The narrative of the young boy in Caradog Prichard's semi-autobiographical novel has a dreamlike quality, mingling scenes from his native village of Bethesda in North Wales with it's surroundings in the years leading up to and during the First World War. Central to the boy's life is the figure of his Mam, whose mental decline and subsequent confinement in Denby Asylum forms the central crisis of the novel. In these musical scenes, whose texts are drawn from Prichard's novel, he recalls the mysterious Queen Of The Black Lake; his Mam's poignant singing of the Welsh hymn Cyfammod; her description of a Welsh Revivalist meeting; the Sunday in church when a young pregnant woman is refused Communion; Mam's decline and journey to Denby Asylum; his return to the Black Lake and farewell to it's mysterious Queen.

Although all three works recorded here were originally composed early in Havergal Brian's career, only the overture Doctor Merryheart, written in 1911-12 and premiered within months of it's completion, is entirely 'early Brian'. Of the other two, the creation of what we now know as Psalm 23, traversed 40 years, and By the Waters of Babylon is a posthumous reconstruction, done with enormous skill and idiomatic fidelity by the composer and Brian expert Rodney Newton.

At the heart of this CD is the cellist Raphael Wallfisch. He not only performs these pieces with the utmost musicianship but they were also all written for him. Since the BBC NOW play with their customary skill under William Boughton, about as well established an expert on his native British music as one could wish to have, this CD is home and dry. The Hoddinott Hall is one of the best acoustics in the country and Lyrita's engineers have, as usual, produced a splendid sound. I did wonder about the slight left-placement of the cello but that is where soloists usually sit so it may simply reflect reality.

Joubert's work is, as the title states, in two movements. Each lasts a little over 11 minutes. Considering it is scored for only double woodwind, horns and strings, it displays a wide range of instrumental colours and is not only impressively coherent but also makes a very pleasurable sound. There is plenty of energy in the work. This is not a pastoral idyll one can allow to just wash over you. Joubert keeps one firmly engaged throughout and reminded me that I have neglected my sole Joubert CD prior to this, the First Symphony, also on Lyrita.

The late Robert Simpson was a very important symphonist and composer of string quartets. His musical structures require close attention from his listeners. This concerto, one of a mere handful, is typical of his later style. It was in fact his last orchestral piece. It consists of a theme and eleven variations played without a break and lasting very nearly half an hour. It is by turns lyrical and dramatic, ending quietly. Though the orchestra is large the textures are always clear and I found myself gripped by his typically involved musical argument right up to the 'calm resignation' of the coda, described thus in the excellent notes by Paul Conway.

Finally Christopher Wright has come to my attention only recently, having heard an extract from his lovely Violin Concerto of 2010 (Dutton CDLX 7286), so I was not surprised to discover that his Cello Concerto is also a fascinatingly individual creation full of lovely sounds but also of much energy and momentum.

We do not hear many different cello concertos in the concert hall. Those by Elgar, Dvorak, Schumann and Shostakovich are deservedly the most frequently performed. The three recorded on this CD are of a quality and approachability to match such as Saint-Saëns, Hindemith, Martinu and Walton. They should most certainly not be allowed to lapse into obscurity.

- Dave Billinge, MusicWeb International

Braithwaite’s engaging Holst proves well worth the wait

Nicholas Braithwaite’s effervescent 1980 account of the winsome Suite de ballet sounded stunning on black disc and continues to do so on silver (Decca’s peerless Kenneth Wilkinson was the balance engineer; the sumptuous acoustic is that of Kingsway Hall). All else is new to the catalogue. The three suites were set down in Watford Town Hall during summer 1993, while the Walt Whitman Overture was taped in the same venue in January 1988. The mind boggles at how performances and recordings of such superior quality can have remained mothballed for so long.

Holst composed the Overture and Suite de ballet during 1899 while on tour as repetiteur and trombonist with the Carl Rosa Opera Company. In neither will you glimpse any vestige of the mature composer (the overture doffs its hat to Brahms) but both parade a host of felicities and are given with palpable dedication here. Gordon Jacob made these skilful and sympathetic orchestrations of Holst’s two military-band suites in 1940 and 1945 (with No 2 renamed the Hampshire Suite – the majority of the folksongs it quotes hail from that county). Under Boult, No 1’s March bowls along with the greater unbuttoned panache, but there’s not much in it.

