Description
John Cheshire Ecstasy
Compositions by the English harpist John Cheshire’s are strewn through all the historical, personally bound collections of sheet music from the 19th to the early20th centuries kept in my archives. Nonetheless, because his music was on the lighter side, it seems that these pieces were ignored and never included in the teaching repertoire. This accidental neglect has now been remedied. I wish to share with you the pleasures of those little gems that ooze charm and showcase all the enchanting techniques harpists relied upon during la belle époque. Each piece brings a different character into play. All of them would be well received by the public in various performance situations. They were published either in England (around 1902), or posthumously in the United States in 1912.
Ecstasy
Cheshire’s Ecstasy, a 1912 Oliver Ditson edition, opens in a striking manner with jazzy pedal glisses, as if heralding the showy, unabashedly romantic style of early big band music. I liked the idea of also sliding the thirds in my fingering, another option would be to cross-finger. Could we call this piece an example of Americana, instead of Victorian music? It does contain all of Oberthür’s big basic technique. After all, his teaching was influential in England during Cheshire’s formative years. But the repetitive chromaticism on single notes that moves beyond mere modulation brings it decidedly into the 20th century. You can look at it as a guilty pleasure, or a good training piece.
