Gordon Jacob’s Piano Concerto no.2 in E flat was completed in 1957 and premiered on 11 July of that year at the Winter Gardens, Bournemouth by the soloist Edith Vogel. A Proms performance took place at the Royal Albert Hall on 9 August 1957 with the same soloist. A review in The Times of the 1957 Proms performance of Gordon Jacob’s Piano Concerto No.2 declared that ‘the composer’s masterly understanding of the orchestra enables him to express each idea economically and in the most clean and attractive colours’, while The Sunday Times’ critic wrote that, ‘having taught the craft of orchestration to a whole generation of composers, Dr. Jacob is himself a past master at clear and effective scoring’.

Addison’s Variations for Piano and Orchestra was written in 1948 and revised the following year. According to Alan Poulton’s Dictionary-Catalog of Modern British Composers, It was first performed in a BBC broadcast in 1960 by Margaret Kitchin. The work is written for a small orchestra, comprising double woodwind, four horns, a pair each of trumpets and trombones, bass trombone, timpani, modest percussion and strings. Though the piano had played a prominent role in an earlier student piece by Rubbra, his Piano Concerto, Op.30 (1932) is the composer’s first fully-fledged, large-scale work for soloist and orchestra. The score features an elaborate solo part and requires substantial orchestral forces.

Malcolm Lipkin's experience and skill as an executant who can perform his own music is evident in each of his piano scores. This is intrinsically piano music, devised specifically for hands at a keyboard. Often hypnotic and brooding, it beckons the listener in to an ethereal, uncanny soundscape. At other times, the material is brilliant and challenging, demanding from the player a formidable technique. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Lipkin’s writing for piano is its basic integrity. If, at a certain point as the music unfolds, the composer decides that an unvarying series of repeated notes or chords or arpeggiated figures is required for several bars then that is, unashamedly and irrefutably, what he sets down on the stave. This preoccupation with the fundamentals of piano writing is part of the very fabric of the material – shrewd, incisive and intuitive. [Paul Conway 2023]

The idea of writing a cello concerto for Raphael Wallfisch was first mooted more than ten years ago at the Banff Arts Centre, Canada, where Jonathan Dove was composer-in-residence. The two men spoke of Dove’s interest in writing a piece for cello and orchestra, and after further meetings in London, the work began to take shape. Given the composer’s extensive experience of writing for the voice, it was decided that the score would be written for baritone singer and solo cello with orchestra with texts taken from poems by various writers. The subject matter was suggested by the Wallfisch family history. Raphael’s father fled, together with his mother and brother, to Palestine from Breslau in 1937, and his mother, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, is a concentration camp survivor. She has written of the persecution of her Jewish family during the Second World War and her own incarceration in Auschwitz and Belsen, where her skill as a cellist saved her life.2 Knowing of these events, Jonathan Dove was inspired to base the work’s theme on the universal experience of refugees being exiled from their homeland.

Jonathan Dove writes of the piece, ‘In Exile moves through a day in the life of an involuntary exile: waking alone in a foreign land; remembering the moment of banishment, the moment of departure, the voyage; remembering the homeland. The Exile feels the pain of being so far away in his country’s time of need, unable to help his own people. He remembers all the names he has been called in this strange land. He thinks of all he has lost, and longs for home. In Raphael Wallfisch’s words: ‘the cello represents the soul and spirit of the Exile, the baritone is that person and sings the dramatic and often challenging texts. Jonathan’s lyrical style lends itself so naturally to the cello. He exploits every register from the lowest to the highest notes. The cello comments on the sung texts”. [Paul Conway] Night Song, a short piece for cello and piano is derived from the final section of ‘In Exile’. In the calm closing moments of the work the baritone sings of his loss in the words of the poet Douglas Hyde : My grief on the sea, / How the waves of it roll - / For they heave between me / And the love of my soul. Night Song was written partly at the request of the Rachel Baker Memorial Charity – who commissioned the orchestral work – and partly in response to the strong reaction of the first audiences who connected with this uncomplicated musical expression.

