For impact, Gregson’s music, as demonstrated
by this CD, takes some beating. Edward Gregson is the Principal
of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and as a
composer he has enjoyed a considerable reputation for thirty years
largely for a variety of vividly realised music for band, including
several concertos which have been variously recorded (notably
on the Doyen label). Some years ago now I encountered Gregson’s
Missa Brevis Pacem when my daughter played in it as a member
of the National Children’s Wind Orchestra, and it was immediately
apparent that here was a composer with the common touch of a Britten
in such music. One can only rejoice that Gregson has at last stamped
his personality on the wider orchestral repertoire with this very
successful Chandos disc.
The coruscating extended opening fanfares of
Blazon feature those aspects of the orchestra which Gregson
has always done best – brass and percussion. Paul Hindmarsh in
his excellent notes tells us that Gregson described Blazon
‘as a miniature concerto for orchestra’ which grew out of an earlier
piece, Celebration, for symphonic winds, harp and piano.
The orchestra is divided into concertante groups who each have
their own music. Gregson called one of his earlier works ‘Dances
and Arias’, a title which could apply to much of his music, and
certainly encapsulates this contrasted musical landscape, the
reflective atmospheric song-like instrumental interludes, perfectly
judged to reflect the general energy and brilliance. It allows
the BBC Philharmonic wind players to show their strengths, which
they do in uninhibited style. It underlines Gregson’s characteristic
strengths – the dance, the fanfare and the song-like line – which
constitute some of his most memorable invention.
BBC Radio Three habituées will remember
the broadcast of this programme from the Royal Northern College
of Music last February. I was at the concert and it was notable
at the time how immediate and exhilarating Gregson’s music was
in the hall. Now tidied up in the studio over the following two
days, with the soloists in perfect balance, here is music of today,
music of substance and wide communication which one hopes will
put the composer on the regular concert scene. The violin soloist
had a notable personal success with the audience in the hall,
though I must say I had not seen him before. Professor of violin
at the Paris Conservatoire for nearly 25 years, Charlier was the
soloist on Chandos’s earlier recordings of the concertos by Dutilleux,
Roberto Gerhard and Gerard Schurmann. The concertos both identify
closely with their soloists, and the soloists with them. Both
are on a substantial scale, running around half an hour. Both
exhibit a strongly personal voice.
Gregson’s fascination with the dance becomes
more and more intriguing, and it seemed to have reached a climax
with his choral work The Dance, Forever the Dance, a notable
success in 1999. The Violin Concerto comes from this same background
and has a programme suggested by three quotations that appear
above the three movements. For the first he quarries a quotation
from The Dance taken from Oscar Wilde: ‘But she – she heard
the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into
the house of lust.’ With such a tag we may expect both dances
and arias, and we are not disappointed. The violin soon arises
from the romantic atmospheric opening, which is quickly left behind
in the violin’s relentless figuration. Gregson’s high lying lyrical
line has momentary reminiscences of earlier twentieth century
concertos, by Walton, Samuel Barber and Prokofiev’s Second. Wilde,
in his poem ‘The Harlot’s House’, shows the woman preoccupied
by a distant waltz, and Gregson’s music reaches a climax with
an insistent dance macabre, reinforced by the ensuing cadenza
for violin and timpani. This runs on into the second movement,
still a dark and threatening atmosphere, which at first strikes
an autumnal note, this time with a quotation from Verlaine in
French, this is the English: ‘The drawn-out sobs of the violins
of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor’. Here Gregson’s
brooding strings presage one of the work’s high points as he continues
to explore the world of the first movement leading to a huge and
threatening climax before relaxing into the textures heard at
the opening of the first movement. Here the music achieves a passing
hard-won serenity as at the close of the movement the solo violin
sings deliciously over running harp figurations. The finale sets
out with what seems to be an Irish reel, albeit a Gregsonian version
of one, the superscription this time coming from Yeats (‘And the
merry love the fiddle And the merry love to dance.’) but this
is still a troubled world we are passing through. At one point
the muscular string music from Blazon appears, but although Paul
Hindmarsh’s notes tell us we have finally achieved general rejoicing,
this is still very much music of today evoking the world as it
is, there is to be no serenity.
The earlier Clarinet Concerto has a similar dramatic,
quasi narrative thread running through it, though without quotations
giving us any non-musical clues; the solo clarinet’s odyssey,
ultimately successful, is left to us to divine. This is a clarinet
concerto on a notably large scale, and in its wide-spanning argument,
symphonic in intensity and scope. It was commissioned by the BBC
Philharmonic for Michael Collins and first heard in 1994, and
it impressed then for its scale, for its approach centred on the
soloist and for its typical rhythmic closing section, capped,
as the composer tells us, by ‘the melody for which the whole concerto
has been waiting’. Clarinettist Michael Collins has really identified
with the music and he gives a remarkably personal and personable
account of the music.
The filler, Stepping Out, is a vigorous
string orchestra essay in minimalism which suggest John Adams.
Indeed, the booklet quotes the throwaway remark, presumably made
by the composer: ‘John Adams meets Shostakovich, with a bit of
Gregson thrown in’. In fact the second part, a tempestuous fugue,
is pure Gregson in its drive, excitement and no-nonsense cut off.
If you have not come across Gregson before do
try this approachable and eloquent music. The BBC Philharmonic
production team of Mike George and Stephen Rinker have done a
great job for Gregson and Chandos.
Lewis Foreman
see also Concerto
for Orchestra
Michael Collins (clarinet);
Olivier Charlier (violin),