In memoriam: Howard Ferguson

The presence of Howard Ferguson in British musical life seemed for so long one of its abiding certainties that news of his death, shortly after his ninety-first birthday, came as a source of surprise and sorrow to many for whom he was a much-loved and still juvenescent figure. In his later years, from his home in Cambridge, he maintained cheerful relations with a varied and international circle of friends, many of whom had not long ago gathered there to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. The esteem in which they held him was not only for his great qualities as a genial host and loyal and entertaining companion, but also as a fine musician, one who, for over sixty years, had played a significant role in the musical life of the United Kingdom.

Ferguson's many creative gifts included those of editor, performer and composer. He was also a writer, the author not only of the valuable Keyboard interpretation (1975), but also, late in life, of a recipe book that had the unusual distinction of being translated into Japanese. For many however, his chief claim to fame was in his impeccably edited Associated Board editions of the standard repertoire, notably a magnificent three-volume survey of Schubert's piano sonatas, revolutionary in its time for its depth of scholarship, and in the minds of many still a pinnacle of applied musicology. Others regarded him with gratitude for bringing to posthumous publication a number of pieces by his friend Gerald Finzi, including the song-- collections published as Oh fair to see and Till earth outwears. Yet another group of people recalled his accomplishments as a recitalist in long-standing partnerships with violinist Yfrah Neaman and fellow pianist Denis Matthews, and his wartime role as assistant to Dame Myra Hess in organising the daily National Gallery concerts. As for his fellow composers, they treasured the unbiased support and common-sense advice he gave them, whether they were his students at the Royal Academy of Music, where he taught from 1945 to 1963, or were those who had come to know him through the broad range of his many musical activities over many years.

Ferguson himself owed his musical career to the encouragement of the pianist Harold Samuel, who on a visit to Ulster had noticed the talent of the thirteenyear-old Belfast boy and, with his parents' permission, had brought him to London to further his education. After Westminster School, Ferguson studied composition with RO Morris and conducting with Sargent at the Royal College of Music, but continued to learn the keyboard privately with Samuel. On leaving the College he divided his time between composition and playing chamber music, and it was with the publication of the Octet op.4 that his name as a composer began to be known. Thereafter, his meticulously crafted ouput slowly increased as he pursued a parallel career as executant musician until, shortly after his fiftieth birthday, he concluded that, having reached his nineteenth opus and having no more to say, he should abandon composition altogether.

If the decision must have disappointed his many admirers, it was none the

less a clue to Ferguson's highly developed sense of his own innate abilities, one consequence of which is that his surviving pieces constitute an almost perfectly rounded oeuvre. Unsurprisingly, many of these scores evolved directly from his own musical connections. Neaman and Ferguson, for example gave the first performance of the Second Violin Sonata, in Holland in 1946. The clear phraseology and pungent invention of this fine work could stand for the technical virtues of the composer's output as a whole. The First Violin Sonata, like its successor and like several other of Ferguson's instrumental works, is unified by a carefully arranged cyclical return of material. Premiered by Isolde Menges and Harold Samuel in 1932, it was later taken up and recorded by Jascha Heifetz. Samuel himself subsequently became the posthumous subject of Ferguson's F minor Piano Sonata, dedicated to his memory premiered by Myra Hess in 1940 and recorded in 1943.

If the Sonata confirmed Ferguson's dedication to classical formal models established in the First Violin Sonata and Octet, then the orchestral Partita of 1936 showed equal facility with romanticised interpretations of the baroque dance forms, with the gigue enlived. by the flavour of Ferguson's native Irish reel. The Piano Concerto of 1951, its exquisitely shaded theme and variations in particUlar, was another important statement in a traditional structure; its sonata-form first movement even included a Mozartear orchestral exposition. In the Overture for an occasion (1953), Ferguson made his contribution to the tradition of the British comedy overture.

Apart from the five pithy Denton Welch settings of Discovery, performed and recorded by Kathleen Ferrier, however, the orchestral Four diversions on Ulster airs, composed between 1939 and 1942, and a few smaller pieces, his only other compositional statements after this time were in genres new to him. Amore langueo (1955-56) and The dream of the rood (1958-59) were both Three Choirs Festival cantatas, written for tenor, chorus and orchestra, and settings of the kind of Medieval verse for which the composer had a lifelong affection. The dream of the rood in particular, like Howells's Hymnus paradisi, remains unforgettable for those who have once heard it, Echoes of other composers, Finzi, Vaughan Williams, Walton, often present in Ferguson's