The Violinist Who Vanished

Patricia Travers

There have always been creative artists who reach a point in their careers and say, "Enough."  One thinks of Sibelius, who effectively quit composing 25 years before his long life ended, or of Glenn Gould, who at age 31 gave up public performances to concentrate on recording.  But the case of Patricia Travers (1927-2010) is perhaps the strangest of all.  (The catchy, alliterative title I have given this post didn't originate with me; it was borrowed from the New York Times obituary of Ms. Travers.)  Raised as a child prodigy, she concertized actively until the age of 23, when she decided to give it all up, shortly after making this recording:

Ives: Violin Sonata No. 2* and

Sessions: Duo for Violin and Piano**

Patricia Travers, violin; Otto Herz, piano

Recorded *April 17 and **September 19, 1950

Columbia Masterworks ML-2169, one ten-inch LP record

Link (FLAC files, 82.37 MB)

Link (MP3 files, 47.15 MB)

That her retirement from public life was an incalculable loss to music is obvious from this recording, for both works receive passionate, committed performances - and it's ironic that one of the composers represented should be Ives, who, though still alive at the time, had not himself composed anything new for over twenty years.

Patricia Travers did make one more recording, in 1952, when she teamed with Norman Dello Joio, accompanying her at the piano for his "Variations and Capriccio" on one side of another Columbia LP (the other side featured works by Paul Bowles).  I am sorry to say I don't have that one.

The New Music Quartet

The New Music Quartet, founded in 1948 by violinists Broadus Erle and Matthew Raimondi, violist Walter Trampler, and cellist Claus Adam (later of the Juilliard Quartet), was much admired during its brief history - I think it may have disbanded in 1956 when Erle moved to Japan for four years.  (He later came back to teach at Yale and to head the Yale Quartet, where Trampler joined him.)  The New Music Quartet made a handful of recordings for Bartók Records (including the première recording of the Third Quartet by that label's namesake), then moved to Columbia where they produced eight or nine albums, among them the first recording of Hugo Wolf's Quartet in D minor.  Their last-issued recording, which occupied one side of an LP, was of this première recording of Roger Sessions' fine Second String Quartet:

Sessions: String Quartet No. 2 (1951)
The New Music Quartet (Erle-Raimondi-Trampler-Soyer)
Recorded May 12, 1955
Side 1 of Columbia ML-5105, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 82.23 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 56.17 MB)

By the time of this recording, David Soyer, later to be one of the founding members of the Guarneri Quartet, had replaced Adam as cellist.

The Sessions quartet strikes me as a modern answer to Beethoven's Op. 131, with its opening slow fugue, its long central variation movement, and its one-in-a-bar scherzo following the variations.  Instead of Beethoven's galloping finale, however, we get a particularly haunting slow movement.  The work has only been recorded three times to my knowledge - in the early 70s by the Kohon Quartet for Vox, and in 1987 by the Juilliard Quartet for CRI.  This pioneering version has, as far as I'm aware, never been reissued.

Its disc mate seems to me a mite incongruous - an early concerto for piano and winds by Colin McPhee (1900-1964), best known for his interest in Balinese folk music.  This work, less than half the length of the Sessions quartet, would seem to owe a lot to Stravinsky, and it does bear some surface similarities to the latter's own piano concerto, especially in the last two movements.  But the opening of the first movement is utterly dissimilar - instead of Stravinsky's pompous neo-Baroque introduction there is a quiet, Impressionistic texture that seems to start in medias res:

McPhee: Concerto for Piano and Wind Octet (1928)
Grant Johannesen with wind octet conducted by Carlos Surinach
Recorded February 22, 1955
Side 2 of Columbia ML-5105, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 39.33 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 28.43 MB)