On this disc, Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to Dance and Symphonies Nos 1 and 2 are performed by the BBC Philharmonic under its Chief Conductor, Juanjo Mena. Scottish bassonist Karen Geoghegan joins them as the soloist in the Bassoon Concerto

Paul Frankenburger, (born in Munich on 5 July 1897) was a successful conductor and composer in Bavaria, until he lost his position at the Augsburg Opera due to a financial crisis at the opera house. In 1933, he left Germany and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. Immediately upon arriving at the new country, he changed his name to Paul Ben- Haim, and within a few years he established himself as a cultural icon, a highly esteemed and influential composer, and the founder of a new musical tradition. Some consider Ben-Haim the national composer of the young state established in 1948, fifteen years after his immigration. The compositions on this album are closely linked to those dramatic years, during which he changed homelands, swapped identities, and, to a large degree, even replaced, or forged, his own unique personal style. Omer Meir Wellber, new chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, makes his Chandos debut with this first album in a series dedicated to exploring the music of Israel.

Tying in with the 100-year anniversary in 2013 of the composer’s birth, we here present two such works, performed by the BBC Philharmonic under Edward Gardner with Chandos stars Tasmin Little and Howard Shelley. The Violin Concerto, here performed dazzlingly by Little, is essentially tragic and weighty in tone, perhaps reflecting his growing concern with the escalation of war-related hostilities. Under Shelley’s fingers the Piano Concerto – in a rare recording with the original third movement, “Recitative and Aria” – is generally lighter and brighter, more transparent and simpler in style.

The first Japanese composer to achieve international status, Toru Takemitsu proposed a fusion between Western music and the culture of his country. His music radiates a lyrical intensity that comes as much from his roots in the early modernists Debussy and Alban Berg as from his affinity with the more overtly experimental mid-twentieth-century styles of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Played throughout the world, he is considered one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th century. Of the four works gathered here, three feature the guitar. Inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson, Spectral Canticle takes the listener through elusive sonic transformations corresponding to the changing seasons evoked by the poem. To the Edge of Dream has an eerie mood and celebrates the haunting, often sinister paintings of Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux. Also inspired by a work of art, Vers, l’arc-en-ciel, Palma, with its refined writing, is close to the spectral composers. Finally, Twill by Twilight for orchestra expresses the moment, just after sunset, when twilight turns into darkness in a delicate and uncluttered pointillism.

REVIEWS:

Clearly all the soloists were prepared for this challenging music-making, as was the BBC Philharmonic. With informative liner notes, one comes away from this recording with an excellent sense of Takemitsu’s writing for guitar and orchestra.

-- American Record Guide

Exceptional accounts here of four of the Japanese composer’s works, with soloists and orchestra alive to the extraordinary coexistence of stillness and threat in Takemitsu’s writing. Startlingly vivid, his sound pictures capture the changing of light, seasons, emotions and memories with unblinking clarity.

-- The Sunday Times (UK)

The Symphony in C was conceived in Paris in the late 1930s, but completed in America in 1940, and is dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premièred in 1946, the Symphony in Three Movements presents us with movements that also manifest different ways of moving: a march, a slow dance, and a march-jog-race. The Greeting Prelude was written as an eightieth birthday tribute to Pierre Monteux, conductor of the premières of Pétrouchka and The Rite of Spring, and was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the very day: 4 April 1955. The other two pieces on the album reflect Stravinsky’s lifelong involvement with ballet. The Divertimento is an orchestral piece extracted by Stravinsky from his ballet The Fairy’s Kiss. The ballet was a homage to Tchaikovsky, based on songs and piano pieces by him, stitched together and orchestrated with Stravinskian cool. The Circus Polka was a commission from Stravinsky’s long-time collaborator George Balanchine, who had been asked by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to create a dance for elephants. The version heard here is the composer’s own orchestral version; the original was scored for circus band and organ by David Raksin, and performed by fifty elephants and fifty female dancers!

REVIEW:

It’s easy to underestimate the depth and breadth of Andrew Davis’s repertoire and indeed his sterling qualities as a conductor – his ebullience, robust sense of rhythm and razor-sharp ears. All of which are much in evidence in this generous compendium of Stravinsky.

-- Gramophone

Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018) was one of Russia’s greatest conductors along with Evgeny Mravinsky and Kirill Kondrashin. His close personal and musical relationship with Shostakovich began in the 1950s and continued until the composer’s death in 1975. Rozhdestvensky said at the time, ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of my relations with Dmitri Shostakovich since he opened before me a musical universe like a gigantic magnifying glass reflecting our fragile world’.

Rozhdestvensky conducted the first western premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.4 in Edinburgh in 1962 and after many subsequent performances internationally, it was also the inaugural piece in his tenure as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1979-81). Composed in 1936 but condemned by the Soviet authorities, it did not receive its first performance until 1961 in Moscow. The epic Symphony No.11, given a dramatic performance by the BBC Philharmonic in 1997, is based on revolutionary folksongs relating to the 1905 Russian Revolution, and received the Lenin Prize in 1958. Despite this, questions arose as to whether Shostakovich was denouncing the Soviet regime’s brutal treatment of its opponents in it, specifically the 1956 invasion of Hungary or the Tsarist tyranny and oppression of 1905, to which there are no conclusive answers.

