Premiere Award John Andrews
Lutyens • Maconchy • Errollyn Wallen
Works for Piano & Orchestra
Martin Jones, Rebeca Omordia (piano); BBC Concert Orchestra/john Andrews
Resonus RES10315
‘Some of the music on this disc is pretty intense and complicated, so it was a delightful surprise to receive this award.’ It’s fair to say that conductor John Andrews wasn’t expecting his disc of unrecorded British piano concertante works to scoop our Premiere Award.
So how did an album containing everything from thorny 1960s serialism –
Elisabeth Lutyens’s Music for Piano and Orchestra – to Errollyn Wallen’s joyously extrovert Piano Concerto come together? ‘Like many of the best projects in life, it came about through a series of accidents,’ Andrews reveals. ‘Back in 2020, what would become this disc started life as three separate projects. We had just finished
Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master with the BBC Concert Orchestra (another BBC Music Awards winner), and we were looking for other interesting projects – in particular, a disc of as-yet unrecorded piano concertos.
‘We had just booked some time to record Elizabeth Maconchy’s Dialogue when Covid hit, so that project was frozen in time. Elsewhere, pianist Martin Jones was keen to cover Lutyens’s concertante works, so that was all bubbling away.
And, in another part of the forest,
Errollyn had been commissioned by
Julian Lloyd Webber to write a concerto for pianist Rebeca Omordia.
‘When we all reassembled post-covid, the most interesting plan seemed to be to take the best bits of all these ideas – and slam them together. We knew there would be some stylistic incongruities between these three very different composers, but we thought that those contrasts might make for an interesting programme.’
The sessions, Andrews recalls, were ‘happy, productive places. We went in with some trepidation, as this is difficult music. Errollyn’s concerto is very flamboyant and extrovert; Lutyens’s two works are uncompromising mid-20th-century serialism and take no prisoners.
‘I don’t think people appreciate what a stunningly versatile group the BBC Concert Orchestra are – they’d just come from recording Shirley Bassey, but they ate this music for breakfast. They cede nothing to the finest contemporary groups in the world.’ Steve Wright
‘We went in with some trepidation as this is dicult music’