Robin Milford - Fishing By Moonlight

×

Robin Milford - Fishing By Moonlight

Close

Robin Milford is one of those distinctive English composers who proliferated between the wars, but whose reputation suffered in the face of the avant garde establishment in vogue during the 1950s and ’60s. Milford composed a range of music, from short practical works for children or amateurs to large-scale works including oratorios, an opera and a symphony. This delightful disc presents Milford’s music at its most quintessential and endearing. During the war Milford lost his six-year-old son to a road accident, a shattering personal catastrophe that blighted the remaining eighteen years of his life. Milford’s idiom deepened and matured, and his ability to distil a mood or atmosphere into surprisingly simplelooking textures is his most rewarding trait. The music on this disc ranges from the soaring intensity of the Elegiac Meditation for viola and string orchestra of 1946–7 (a meditation on the losses of six years of war, or perhaps Milford was thinking of his dead son Barnaby), to the spirited and easy-going Festival Suite, written in 1950 to mark the Festival of Britain the following year. Milford’s most famous work, Fishing by Moonlight, opens the disc, and is ravishingly performed by Guildhall Strings, with the composer’s grand-nephew Julian Milford at the piano. Once again, Guildhall Strings perform unduly neglected British music with refinement and a rare sense of shared enjoyment.

The notes to this excellent release make no exaggerated claims for Robin Milford and his music, calling him a "distinctive minor voice," which describes him perfectly. It may be that the history of Western culture would not be any different had he never existed, but we can listen and be happy that he did. This is a lovely, unpretentious, immaculately crafted, well recorded, and beautifully performed program of works for string orchestra (sometimes with piano or flute added). Especially delightful are the Festival Suite, Miniature Concerto, Interlude for Flute and Strings, and the suite Go, little book. This last item has a soprano solo singing the opening "Envoy" from A Child's Garden of Verse, after which flute and strings play seven miniatures, each based on a line of the poem. It's a charming concept, executed with unfailing accuracy and character.

As noted, the performances are excellent. None of the music is terribly difficult, but it requires all of the classic virtues of good rhythm, just intonation, tight ensemble, and dynamic sensitivity, and that's exactly what the Guildhall Strings provide. Occasionally, I might have wished for the fuller sonority available to a larger group, and flutist Julian Sperry, though very good, is recorded a touch too closely (the microphones capture his breathing with extreme clarity), but these are small quibbles. Milford also wrote larger works, including a symphony, a violin concerto, and a four-act opera based on The Scarlet Letter. Hopefully the success of this disc will motivate Hyperion to let us here some of them. It seems that there's no end to interesting and attractive English music written in the first decades of the 20th century. And a good thing, too!

David Hurwitz