In her A minor Sonata, Op.5, as in her earlier Sonata in C minor for cello and piano (1880), Ethel Smyth favors expressivity over virtuosity, emphasizing the cello’s warm and lyrical tone. The piano enjoys a key role in all three movements and is often invited to present the chief subject matter rather than merely playing a supporting role accompanying the cello line. One of Delius’s most satisfying chamber works, the Cello Sonata is distinguished by the expressive power of its material. Both instruments enter at the same time, the cello unfolding a songlike, long-limbed line, while the piano presents the main idea. A second key theme, introduced by the cello over the piano’s rippling, arpeggiated chords, is more forthright and sharply defined. An unattributed review of Gibbs’s Cello Sonata in E published in The Musical Times in 1953, found it to be ‘an ideal piece of work for cellists who want something contemporary on which to develop their technique, for its difficulties are of the sort which repays practice’. Thanks to this recording of the work more than seventy years after its completion, contemporary listeners now have an opportunity to appreciate its melodic strength, understated formal artistry and grateful writing for both instruments. Britten’s Cello Sonata is a challenging, bravura piece that benefits immeasurably from the natural affinity between composer and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. The relationship would inspire Britten to produce four more major works for Rostropovich who wrote of the work, ‘This is a sonata full of surprises, innovations for any cellist, gifts for the musician flowing freely from the horn of plenty. We meet not merely a novelty in finger-work but, what is most important, a new kind of expressive and profound dramatic composition.’

In his obituary of William Busch, the writer and broadcaster John Amis observed that ‘His music is distinguished by its sensibility and warmth with a strong sense of form and a fine texture, linear rather than harmonic. It is tragic that he should have died when he was writing at the height of his powers and at a time when his gifts were beginning to receive recognition. Recognition will not cease now, for his work has permanent values’. Over forty year later, in a series of radio programs entitled ‘Forgotten Reputations’, Amis warned that ‘Of all the musicians of the ’30s and ’40s… William Busch is the most likely to be forgotten’. The current release preserves an important part of his creative legacy and seeks to ensure that his music lives on.

Though some of Rebecca Clarke’s most successful pieces feature the piano, such as her Viola Sonata (1919) and Piano Trio (1921) and her writing for the instrument in those scores is both idiomatic and inventive, she only wrote a handful of solo piano pieces, all featured on this release.

Classical Music

A neglected corner of the Alwyn heritage rewardingly explored.

Alwyn the polymath: artist, author, composer. Among these gifts music came foremost. The other skills drew on and were even the servants of the music. Writing for the cinema inculcated in him a discipline of writing to very specific mood and time constraints. Cinema paid the bills and allowed a lifestyle and, later in life, a recording programme only dreamt of by most other composers of his generation. The screen connection also meted out a punishment in that success resulted in deprecation for his concert works. The artistic hegemony in the period 1950-75 found his tonal-melodic style anathema and let him know it.

Mirages is a song-cycle for baritone and piano. Benjamin Luxon is here captured in vocal heyday. Long and sustained notes are sung quietly without a trace of beat. The poems are by Alwyn and were published in a collection with his own line drawings. These are songs of darkling beauty – a common theme being night and twilight. Only in Honeysuckle, the third song, are the moods and exultation of the English lyric masters referenced. More typical are the grim lines and finally the thrawn protest of Metronome. Excitement bursts free from Paradise - nothing of Cyril Scott's oozing ecstasy. This is a nocturnal witch-ride on the wings of a hurricane. Then comes a different take on Hardy's actress caught gazing into a mirror - here we have the musings of the composer on his elderly face gazing back from the mirror ‘redeemed’ only by the child-innocent eyes.

The Divertimento is for solo flute, the instrument with which Alwyn made his living in the 1930s and 1940s. René Le Roy performed it to enduring success at the 1941 ISCM Festival in New York. It has the gamin playfulness and seraphic smile of the Bach suites. Only the outer sections seem unequivocally to come from the 20th century.

Naiades places flute with harp in a work subtitled ‘Fantasy-Sonata’, written for husband and wife duo Christopher Hyde-Smith and Marisa Robles. This is an intensely Gallic-perfumed piece, warm and from some classic Arcady. It is a close cousin to the Ravel Introduction and Allegro and to Bax's Elegiac Trio.

The second CD takes us back to the very earliest days of Lyrita, recorded in the Itter home in Burnham. The half-hour-long Fantasy-Waltz sequence is dedicated to Richard Farrell, the NZ pianist killed in a car crash in 1958. The eleven waltzes are varied, angular, fantastic impressions often suggestive of liquid gesture and movement. Some, such as the ballroom candour of the Allegro Giocoso (6), the Vivace (8) and the In tempo piacevole (10) step outside these boundaries and dally with Godowsky but with style-Alwyn calling the shots. In the earlier sonata Alla Toccata the expected neo-classical casing is to be found in the outer movements with a touch of Lambert here and Prokofiev there. The central sleepyhead Andante has the gorgeous romance of the Lento of the Classical Symphony. The Fantasy-Waltzes have been recorded twice before on Chandos: on CHAN8399 by John Ogdon and latterly by Julian Milford on CHAN9825. The coupling is different in each case (more Alwyn though!) and only the Lyrita takes you back to the label’s earliest days and includes the chamber works as well – all for the price of a single premium price disc.

The mono sound has been well preserved and presented in the case of the piano solos. This serves to whet appetites for Lyrita’s complete Ireland and Bax – not to mention other treasures including the Moeran, White and Jacob. The Decca-engineered 1970s stereo disc is as good as the reputation would lead you to expect.

The notes, in English only, are from the original vinyls and are by William Mann and Joan Chissell.

-- 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

Sonically this was not one of Lyrita's best productions, with slightly dull piano sound and dense orchestral textures in works that are already quite thickly scored. The performances, though, are excellent. The single-piano version of Vaughan Williams' Piano Concerto on the whole is preferable to the two-piano alternative on account of its less-heavy keyboard sonority. Howard Shelley's performance is only surpassed by: Howard Shelley, with Bryden Thomson on Chandos, basically on account of the superior sonics. There was no competition in the Foulds, a marvelous piece by a fascinating minor master, until Warner very recently released a fine new version with Peter Donohue and the CBSO under Sakari Oramo. That disc may be well-nigh impossible to find and doubtless won't last long in the catalog, while the Chandos version of the RVW comes only in tandem with more Vaughan Williams (the Ninth Symphony). So if you're looking for this repertoire and a very satisfying coupling of two rare but extremely worthy works, this disc is easily recommendable, very minor reservations aside.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

It is as though Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire were not on show because no one could be bothered to clean it, or as though Wordsworth’s The Prelude had been allowed to go out of print. How can it have taken so long for this great and magical opera to appear on CD?

So many of the expressions of our age have frowned in their contemplation of it, or have turned away to cultivate arcane, private gardens. But here was Tippett in 1955 expressing joy, boundless optimism and faith in beauty and humanity; doing so, moreover, with such richness of imagery that even those who loved it at first hearing were a bit taken aback by its overwhelming abundance.

As so often with his pieces, it took a while to sink in, and for players and singers to get their fingers and their vocal chords around those springing rhythms and sinewy lines. The moment at which that happened was the moment of this recording and the performances that preceded it. Remedios and Carlyle are not simply managing those exuberant hocketings above the stave in their final duet; you would swear that they were enjoying them, and as they do so the image of love as a consuming flame is vividly projected. Burrows and the adorable Harwood are audibly moved by how much tenderness and innocence there is in their music, and they make a real and most touching couple. Herincx is wonderfully suave and bossy as King Fisher; Watts not only survives her forays into the bass-baritone register but makes an awesomely Sibylline figure of Sosostris. And Davis, raptly in love with this score and communicating that to his singers and players so effectively that one is never aware of them gritting their teeth and counting beats as though their lives depended on it, reveals again and again the opera’s magical sonorities. It is a superb performance: after it one can hardly read those early reviews (“incomprehensible libretto”, “too much counterpoint”, “half an hour too long”) without laughing. The recording, too, communicates a real sense of live performance.

