Album Review: Piano and Chamber Music by Jessy Reason

This interesting new release from British pianist Duncan Honeybourne, with British-American violinist Leora Cohen, introduces the hitherto little-known music of Jessy Reason, known somewhat cryptically during her lifetime as “J. L. Reason”.

A long-forgotten, enigmatic figure, Jessy Lilian Reason, née Wolton, was born in London in 1878, the daughter of a wealthy hop merchant. In 1902, in Cornwall, she married a gentleman of private means twenty years her senior, with whom she settled firstly in Devon and later in Tonbridge, Kent. In the late 1920s, the couple made a final move to Reading, where Jessy died in 1938.

Jessy Reason’s Lute Players’ Dreams

In May 1992, a writer called Alan Poulton discovered a large stack of handwritten music manuscripts in a second-hand bookshop. He purchased the collection, and during the 2020 Covid lockdown, now retired and with time on his hands, he set about exploring and cataloguing the manuscripts and researching the life of the woman who had composed 70 handwritten works in the early decades of the twentieth century. The paperwork accompanying the collection reveals that Mrs Reason studied composition with the renowned composer and conductor Eugene Goossens; she was then in her mid-40s, her tutor some 15 years younger. How much of Reason’s music was performed during her lifetime remains unclear: all that has come to light so far is a performance of a single song at London’s Wigmore Hall and a song cycle given at a minor concert in West London, all in the early 1920s. (The current catalogue of Reason’s music, compiled by Alan Poulton, can be found on the British Music Society website.

Duncan Honeybourne

Pianist Duncan Honeybourne is a passionate advocate for lesser-known and rarely-performed music, and this new release by Prima Facie Records reflects his unerring ability to unearth really fine music and bring it to a wider audience by recording and performing it (see also his release, also on the Prima Facie label, of piano music by William Baines.

Leora Cohen

In this recording, he is joined by young British-American violinist Leora Cohen. She brings a wonderful range of colours and nuance to the Three Poems for Violin and Piano, matching Honeybourne’s playing with a remarkable sure-footedness, sensitivity and musical maturity.

Duncan Honeybourne Performing Jessy Reason’s music

This disc presents Jessy Reason’s entire output for solo piano, together with the Three Poems, and as such, is a wonderful introduction to Reason’s writing. She was clearly a highly-skilled yet largely self-taught composer and musician (her writing for piano reveals an intimate knowledge of the geography of the keyboard): in his biography of his mother, Richard Reason describes her as “an ardent musician, with a fiery style of violin-playing . . .teaching herself the whole technique of writing for full orchestra”. Her scores, some of which I have seen, thanks to Duncan Honeybourne, are elegantly crafted and neatly laid out.

By turns richly romantic, impressionistic, darkly lyrical, sensuous and harmonically complex, there are hints of late Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, even early Messiaen in Reason’s sophisticated, inventive music. This inspiring legacy of work is brought vividly to life by Duncan Honeybourne on a piano contemporaneous with the music, a 1922 Bösendorfer.