William PERRY (b.1930)
Toujours Provence – Music for Stage and Screen
Toujours Provence: A Musical Guidebook for Orchestra and Piano (2018) [20.47]
Fiona (2016) [4.13]
Wind in the Willows: Ballet Suite (2018) [34.32]
Swordplay! (2017) [5.06]
Shopping in Paris (1982) [2.46]
Soliloquy (1982) [3.33]
Graduation March (1971) [3.06]
Michael Chertock (piano)
Richard Hayman (harmonica)
Slovak Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra/Paul Phillips, William Perry
rec. 1982-2019, Reduta Concert Hall, Bratislava
NAXOS 8.573954 [74.26]
I rather wish I could be more excited about this CD, but I am not, even though I recognise that many listeners will enjoy it very much. My reservations are not about the playing or performances, which are frequently attractive and certainly carefully prepared, but the intrinsic quality of the music, which left me lukewarm, with no emotion as strong as dislike. Indeed there is nothing here to cause a horse even a second of mild concern – but nothing stayed in the recollection much beyond its initial hearing.
There is something curious about the enterprise as a whole. Take for example Wind in the Willows: Ballet Suite, with a composition date of 2018. The original stage musical appeared in 1985, with book by Jane Iredale and lyrics by Roger McGough and William Perry. The run was fairly brief, but the production received various Tony nominations. Perry in 2018 turned the stage score into a ballet, and it is indeed very danceable. The score was expanded from that of a theatre orchestra to a fully symphonic score. The performance on the CD is a mixture of both early and later versions – though seams do not really appear. Of the 11 movements, the first and second, the fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth were recorded under the direction of Paul Phillips in 2018, the remainder under the composer in the 1980s. As theatre music it works well – instantly attractive to the audience even if not that memorable. The tropes are very much those of American musical theatre. One might have expected something more English in its sound world, but it is amiable enough.
The other sizeable work is Toujours Provence, written as a suite rather than a piano concerto, with four loosely connected movements (‘A Brief History’, ‘Lavender Fields and Vineyards’, ‘Café Terrace at Night’ and ‘Market Day’). One linking feature is a solo clarinet as a kind of guide, with the piano representing modern day Provence. The result is an undemanding, quite attractive and amiable work, which sits somewhere in the genre of light classical, without the memorability of some better-known pieces.
The remaining short works demonstrate very well that Perry is an accomplished composer, technically proficient and able to write quickly to order: not so certain is how long his music may endure.
Michael Wilkinson
