I revised the long post before last and inserted this paragraph about a pianist who died in 1953:
“Mewton-Wood was a pianist of the front rank, the equal of Lipatti. He was one of a group of classical musicians – Neveu, Lipatti, Ferrier, Kapell, Cantelli, Brain – who died young at around that time. Neveu, Kapell and Cantelli died in plane crashes, like Thibaud and Buddy Holly, Brain in a car crash, like Camus.”
His performance of a Weber piano sonata which is on YouTube (it starts here) is enough evidence, I would say, of his stature. I’d never consciously listened to a Weber piano sonata before. This is more like a fantasia. The first movement lasts nearly fifteen minutes. Sometimes we’re within sight of Beethoven, and the fast passages have a sort of Regency stride that we associate with Weber.
Britten composed his Canticle III, Still falls the rain (The raids 1940, Night and dawn), a setting of Edith Sitwell, for a memorial concert for Mewton-Wood which was given at Wigmore Hall in January 1955 with him, Peter Pears and Dennis Brain performing. There is a powerful version of it on YouTube from a performance given in 2009 in the Sacristy of Bramante in the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (whose refectory houses Leonardo’s Last Supper) with Mirko Guadagnini, tenor, Dimer Maccaferri, horn and Paolo Ceccarini, piano.
