Gurney: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 & 3

Ivor Gurney’s songs (Naxos 8.572151) have long earned him renown but his works for piano, composed over the period of a decade, are hardly known. The lyrically beautiful Five Preludes reflect influences as wide as Schumann and Scriabin but preserve Gurney’s expressive freshness. The Sonatas Nos. 1 and 3 inhabit very different sound worlds from each other, and only one movement of Sonata No. 2 has survived, a deeply poignant elegy – all of which are heard here in world premiere recordings. His poem for piano, Autumn, offers further opportunity to discover this rarely heard music by a composer for whom the pursuit of beauty was of the utmost importance.