A masterpiece, in short, and one that can be listened to again and again without exhausting its exuberant generosity.

Michael Oliver, GRAMOPHONE (1/1996) Review of original CD release

Classical Music

Other companies would have flinched from including two totally unknown works on one disc. Most would have dropped one of the two and dashed for the safety of buttressing the familiar with the unfamiliar. Not Lyrita. Instead they give us two meaty concertos. The cello work is early while the piano work is from five years short of the composer’s death when fashion had turned its face against Stanford and Parry.

The Cello Concerto is in the same league as the later Dvo?ák concerto with a first movement ripe with surging energy and some really dramatic writing for the brass. The Molto Adagio glows with gracious lyricism and while the manner might be familiar from Dvo?ák and even Brahms the listening experience is fresh and full of intriguing detail. A noble allegretto reminded me at times of Dvo?ák 8 and at others very strongly of the Brahms Violin Concerto. It’s a delightful work and an early crowning glory for this composer.

The Third Piano Concerto survived only in two piano score. Because the full score could not be found Geoffrey Bush - who did so much for Stanford’s music and reputation – did the orchestration. This time the stormy-heroic manner leans more noticeably towards Brahms; nothing untoward in that. I found myself thinking of the gymnastic euphoria of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto in the first and last of the three movements. The middle movement – a Larghetto – includes extensive calm solo episodes for the piano with gentle interventions from the orchestra; these return most touchingly in the finale. This is a very optimistic work radiating smiling confidence.

The notes (in English only) by Lewis Foreman are well up to his usual high standards in terms of content and readability.

Two works that add invaluably to the repertoire.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Here is the ideal introduction to the music of Edmund Rubbra. The Third and Fourth symphonies (fine works, both) sandwich two shorter, but still impressive, orchestral works.

Robert Layton provides a sterling example of a programme note. As he quite rightly says, ‘Edmund Rubbra belongs to the same generation of English composers as William Walton and Michael Tippett … but has never enjoyed the same measure of exposure’. Perhaps bringing these Lyrita discs once more to the public’s attention will do something to rectify the situation.

The Third Symphony is quite a lean work in terms of orchestration. It also breathes a dignity that is most compelling. It is fairly unremittingly serious in both demeanour and in intensely controlled thematic workings. The intensity reaches its height in the ‘Molto adagio ma liberamente’ slow movement, a statement of real depth, and one that inspires Del Mar and his orchestra to great things. If the title of the finale sounds forbidding – ‘Tema con 7 variazioni e una Fuga’ – it is not all so (there is even a passage that trips along nicely until interrupted by darker shades). The closing pages are marked by a rugged determination. Of course, 1939 was the year that marked the beginning of the Second World War, and it is not difficult to read echoes of these events into the more intense passages of this symphony..

The Fourth Symphony opens with a feeling of peace (now, of course, quite removed from external events – it was written in 1942). The work is in three movements, although the extended Introduzione to the last movement is banded separately by Lyrita because of its length (4’50). Robert Layton talks of ‘serenity, a remarkable stillness and an inner repose’ and this just about sums it up. The music of the first movement seems to pulsate welcomingly. The Intermezzo second movement is pure delight (its marking is ‘Allegretto grazioso sempre delicato’), especially when played with as much affection as on this Lyrita recording. The clouds of the ‘Introduzione’ to the final movement are magnificently evocative here (the well-balanced recording helps, preserving the depth of the shadowy strings), while the movement proper (‘Allegro maestoso’) has a noble dignity (it is more immediately identifiable as ‘English’ than some music by this composer). It does, however, carry the inimitable stamp of Rubbra’s compelling harmonic language.

