“Heritage” program note
Trio in B flat for piano, violin and violoncello
Frederick Septimus Kelly (known as ‘Sep’) was born in Sydney in 1881, into a wealthy Irish family. He studied at Sydney Grammar School, then at Eton College in England, followed by several years at Oxford, excelling both at piano (tutored by Donald Francis Tovey) and at rowing. These years at Oxford (1898-1903) from which this trio is thought to date, were a personally tragic time for Kelly, as he suffered the loss of his brother and both of his parents. After Oxford, Kelly spent five years from 1903-1908 studying piano with Ernst Engesser and composition with Iwan Knorr (formerly Grainger’s teacher) at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where Clara Schumann had taught only a decade or so before. After his studies concluded, Kelly returned to London, composing and performing prolifically, and also winning gold with the British rowing team at the 1908 Olympics. Kelly returned to Australia for several months in 1911 for some concert engagements in Sydney. At the outbreak of WWI, Kelly enlisted, surviving the Gallipoli campaign, but was killed on 13 November 1916 at the Somme in the battle of Beucourt-sur-Ancre while leading a rush to take a German machine gun post. For many decades, his music has remained largely unknown, but with the work and championing of scholars such as Thérèse Radic, Richard Divall, and especially Chris Latham, Kelly’s rich catalogue of romantic works, from songs through piano solos, chamber sonatas and orchestral works, is currently experiencing a long-deserved revival.
Partially as a result of his teachers’ backgrounds, Kelly’s writing style was deeply embedded in Germanic compositional style, especially in the work of the great romantic, Johannes Brahms. This trio in Bb major was an early student work which Maree copied from a manuscript stored in the National Library of Australia’s archives. It is cast in two movements, and is considered unfinished. The first movement begins with a warm and genial theme in the cello, which gradually builds to a dramatic climax, before giving way to a flowing bridge passage, and a tranquil second theme. The exposition is closed with a dreamy sequence of broken chords in the piano with a calm melody shared by the strings. After a stormy development, the recapitulation re-enters over a hesitant pedal Eb in the piano. The second movement is a sparkling and witty Scherzo and Trio marked presto. It begins pianissimo staccato, with a staggered entrance of the cello and piano following the violinist. In true Scherzo fashion, the movement breaks into double octave fortissimo in the piano in bar 33; and the Scherzo ends triumphantly in Eb major. The Trio is a broad and majestic chordal hymn in Eb minor aeolian mode, with possible hints of English pastoral harmonies. Cast as mainly a piano solo, there is conjecture as to whether the Trio was unfinished. However it quickly passes to a recapitulation of the Scherzo, finishing with a triumphant coda, fff in Eb major.
Frederick Septimus Kelly, image courtesy of Chris Latham.