PGH began considering writing a piano concerto, the work that would eventually be named the Etruscan Concerto, in early 1953. Her short score is is dated 13 July 1954, suggesting that she had completed the first draft a few weeks before she arrived in Italy in August that year. Her destination was Fiesole, on the outskirts of Florence, a town based on the village of Faesulae, one of the main cities of the Etruscan confederacy. She had been to Florence once before, in April 1937 on holiday from studies in Paris. Then she must have visited the Museo archeologico nazionale, housed in a Medici palace, which holds terracottas, furniture, sarcophagi, ossuaries, vases and other Etruscan artefacts. In Fiesole in 1954 she could also have visited the Roman theatre, first-century baths, a Roman temple and tombs as well as an Etruscan museum, and on 29 August, on her way to Paris, she stopped in Ferrara and then Comácchio, which had been occupied by the Etruscans and Gauls. In a lagoon northwest of Comácchio is the remains of the Greco-Etruscan city of Spina where artefacts such as vases were found. The title of the concerto thus honours this visit to Italy as well as the vivid descriptions of Etruscan life in D.H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932). Unfortunately, even if it was personally a memorable experience, and even if seeing Etruscan remains and sites fuelled her interest in archaeology and the ancient world, she left no description in words. In Apollo magazine, however, Xavier F. Salomon recounts how he travelled to all the sites mentioned by Lawrence, including museums in Rome and Florence, and this gives the flavour of what PGH herself might have discovered only ten years after Lawrence himself had been there.
On 24 February 1937, having recently arrived in Paris, PGH noted in her diary that she had written the first movement of a flute concerto. Stanley Bate was also in Paris and this was the year he composed a flute sonata, recorded the following year for the Oiseau-Lyre label by Marcel Moyse (flute) and his son Louis (piano) so perhaps both composers were inspired by the playing of Moyse, then a professor at the Conservatoire and a friend of Nadia Boulanger. Although PGH’s concerto must have been completed—in 1943 she offered the score to the ABC in Australia—it has since been lost. Louise Dyer (of Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre) was prepared to offer Bate a recording contract for whatever he wrote but found him difficult to work with. The flute sonata was reviewed in Music & Letters by E.R. (Edmund Rubbra?), who described it as “well-oiled music that, once it gets started, is able to go on its own momentum ad infinitum”. He also made the usual complaint about Bate’s immaturity, adding, “We shall know the stature of this young composer only when he has ceeased to gather hints on note-manipulation from a certain widely-influential Parisian school”. The flute sonata has recently been recorded by James Dutton with Oliver Davies for Willowhayne Records. It is a delightful work, typically French in its lightheartedness and typically a product of the Boulangerie in its whimsical meanderings with spicy modernist inflections.
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