VA - British Piano Concertos (2014) 4CD Box Set

×

VA - British Piano Concertos (2014) 4CD Box Set

Close

This boxed set reassembles largely analog material from existing Lyrita CDs under a new generic grouping. Dates and locations of recording sessions are not given. Lyrita seem always to have been reticent about those details. The sound is a model of its kind – Lyrita were always able to boast glorious sound.

The freshly written liner-notes are by the authoritative and accessible Paul Conway and run to ten pages. These are not a simple retread of the original notes by other authors.

There is provocative variety to be found in this Piano Concerto box, serving up Stanford's least neglected piano concerto which is both Brahmsian and yet has a dash of Rachmaninov about it. The Finzi Eclogue is a peaceful spiritual essay - it causes no offence and imparts a blessing as it passes. The Foulds and Bridge pieces are not concertos. The former is a fantastic display of brilliance of imagination and technique while the Bridge parallels his own Oration - which is not included in these sets - in its tension and bleak expressive power. It does have its heroics but they are bitter indeed. The Vaughan Williams concerto recalls the world of his Fourth Symphony while the Rawsthorne is softer and more yielding than we may be accustomed to from this source. The Scott Poem, with its roundabout convolutions and folksong game-play, contrasts with the Busch Piano Concerto. Ireland's Legend is another Sussex ancient sorcery, quite different in its subtlety to the crowd-pleasing romantic heroics of the Moeran Rhapsody, which plants its confident feet in 1940s film piano concerto pastures; it’s very enjoyable. The last disc lets us hear again three piano concertos: early, accessible and not fully characteristic in the case of the Hoddinott and Berkeley; and fully mature in the case of Williamson’s joyously clangourous and angular Third Piano Concerto.

Generosity is the order of the day. No CD plays for less than 72:00. The price point is attractive and may well make this suitable for the intrepid and open-minded soul as Christmas presents, if the original CDs are not already on the intended receivers' shelves.

Review by Rob Barnett, Music-Web International

This 4-CD boxed set is a companion volume to Lyrita’s British String Concertos set on SRCD2346, which similarly collects previously issued items from the company’s distinguished releases. All have been reviewed here in their single-CD incarnations and Editor Rob Barnett has already reviewed this box, so I shall only say a few brief words of welcome to this highly desirable collection.

The set includes the expected favourites, and not all, by any means, are concertos. It’s good that Stanford’s C minor Concerto is here in the recording Malcolm Binns made with Nicholas Braithwaite, an extrovert Rachmaninovian work exuding panache and colour. Finzi’s beautiful Eclogue – I practically wore out my LP of it – is a ten-minute Elysian favourite. It’s followed by a work of utterly different stripe – this first disc seems to have been compiled on the opposites attract principle - in Foulds’s forward-looking and brilliant Dynamic Triptych, that surprised so many when Howard Shelley and Vernon Handley’s LP was released. In terms of rhythmic and colouristic appeal it has few challengers in the British repertoire of its time, or any subsequent time, but not to be overlooked is the sheer expressive intensity of its slow movement.

Disc two centres on that most dishonest decade, the 1930s, presenting Bridge’s unsettling, gaunt, ghostly Phantasm – one of the most ambiguously powerful works of those years – and Vaughan Williams’s Piano Concerto in C, written a year earlier. The Toccata is famously extrovert but the Romanza – and not in name only – seems to prefigure the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony of the following decade. Rawsthorne’s Piano Concerto No.1 dates from 1939 but was revised in 1942. Binns and Braithwaite are again the protagonists. In terms of construction this is probably the most accomplished of all the works in this set. It’s a masterly example of Rawsthorne’s late 1930s style, virtuosic but unusually thoughtful, and the place I would send newcomers to his art. Lympany and Herbert Menges (EMI CDM 5-66935-2) are tauter, but Binns and Braithwaite enjoy immeasurably better sound.

The third disc offers a quartet of composers in a variety of forms. Cyril Scott is represented by his poem for piano and orchestra, Early One Morning. It's alternately luscious and emphatic in John Ogdon and Bernard Herrmann’s uninhibited performance. John Ireland’s Legend is heard in this ideal account by Eric Parkin and Adrian Boult. E.J. Moeran’s Rhapsody – John McCabe and Braithwaite – is an old friend and a cornerstone of the British concertante repertoire on disc. William Busch’s 1937-38 Piano Concerto is what I called in my original review one of the fabled ‘new’ Lyritas; the concerto is dissonant, powerful, impressive and not always likeable.

The last disc moves forward in time from Lennox Berkeley’s 1947 Concerto (David Wilde and Braithwaite) to Hoddinott’s 1960 Concerto No.1 with Philip Fowke and Barry Wordsworth. We finally reach the 1962 Third Concerto of Malcolm Williamson, the composer taking the solo responsibilities and Leonard Dommett conducting. Berkeley is animating and full of interest and is very well played. Hoddinott’s powerful concerto is knottier, and turbulence is seldom far from the surface. Williamson plays his concerto with requisite panache and extroversion but no little poetry too.

Lyrita’s fabled recording quality is well-known. Paul Conway’s notes are new, commissioned for this set, and are thus not a précis compendium of previous booklet notes. They make for good reading. There are no reasons to avoid this set if the repertoire appeals.

Review by Jonathan Woolf, Music-Web International

×

VA - British Piano Concertos (2014) 4CD Box Set

Close