Etudes and Idylls: Piano music by Agnes Tyrrell (1846-1883)
World Premiere of Complete Concert Etudes Op. 48, A837
Jocelyn Swigger, piano
PROGRAM
Idylls, A884
Pastorale in E major
Scherzo in a minor
Concert Etudes Book One, Op. 48, A837
No. 1 in bb minor: Thirds
No. 2 in B major: working title “The Juggler”
No. 3 in A major: Octaves
No. 4 in A major
No. 5 in a minor
No. 6 in Eb major
Idyll in G major, A860 “Olivia”
Concert Etudes Book Two, Op. 48, A837
No. 7 in F major: Tenths
No. 8 in g minor
No. 9 in d minor
No. 10 in Ab major: Trills
No. 11 in F# major
No. 12 in B major
Die Mühle (The Mill)
Notes
I learned all of the music for this concert from photos I took of handwritten manuscripts in the Agnes Tyrrell archive in Brno, in the Czech Republic. I’m extremely grateful to the archive in the Moravian Museum (MZM) Department of the History of Music not just for their kind permission to publish and perform this music but also for their generations of librarians who have taken such beautiful care of the documents themselves.
All of the music on this concert is currently unpublished. My wonderful student assistant and collaborator, Riley Dunbar, and I are working on publishing typeset versions of many Agnes pieces, including the Idylls from this concert, to the open-source IMSLP platform. My printed score edition of the Concert Etudes will be available soon from Certosa Verlag, a publishing company in Germany.
Agnes assigned opus numbers to only some of her pieces. Fortunately the archive has catalogued all of her documents, and those numbers are perfect for keeping track of Agnes’s more than 300 pieces (I don’t know what the A stands for, and I’m sure it’s not Agnes, but it’s quite handy that it happens to be her first initial).
We begin with two Idylls, A884. An Idyll is a poetic vision of an idealized moment in nature. The Pastorale in E major is a canon, where the left hand is an exact copycat of the right hand, and the Scherzo in a minor is just a little joke.
Agnes did publish her Concert Etudes Op.48/A837, and she did get a positive review from the most important music journal of the day, but they almost immediately fell out of print. Agnes designated her etudes as Book One and Book Two, and I’m performing them in those groupings. Occasionally I am adding my own transitions between the etudes; that was common practice in Agnes’s time, for a performer to make up transitions. These etudes do exactly what a good etude does: demand and develop a specific virtuoso technique. Practicing them is making me a better pianist, and that’s really exciting. Etude no. 1 in b flat minor has thirds in the right hand, and then later in the left hand.