Sir Malcolm ARNOLD (1921-2006)
Symphony No. 5 (1961) [29:54]
Divertimento No. 2 (1950) [9:03]
Symphonic Study - Machines (1948) [6:34]
Solitaire: Sarabande and Polka (1956) [5:49]
Homage to the Queen (1953) [9:21]
Little Suite No. 2 (1967) [8:36]
The Belles of St Trinians - comedy suite (1954) [8.33]
Munchner Symphoniker/Douglas Bostock
Royal Aarhus Academy Symphony Orchestra/Douglas Bostock (Homage; Little Suite)
rec. 1999/2000, Munich, Aarhus
ALTO ALC1424 [78:30]
This tightly-packed CD encompasses most of the genres in which Arnold practised: symphony, suite, ballet and film music. Bostock with his orchestras and engineers do the music credit. This is matched by Lewis Foreman’s and Eric Bach’s compendious notes on the music. These are across no fewer than six pages.
Bostock’s account of the Fifth Symphony is a briskly virtuosic but still poignant, tense and undeniably exciting version of this wonderful work. As to timings in other recordings, the composer took 33:35, Handley 31:41 and Penny 32:37. Bostock is very healthily recorded in an open acoustic that reports a wealth of glorious detail. I look back to days when the Fifth was a rare and despised piece which I recall discovering in its first recording … in my case on cassette. In those days - the dim and distant early 1970s - I never expected to hear the work in concert. When I did - some 25 years alter - the emotive experience was quite overwhelming. I heard it live in Stockport in 1998 and then under Alexandre Bloch in Cardiff.
The Symphonic Study - Machines is an early work and fairly severe, Broadly it’s from the same territory as the Horn Concerto No. 1 and the Symphony for Strings. Colourful and with its feet firmly planted in his music for the Central Office for Information documentary Report on Steel, it may have been written in knowledge of the furnaces and rolling mills of Mossolov’s Iron Foundry. There are however some dreamy sections that look forward to his later music.
For the ballet Solitaire, ‘Sarabande’ and ‘Polka’ were rustled up to join the Eight English Dances. There’s a smile and a sigh in ‘Sarabande’ and a boozily dissolute evocation of the music-hall and circus ring in ‘Polka’.
The Homage to the Queen pieces might just as easily function as another four dances to join Arnold’s complement for the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish collections. They reflect whooping pageantry and a sense of confidence bursting forth.
The Second Little Suite is a three-movement character collection. Again, delicious bluster rubs shoulders with a study in grey, romantically wistful and smoochy notes. A vivace Dance revels in one of Arnold’s DNA strands: sumptuous and tangily varied percussion. It’s as much in evidence here as it is in the Fourth Symphony.
We end with film music in Christopher Palmer’s ‘raid’ on the 35 orchestral cues from the score Arnold wrote for the film The Belles of St Trinians. The resulting five-movement Comedy Suite is a slight thing, full of wheezy wit, slily sidling music and uproarious circus capers.
The contents of the present disc have been assembled from two ClassicOs of yore. The main burden is drawn from: CLASSCD294 (review review) and the ‘top-up’ from CLASSCD424 (review). The Organ Concerto from the latter has found a home on Musical Concepts MC3105 (review).
This is a very good and well-stacked budget price collection with a Fifth Symphony to vie with the numerous best. It’s also distinguished by a cover photograph of Arnold with cheroot firmly planted. I’ve not seen that photo before.
Rob Barnett
