Yet another Naxos/British music bull's-eye, comprising an imaginative programme
realized with great sympathy by all involved. The most substantial offering
here - the resourceful and magnificently crafted Concerto for String Orchestra
- dates from 1949, and David Lloyd-Jones and his admirably prepared group
give a performance which, in its emotional scope and keen vigour, outshines
Sir Adrian Boult's (now-deleted) 1966 radio recording with the BBC SO: not
only does Lloyd-Jones achieve a more thrusting urgency in the outer movements,
he also locates an extra sense of slumbering tragedy in the Lento e mesto.
Similarly, Lloyd-Jones's sparkling new version of the immensely engaging
Divertimento that Rawsthorne wrote for Harry Blech and the London
Mozart Players in 1962 must now take precedence over Bryden Thomson's altogether
sturdier 1979 recording with the BBC Northern SO (BBC Radio Classics, 7/97
- nla)'. certainly, the rumbustious concluding 'Jig' (track 13) is as good
a place as any to sample the spick-and span response of the Northern Chamber
Orchestra.
Written for the Hampton Court Orangery Concerts (where it was first heard
in 1951), the Concertante pastorale is an atmospheric, beautifully
wrought ten-minute essay for sol6 flute, horn and strings. It's succeeded
by the perky LighL Music for Strings composed in 1938 for the Workers'
Music Association and based on Catalan folk-tunes. (The composer's Spanish
Civil War sympathies also revealed themselves in the finale of his First
Piano Concerto premiered in the same year, which quotes a fragment of the
Italian revolutionary song adopted by the Spanish, Bandiera rossa.) The
Rawsthorne Trust commissioned John McCabe's expert orchestration of the miniature
Suite for recorder and strings, the second of whose four linked movements
is a reworking of a ballad from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. But
the most exciting discovery has to be the 1963-4 Elegiac Rhapsody, a
deeply felt threnody for string orchestra written in memory of Rawsthorne's
friend, the poet Louis MacNeice. Not only does it pack a wealth of first-rate
invention and incident into its ten-minute duration, it attains a pitch of
anguished expression possibly unrivalled in this figure's entire output.
Excellently annotated by John Belcher and cleanly engineered, here is a terrific
successor to Naxos's outstanding coupling of Rawsthorne's two violin concertos
(9/98). Tantalizingly, the booklet lists a forthcoming chamber music collection
featuring pianist John McCabe, violist Martin Outram and the Rogeri Trio.
Dare we also also hope for a new version of the Cello Concerto and (above
all) what remains perhaps Rawsthorne's masterpiece, namely the exhilarating
Symphonic Studies of 1938?
Reviewer
Andrew Achenbach
Reproduced by kind permission of Gramophone magazine.
See previous reviews
What next?
You can learn more about the composer from the
Rawsthorne Web Site
If you purchase this disc, as you surely must, reduce your average postage
by also purchasing the companion disc:
 |
RAWSTHORNE
Violin Concertos 1& 2, Fantasy Overture: Cortèges
 Rebecca Hirsch (violin),
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, cond. Lionel Friend
Naxos 8554240
Buy here:
Crotchet
Amazon
see review here |
Naxos also lists a third disc which I have yet to hear:
RAWSTHORNE Quintet for Piano and
Strings, Piano trio, Cello Sonata, Viola sonata, Concertante for Violin and
Piano John McCabe
(piano) Martin Outram (viola) Rogeri Trio
Naxos 8.554352
buy
here
Currently at a special low-midprice there is a recording of the Rawsthorne
Clarinet Quartet coupled with two other British works:
Rawsthorne's symphonies are available on a Lyrita CD:
