Bax • Bliss • Rubbra
Bax: Morning Song ‘Maytime in Sussex’; Bliss: Piano Concerto in B flat; Rubbra: Piano Concerto in G, Op. 85
Piers Lane (piano); The Orchestra Now/leon Botstein
Hyperion CDA68297 76:46 mins Completed in 1955 to a BBC commission, Edmund Rubbra’s Piano Concerto in G major is something special. Rubbra here turned to the sarod-playing of Ali Akbar Khan as a benchmark for his typically untypical virtuoso concerto. The serenity and strength of the piano’s opening statement stakes out the work’s territory, whose high points include the second movement’s interaction of long orchestral lines and accompanying piano chords – an obvious device, delivered with Rubbra’s trademark un-obvious mastery and expressive reach. Two expansive opening movements then necessarily commit the work to a quicker finale, yet here too the dance-like style avoids cliché; and the crowning device is the unusual placement of the soloist’s cadenza towards the end of the work, memorably drawing together material from all three movements.
For all that Bliss and Rubbra were colleagues and personal friends, Bliss’s garrulous Concerto in B flat – premiered by the great Solomon, no less, at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 – can’t help sounding rather shown up in such company. For all the music’s unanswerable fluency and panache, plus some fine and probing individual passages (as in the more sombre slow movement), the work’s 40-minute duration feels much too long for what it has to say. The early-debussy manner of Bax’s Morning Song ‘Maytime in Sussex’, dating from 1946, offers a pleasing if lightweight interlude.
Piers Lane’s solo playing throughout is a phenomenon of tireless technical strength, always beautifully aligned to each work’s different style, and with classy orchestral support at every point. Malcolm Hayes
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Gipps: Clarinet Concerto;
I Hamilton: Clarinet Concerto; Ireland: Fantasy Sonata;
Walthew: Clarinet Concerto
Robert Plane (clarinet);
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/ Martyn Brabbins
Champs Hill CHRCD 160 77:43 mins
Of all the British clarinet works on this enterprising album that need reawakening, the easy winner is Iain Hamilton’s compelling concerto, first performed in 1952, but lost from sight after its orchestral parts were later mislaid. Robert Plane’s resurrection reveals a confident and dynamic example of mid-century ‘Romantic modernism’; a piece occasionally in Walton’s shadow, with some Bartók visitations too, but very much its own boss in instrumental exuberance, orchestral finery, structural coherence and well-knit design. Whether gurgling with rhetorical truculence or sinking into tenderly melancholic sighs, Plane has the work’s full measure, benefiting from a recording balance that puts the soloist first, though the acoustic still leaves plenty of room for the spirited splendours of Martyn Brabbins’s Scottish troops. All told, a thrilling rediscovery from an unfairly neglected composer.
We enter a different, more delicate world with the 1902 concerto of Richard H Walthew, a Parry pupil who specialised mostly in chamber music. Sunny and blithe in the Mendelssohn way, it’s a piece that well deserves a hearing (plus a stronger last movement).
Delights are less abundant in
Ruth Gipps’s early concerto of 1940, clearly written under the spell of her teacher Vaughan Williams, though the central Lento, piquantly blending oboe and clarinet (the instruments respectively of herself and her future husband, to whom she dedicated the concerto), is charmingly dispatched here. The last item is Ireland’s eloquently moody clarinet-piano Fantasy Sonata of 1943, with the piano part replaced by an occasionally gushing body of strings. This changes the work’s spell and dynamic, and not for the best. The Hamilton, however… Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★