The Overture, Resurgam, was inspired by the bombing of Plymouth in March 1941. The Overture was written in 1975 on a commission from the Plymouth Symphony Orchestra to commemorate its centenary. The title comes from a word (Resurgam) inscribed on the tower of the church of St Andrew (the only part left standing after the bombing). Resurgam begins very quietly and delicately. Although only eight minutes long, it is very serious in its intense scoring and in its density of ideas (Rubbra also uses a more acidic language than in the Third Symphony, heard first on the disc). Finally, A Tribute, Op. 56 (originally entitled ‘Introduzione e danza alla fuga’) begins in the most tender of fashions. Del Mar’s balancing of orchestra textures is revelatory in the introduction, while the ‘danza alla fuga’ is fascinating. It begins rather stealthily, but never releases its dance origins. The tribute is actually to Ralph Vaughan Williams (in honour of that composer’s seventieth birthday), although there appears to be no direct musical allusion.

A fascinating disc, then. Rubbra’s music reveals more and more on repeated hearings – facile is the one thing it is not.

-- Colin Clarke, MusicWeb International

Edmund Rubbra's first four symphonies tend to be hit or miss affairs, and the Second is arguably the best of them. Owing to a resolutely undramatic style, Rubbra's finales in particular tend to bog down in contrapuntal noodling; but despite the fact that he follows the slow movement here with a gently paced Allegretto amabile conclusion, the result is satisfying. As might be expected, Vernon Handley's performance is a fine one, very similar in its basic outlines to Hickox on Chandos (though more successful in the finale) and even more warmly recorded. He does a good job maintaining clarity of texture despite the sometimes thick scoring, and he keeps the music moving intently forward, never allowing Rubbra's rather relentless seriousness of purpose to degenerate into mere pedantry.

The Seventh Symphony belongs to the great quartet of works (Nos. 5-8) that show Rubbra's symphonic art at its best. Compared with the Second, the orchestration is more colorful, the thematic material more distinctive, and the structural control more assured as well as organically spontaneous. Once again there's little to choose between Boult's wise, effortless interpretation and the competition on Chandos, save for the fact that Boult's slightly more relaxed way with rhythm seems a touch more idiomatic than Hickox's sharper edge--and he's even livelier than his younger colleague (surprise!) in the symphony's opening movement. Still, this is a minor point: there are only two versions of this excellent symphony available, and collectors will surely want both. The Festival Overture makes a nice bonus. It's a pleasure to welcome these performances back to the active catalog.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra, Op.38, was written in 1934-1936 and revised and rescored in 1942-1943. The composer himself was the soloist in the premiere which took place in a Promenade concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult on 10 August 1943. Rubbra also performed it with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent on 4 July 1946 at the second Cheltenham Music Festival. The Prelude and Fugue on a theme of Cyril Scott for piano, Op.69, was composed in honour of Scott’s seventieth birthday in September 1949 and premiered by Margaret Good on 5 June 1950 in a BBC broadcast. It is based on three bars from the slow movement of Scott’s Piano Sonata no.1, Op.66. As part of the Northampton concert of Cyril Scott’s music which Rubbra organised in 1918, he programmed and performed four of Scott’s short solo piano works. Nearly fifty years later, he chose to perform another brief solo piano work by Scott to round off his BBC recital on 9 August 1967, Consolation. In his brief spoken introduction to the broadcast performance, Rubbra described this as ‘one of Scott’s maturest pieces’ written ‘at the height of his powers’ and characterised it as ‘a deeply felt ‘in memoriam’ written as a tribute to a close friend’. In 1958 he began work on the Violin Concerto, Op.103, finishing it in the summer of the following year. It was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall on 17 February 1960 when the soloist was Endré Wolf with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by its Principal Conductor at the time, Rudolf Schwarz. This first performance was relayed live and the BBC repeated the work in a Maida Vale performance three days later. A recording of that impressive second performance is presented here.