Commissioned as a test piece for the 1928 National Brass Band Festival, A Moorside Suite has long been a personal favourite (don’t deprive yourself of hearing the Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s unforgettable 1977 Decca recording, 3/86 – nla). Jacob’s affectionate reworking followed in 1952, and Braithwaite and the LPO relish its many deft touches. (On two copies I’ve tried there’s a tiny electronic-sounding blip at 3'04" in the haunting central Nocturne.) Attractively presented (the lucid and detailed booklet-essay is, curiously, uncredited), this release makes consistently enjoyable listening.

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone [5/2007]

With two orchestral collections already out from Chandos and a third on the bench Cyril Scott’s music is at last making its way.

He died nine years short of his centenary. Had he lived to experience that iconic event he would have seen a couple of articles and very little else. In the 1980s things moved on a little as it did for his copains Granville Bantock and Josef Holbrooke. For Scott this took the form of a rather lacklustre orchestral collection from Marco Polo. Since then there has been a Chris Howell anthology of piano solos on Tremula and three double CD sets of the solo piano music played by Wilfred De’Ath on Dutton. The BBC broadcast the one act opera The Alchemist as well as the choral piece La Belle Dame Sans Merci and most recently the Violin Concerto, itself rumoured to be included on the next Chandos Scott volume. Latterly the real impact on the musical public’s consciousness has come from those two Chandos collections which in repertoire terms substantially overlap the present disc; the only completely new works there being the symphonies 3 and 4 and Neptune.

There’s no direct competition between this disc and the Chandos pair. Lyrita have here gathered the contents of two LPs issued in 1975 and 1977 giving us Scott’s principal output for piano and orchestra. The recordings were the result of a volatile collaboration between Richard Itter, John Ogdon and the irascible Anglophile conductor and composer Bernard Herrmann.

Do not expect from these three works frank heroics in the Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov or Brahms mode. This is not solo pianist in adversarial contest with orchestra, pugilistic and then subdued. The First Piano Concerto was written just before the Great War. Beecham conducted at the premiere and the composer was the soloist. Latterly it was taken up by Kendall Taylor, Moura Lympany and Esther Fisher. The work is subtly perfumed with solo textures abounding and an overpowering atmosphere of mystery and idyllic lambency. After the Chinese hieratics of the first movement the second shares the enigmatic ritualism of John Ireland’s Legend and Forgotten Rite. The arcane beauties of the piece can be sampled in the dialogue of gong and celesta. Liquid Debussian touches create a meditative art nouveau kaleidoscope – a Klimt canvas in motion. The mood changes for the finale with its Handel-out-of-Grainger jocularity.

The beguilingly glittering waywardness of the First Concerto can also be heard - though with none of the oriental edge - in Early One Morning. The folksong itself is for the most part deeply subsumed, rising in enchanting Copland-like mist at 4:18. It is most clearly limned by the piano at 5:03 onwards. This is by no means the sort of conventional variations on a theme that Stanford produced for Down Among the Dead Men. The recording sessions were the first performance of the revision for single piano and orchestra. The original was for two pianos and orchestra.

The Second Concerto cannot be precisely dated but it is known that the composer was working on it in 1956. It is quite short and is in three movements. A tougher nut than the First Concerto, its themes are more subtle. Its haunted swaying harmonic world recalls an overgrown, lichen-festooned castle. Herrmann’s Xanadu was perhaps an influence; I wonder if Scott saw Citizen Kane? More plausibly we might hazard that the concerto was influenced by Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. There is a positively Baxian war-dance trope at 00:32 in I. Otherwise the stylistic links are as with the other works: with the last two piano concertos by Nicolai Medtner, the Symphonic Variations of Arnold Bax (contemporary with Scott’s First Piano Concerto) and with John Foulds’ Dynamic Triptych and Essays in the Modes.

