Here’s a Four Seasons that blends scholarship with
technique and imagination with a sense of the ethereal without losing
a sense of dynamism and animation. The crisp and pliant Spring is not
without some daring metrical freedoms though always at the service of
the whole picture with the contrastive properties of the movements properly
observed. In Summer there is a sense of almost improvisatory freedom
in the opening Allegro that is a pleasure to hear, the quirky harmonic
discursiveness of the music allowed to infiltrate the textures. Autumn’s
Adagio molto is enlivened by the archlute; Lamon is at her peak in this,
the third of the Concertos, with a real command and innate musicality.
In Winter’s opening movement, sensitive and vigorous, there is real
articulacy to the shaping of lines and in the succeeding Largo flying
ornaments decorate the solo violin’s line, apt roulades that, with dynamic
shading and diminuendos, add a piquancy to the movement. For my own
taste, which is apt to be rather more old fashioned, I miss the utter
concentration of an essentially unornamented line (Loveday with Marriner
say or Lola Bobesco with the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra) but there
is no doubting Lamon and Tafelmusik in their stylish playing.
The disc is rounded out – an ungenerous phrase for
such eloquent performances – by various concertos. An uncredited cello
soloist is flexible and unforced in the little B Minor Concerto, the
Double Oboe Concerto opens with stately tread but soon blossoms and
flourishes, with an especially beautiful slow movement making me wish
once more that the orchestra’s soloists had been credited as they fully
deserve to be. Steele-Perkins and Thiessen playing natural trumpets
are, whether in unison or antiphonally, ringingly ebullient in their
Concerto.
The sound quality has plenty of space in which to bloom
but never loses focus. This is a spirited and sensitive disc.
Jonathan Woolf