The
British Piano Concerto series has alighted on Hamilton Harty’s
alluringly romantic opus. It’s prefaced by the Comedy Overture
and by the less well-known Fantasy Scenes and the
disc clocks in at five minutes under the hour. Two of these,
the concerto and the overture, come into direct competition
with Chandos’s pioneering recordings presided over by Bryden
Thomson and still living artefacts in the marketplace.
The Comedy Overture was
written in 1906. It’s light-hearted but with real feeling.
The cocksure opening, ebullient and confident, is intimately
related to the sentimental Irish folk melody that’s embedded
in the Overture with its Dvořákian tints - Harty was
a splendid Dvořák conductor and recorded the New
World with the Hallé. The brass and wind efflorescence
and the balletic string writing sound like the light Elgar
but the whole sounds comfortingly like Harty, not least his
diatonic mastery.
The Fantasy Scenes date
from 1919, the year before his assumption of the chief conductorship
of the Hallé. It was written in the then fashionable Arabian
Nights style though it’s very much light or entr’acte music
and written for a correspondingly small orchestra. The third
of the four movements is actually a reworking of an earlier
work. The Laughing Juggler has a vigorous, almost
brass band energy about it, whilst pizzicati and some lissom
balletic strings lace A Dancer’s Reverie. The third
has a gentle burnish and the final scene, In the Slave
Market is bustly and none-too-serious.
The meat of the programme
however is the Concerto. This is a glorious late Romantic
effusion, one that has supped deeply of Rachmaninoff. Cast
in three movements it never lets up in motivic interest,
colour, rhythmic snap and digital demand. The seamless transitions
are more overtly romantic than the earlier Violin Concerto
(notwithstanding Ralph Holmes’s superb advocacy on Chandos
this could do with a new recording for Hyperion’s Romantic
Violin Concerto series). Statements, recapitulations and
embellishments are all of the highest quality and it helps
that the material as such is of such melting beauty or such
passionate and declamatory command. The smuggled reference
to the old Irish song The Wearing of the Green shows
how adept his orchestration is, and in the slow movement
the rousing middle section acts as a powerhouse contrastive
device to the more emollient material that surrounds it.
The finale is an unstoppable creature, full of snap and sap,
ruminative but never discursive, driving, leonine, humorous
and all-conquering.
If you know and love the
Chandos performance with Malcolm Binns, the Ulster Orchestra
and Thomson you should know that this new Donohoe/Yuasa – the
orchestra reprises its performances – is very different in
character. It’s much, much faster, the rhythms are snappier,
corners are turned with greater velocity and there’s greater
tensile energy throughout. It may well be that this is more
in keeping with how Harty would himself have played it – he
premiered it with Beecham conducting – but I have to admit
a certain fondness for some important aspects of the Binns/Thomson
performance. Maybe it’s familiarity but the finale – though
very steady – seems to gain in cumulative drive and scores
over the newcomer in this respect. And Chandos’s recording
was stunning whereas the Naxos has some sticky moments – piano
embedded in orchestral tuttis and some weird sounds in the
finale (I decided they were exposed trombones) as well as
a huge percussion crash, which sounds outsize. Still, this
is an inevitably self-recommending disc because Thomson never
recorded the Fantasy Scenes and they’ve never been
recorded in this form before. The Comedy Overture is well
worth getting to know and love and the Concerto makes a bracing,
finely played alternative to the Chandos.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Rob Barnett
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Peter Donohoe (piano) 