The cover of the CD booklet is a detail from the cover of the LP SRCS81: a portrait of Scott at age 52 painted by George Hall Neale. The notes are by Christopher Palmer and Roger Wimbush and are taken from the original LPs which are:

SRCS-81 Piano Concerto No. 1 in C / Ogdon (piano) Herrmann LPO
SRCS-82 Piano Concerto No. 2; Early One Morning (Poem for Piano and Orchestra) / Ogdon (piano) Herrmann LPO

This is a generously timed disc presenting Scott’s subtly beguiling piano concertos. The first is the more instantly captivating of the two but the second has much to commend it. Superbly done.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

One of Parry's finest works, magnificently performed, and the best of the two available recordings of "The Sons of Light".

This was the first recording of "The Sons of Light". When I reviewed the second recording, by David Lloyd-Jones on Naxos, I found the Lyrita preferable, with more presence to the recording, more vital conducting and better choral diction. At that time there still seemed to be no prospect of the many Lyrita treasures ever seeing the light of day again. Now things are changing and this is the recording to get.

I referred in my review to the "coursing energy and phenomenal range of colour" of the work. It is, in its way, one of Vaughan Williams’s most impressive. You would certainly never imagine it was written to be sung by children – 1,150 of them at the first performance in 1951, with the accompaniment of the LPO under Boult. What worries me is that, every time I come to it, I find I don’t remember it. It’s not just that the themes don’t stay in my mind. As the work plays I don’t get any sense of recognition – "Ah, I remember that bit now". I hear it as a work I’ve never heard before. This is not a problem I have with Vaughan Williams generally.

Though I also had the LP containing "The Mystic Trumpeter" I never really listened to it often enough to say whether it sticks in my mind or not. I should think it unlikely. I find the same problem here as with Vaughan Williams’s "Willow-Wood", which was also on the Naxos/Lloyd-Jones disc. The composer has very skilfully set the poem line by line, with meaningful upward swoops for important words, pregnant key-changes and so on. He’s produced a nice wall-paper backing to a poem that is far more exciting when it’s simply read. But composition is about creation. It is a constructive process. If you start with an exhilarating poem and finish with a piece of music with about as much tension as a wet lettuce, is this to be defined as composition or decomposition? A work for Holst completists only. The performance is good enough, though Armstrong’s voice sometimes billows when it should soar. Holst seems to have a whopping Wagnerian soprano voice in mind and Armstrong, for all her virtues, was not exactly that. There is also a touch of opaqueness to some of her notes on the CD, though not on the LP.

The Parry is a far more memorable work. The composer had the good sense to choose a poem which provides a refrain. He does not repeat the same music every time but provides a new variation of it. The result is a sort of variation rondo form, combining continuous development with structural unity. Parry is at his finest and most eloquent throughout, from the lilting opening to the dancing energy of the later stanzas. There is a satisfying build-up which dies away to a touching close. There is also a lovely solo stanza, beautifully sung by Teresa Cahill. John Quinn noted in his review that her word underlay at the end of this stanza was at variance with the new edition he was using and wondered if the edition had been revised. I doubt it; I have a copy of the original edition and the textual underlay is different from what is sung there, too. Quite simply, the music as written calls unrealistically for a third lung, so I imagine Cahill herself changed the underlay in order to take a breath in the middle. Composers who aren’t singers miscalculate in this way more often than you’d expect – even Verdi did sometimes. Read John’s review, by the way; he has had the good fortune to sing in a rare performance of the work and his enthusiasm comes from within. But did the soprano at that performance cope with that long phrase in a single breath?

If Parry is at his best, so is Willcocks. It’s a thrilling performance from a great choral conductor. This is the only recording of the piece so far, but now it’s available again we hardly need another. Just for the record, I have always thought Cahill a little insecure in her opening phrase, but thereafter she is splendid. She has a lovely disc of R. Strauss and Rachmaninov to her credit and, unlike Sheila Armstrong in "The Mystic Trumpeter", her voice doesn’t billow, it soars.

Maybe in 1912 the Parry seemed old-fashioned. In 2007 it just seems timeless.

Outstanding recordings, as always with Lyrita, and notes by Ursula Vaughan Williams, Bernard Benoliel and Imogen Holst.

-- Christopher Howell, MusicWeb International