Reviews and occasional notes on classical music "Music, both vocall and instrumental, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so super excellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like." - Thomas Coryat, after hearing 3 hours of music at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, 1608.
The first volume of this series by the great team of Tasmin Little and Piers Lane, which I reviewed here, was one of the top violin discs released in 2013. This new disc, to be released May 27, 2016, contains two incomplete violin sonatas, one partially written by Frank Bridge in 1904 and completed in 1996 by Paul Hindmarsh, and an early single-movement sonata begun but abandoned by Arthur Bliss in 1916, and prepared for publication in 2010 Rupert Marshall-Luck. The first sonata of John Ireland is a little in the shadow of his great second sonata, but it's the most substantial work on the disc, which is filled up with some sweet pastoral trifles from Ralph Vaughan Williams and (in a recording premiere) William Lloyd Webber.
The Bridge sonata is full of Romantic feeling, but it's rather slight. It's played with panache by Little and Lane, but not any more profoundly than it deserves. The two give the Bliss a more serious performance; the music is almost opulent at times, and the full emotional weight of its genesis during wartime and the death of his brother comes through. The musical centre of the disc, though, is the Ireland. Thanks to this performance I'm re-thinking my earlier view about this composer; this music is such an interesting blend of the English pastoral tradition with bits of Brahms, Wagner and the French Impressionists melded in.
When I first listened to Raphael Wallfisch playing the Gerald Finzi Cello Concerto, in this two-CD re-issue by Chandos (to be released in North American on May 27, 2016), I thought to myself that it was amazing, probably the greatest British Cello Concerto after the Elgar. Then I came across a link to this great short film on Wallfisch's website:
Wallfisch makes a good case, though I'm still inclined to consider his claim just a trifle hyperbolic. These are all fabulous recordings, from the mid-1980s to early-1990s but still sounding very good. I recently listened to Wallfisch's Bax Concerto when I reviewed the new Lionel Handy disc on Lyrita in March, and thought it very fine. The other works on this disc are less familiar, but they all owe a debt to Elgar's Cello Concerto of 1919. All except the bonus piece on the disc: the Stanford 3rd Rhapsody in the series of six he wrote before WWI. The Rhapsodies are all marvellous works, quoting Irish folk songs in a Brahms accent.
The Bliss Concerto is, for a work written in 1970, easy on the ears. The composer said about it, "There are no problems for the listener – only for the soloist." Though it's a bit lighter in tone than some of the other works here, it's tightly, symphonically, constructed. Rostropovich was right when he convinced Bliss to change its name from Concertino to Concerto. The Moeran Cello Concerto, from 1945, is perhaps closest to the Elgar model, with lovely long melodies and a keynote of nostalgia and sadness.
Wallfisch has the measure of all of this music, and this album is a perfect way to collect it, in spite of other strong performances on disc by such cellists as Lionel Handy, Yo Yo Ma, Guy Johnstone and Peers Coetmore (who was Moeran's wife). Wallfisch has strong support from Liverpool, London, Bournemouth and Belfast orchestras, and the low price makes this album a must-buy.
Here is the Stanford 3rd Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, from the 1990 Chandos album with Raphael Wallfisch and Vernon Handley conducting the Ulster Orchestra:
