Harold Truscott - The Music

The Music

As a composer, Truscott perfected an expanded tonal idiom of contrapuntal intricacy and sometimes terse, no-nonsense expression, but a mystical streak sometimes emerges, as in the finale to his only completed Symphony, and his Elegy for string orchestra, composed in 1944 and never performed in his lifetime, is an utterance of astonishing romantic intensity. Beethoven, Schubert, Medtner and Nielsen are among obvious influences which were subsumed into an individual musical language. He wrote a fairly small amount of vocal and orchestral music, though apart from the Symphony in E major several other symphonies were either lost or remained unfinished. He also composed some notable chamber music, including sonatas for clarinet and piano, cello and piano, and a set of sonatas for solo violin. But the bulk of his output was for his own instrument, the piano, and this includes no less than 22 sonatas, some of epic length and others of pithy concision. He also made completions of all Schubert’s unfinished piano sonatas.