Sapphic Poem is a 15-minute work for cello and piano, also later arranged for cello and orchestra. Composed in 1906 at Broad Meadow, Kings Norton, for the cellist Willy Lehmann, the piece was published by Novello in 1908 in its cello and piano version and in 1909 in its orchestral version.

This urtext edition offers a fresh look at one of Bantock’s most distinctive works for cello. Despite its beauty and expressive power, Sapphic Poem remains rarely performed. To date, only two commercial recordings are known: Gillian Thoday’s 1978 recording and Julian Lloyd Webber’s 1999 recording. Apart from these recordings, the work appears to have received only a small number of public performances since its premiere in 1906.

The piece is cast in one continuous movement. In the autograph score, Bantock includes a fragment by Sappho in Greek, with an English translation quoted from Henry Thornton Wharton’s Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation. Bantock’s musical language is distinctly British, though Wagnerian and Russian influences can also be heard. The main key is B minor, with a middle section in F-sharp minor, a return of the main theme in E major, and a peaceful conclusion in B major.

The cello writing is lyrical throughout, but the work also includes moments of real virtuosity, including a cadenza passage requiring nineteen notes in up-bow staccato. This edition is based on the composer’s manuscript and is intended to bring Bantock’s tribute to Sappho, one of the great poets of the ancient world, to a wider audience of twenty-first-century cellists.

ASTA Level: 4