Lloyd became a symphonist despite himself. When he was in his twenties he seemed destined to be a composer of operas and it is likely that, had the vicissitudes of war not intervened, he would have written music for the stage exclusively. In an article for the June 1939 issue of the Musical Monthly Record, Harry Farjeon wondered why music for Lloyd was ‘not centred in the concert hall but in the theatre’ and quoted the young composer as being ‘interested only in opera’. There are strong traces in the symphonies of what might have been: the intensely lyrical, cantabile nature of the writing, the intermezzo-like movements, the opera buffa qualities of the finales and the feeling for the long line which runs through those supple and sweeping melodies all denote a born opera composer. In the event his operatic aspirations were cruelly cut short and it is to his courageous, life-affirming twelve symphonies that we must look to chart his development, recovery and eventual triumph.

Every five years the Soviet Union celebrated the anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution with large-scale public events, to which the country’s leading artists were expected to contribute. Mieczyslaw Weinberg, like his friend Shostakovich, enjoyed mixed fortunes with his efforts. The symphonic poem Dawn (Zarya), Op. 60, dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, seems to have remained unperformed during his lifetime, despite its ideologically irreproachable content. Its première was finally given in the BBC studios in Manchester, on 15 May 2019, by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds.

When Shostakovich died, on 9 August 1975, it had been five years since Weinberg composed his last symphony. To commemorate his friend and mentor (whom he regarded as the greatest symphonist of his age) Weinberg decided on a full-scale, four movement, non-programmatic work as his personal tribute. Symphony No. 12, written between December 1975 and February 1976 is the longest of Weinberg’s purely instrumental symphonies. Kirill Kondrashin was due to conduct the première, but his last-minute insistence on large-scale cuts and changes to the score was taken by Weinberg as a great insult, and ended their relationship. The first performance was finally given as a radio broadcast on 13 October 1979, (probably) by the USSR TV and Radio Symphony Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich.

Without question born a little too late in a century of huge upheavals, Pierre Sancan has almost completely disappeared from our memories. He nevertheless occupied a place at the heart of the history of French music in the second half of the twentieth century: composer, pianist, teacher, and an extremely endearing personality, as one will discover on this disc.

This program of the Piano concerto, orchestral works, works for solo piano, and the flute Sonatine (played by Adam Walker) serves as a personal tribute to Sancan from both pianist and conductor, and will hopefully help to raise awareness of this gifted composer.

Rumon Gamba leads the BBC Philharmonic in this collection of lesser-known pieces by the British composer Sir Malcolm Arnold.

Born 1921, Arnold was inspired by Louis Armstrong to take up the trumpet at the age of twelve. Following study at the Royal College of Music, in London, he became Principal Trumpet of the London Philharmonic, in 1943 – a post he held (bar one season at the BBC Symphony Orchestra) until he moved to composing full time, in 1948.

Arnold was active in many genres, writing nine symphonies, two operas, five ballets, and more than 100 film scores, including The Bridge on the River Kwai for which he won an Oscar.

This album features music from across his compositional career, from Larch Trees (1943) to the Philharmonic Concerto (1976) – both works written for the London Philharmonic. His Divertimento was written for the newly formed National Youth Orchestra, whilst the BBC commissioned the Commonwealth Christmas Overture for the twenty-fifth anniversary of King George VI’s first Christmas Broadcast, in 1932. The Clarinet Concerto No. 1, expertly performed here by Michael Collins, was written for Frederick (‘Jack’) Thurston who gave the première, in 1949, at the Edinburgh Festival. The album concludes with Philip Lane’s orchestration of The Padstow Lifeboat, originally composed for brass band to celebrate the launch of a new lifeboat in Padstow in 1968.

REVIEW:

What better way to start the New Year than with a bumper disc of Malcolm Arnold at his most entertaining. The program of this recording has been somewhat dictated by music missing from the extensive Chandos catalogue of the composer, so the result is something of a seeming hotch-potch albeit a very engaging one.

Conductor Rumon Gamba and the ever-reliable BBC Philharmonic are old hands at Arnold and this style of repertoire which they play with genuine flair and engagement throughout. While none of the repertoire is new to the catalogue, four of the works are receiving only their second commercial recordings, and, with one exception, all the other recordings of these works are over twenty years old. Furthermore, most of those older recordings appear to be out of print. So even if this new disc were not as fine as it is, it would pretty much have the field to itself.

The most recorded work on this disc is the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 Op.20. The soloist here is Michael Collins, who recorded it as part of the Conifer survey back in 1988. Collins’ playing is simply superb; expressive and humorous, articulate, virtuosic. Conductor Ramon Gamba is most imaginative with his phrasing and attention to dynamics and accentuation.

The Divertimento No. 2 Op.24/75 is a great example of unaffected, unbuttoned Arnold. The flair and brio of this present recording is undeniable and affords great listening pleasure.

Near the other end of Arnold’s compositional career is the Philharmonic Concerto, Op.120 written in 1976. This is Arnold at one of his very darkest times rather desperately trying to make out that everything is just fine while the music tells a different story. Again this new performance is simply excellent – unflinchingly muscular and dynamic with an aggressive edge that seems wholly, if somewhat uncomfortably, appropriate.

The disc ends with a collective sigh of relief – the utterly brilliant Padstow Lifeboat in its orchestral transcription by Phillip Lane. The original Brass Band version is incomparable and utterly “right” but Lane’s orchestration is a delight.

So an uplifting conclusion to a disc guaranteed to raise spirits in the dank winter months with performances and recordings to match or supplant any in the catalogue. Recording dates show sessions split by the pandemic but the sound and playing is superbly consistent. A top-notch Chandos release to start the year right down to the cover photograph of the RNLB James and Catherine Macfarlane – the eponymous Padstow Lifeboat itself. Certainly a disc to show the range and quality of Arnold’s mercurial genius in all its glory.

-- MusicWeb International