H**N
Great British Music From Luxembourg
The Parry Third Symphony is a favorite of mine, and this 1981 recording blows away the very good Bamert recording on Chandos. I don't know who Hager is, but he leads a vibrant, exciting performance, and the Luxembourgers play very well. The recorded sound is also very acceptable. The other pieces are well done too. I could live without the Brian, but especially liked the Foulds suites. It's amazing that these are first recordings (I think Boult made an earlier recording of Parry's Symphonic Variations). This set was also issued on CD, but is hard to find. Recommended for lovers of Parry and Foulds.
D**E
Not the best versions when there are others, but still the only one of some of these rare works
The Luxembourg Orchestra, Salzburg-Mozarteum stalwart Leopold Hager and the small French label Forlane seem unlikely candidates for unearthing forgotten works by near-forgotten turn-of-the (20th) Century British Composers - especially back then in 1981 when these recordings were made - but this is precisely what we get here. These were all recording premieres.Parry's third Symphony "The English", composed in 1889, is precisely what gave British music a bad reputation and provoked some to say that there wasn't any between Purcell and Britten (or was it Elgar?) : it is written in sub-Brahmsian style (and the Brahms of the Acadamic Festival Overture rather than the Symphonies) and sounds epigonic - think of Bruch, or better (worse) still Goetz or Raff. Don't get me wrong: the Symphony is a good specimen in its (limited) genre. But there is something that Brahms obviously got that Parry and all the Brahms epigones never acquired: a unique sense of orchestral texture. Still, there is now apparently an international audience for that kind of music, as there was in the UK at the turn of last century, if the numerous recordings of Parry's Symphonies now available are to serve as an indication. If you don't mind, I'll stick to Brahms.Apparently Parry liked to reconcile the opposites - or what was viewed as such in those days. It is Wagner and Liszt that he imitates in his Concertstück. Its date of composition is supposed to be 1884 or 1887. The liner notes set much store on the fact that when the piece was composed, the Liszt-Wagner model was very avant-garde. Maybe so, and the piece is indeed dramatic and theatrical as a Liszt tone-poem, but these considerations do not make it less epigonic. I'll stick to Liszt and Wagner if you don't mind.Havergal Brian worked on his opera "The Tigers" between 1917 and 1929. Despite the publication of the vocal score in 1932, it didn't get performed in Brian's lifetime (which lasted until 1977). The full score was considered lost but was retrieved (apparently from a pile of rubbish in a London Tin Pan Alley basement), thanks to an offer of reward by the Havergal Brian Society, and its first complete performance took place in 1983 with the BBC under Lionel Friend. The opera is a satire of the English society of the time (its original title was "The Grotesques", including the army, represented by The Tigers, the regiment of the title. In the early 1920s Brian extracted six Symphonic movements from the score, to be performed as a suite or individually. They add up to a substantial piece of 55 minutes, and are given here complete. Hearing them makes one regret that the complete opera isn't available on CD (the 1983 performance was taped and aired by the BBC).One of the remarkable aspects is Brian's ability to write music that sounds not just like an accompaniment for voices, but has a real symphonic and formal cogency. The Symphonic Variations start in a merry and insouciant mood, but there are striking turns to the dramatic and an evocation of grotesquerie through imaginative touches of orchestration (3:12), and the same can be said of the other symphonic excerpts, with many moments that are also lush, sensuous, atmospheric and subtly colored. I wouldn't say that it breaks any new grounds even within the limits of late-Romantic symphonic writing, but there is a whimsicality that is uniquely Brian's own.I discovered John Foulds and his music in the early days of the CD era, through his pieces for String Quartets played by the Endellion Quartet on Pearl ( Foulds: String Quartets ). I found them works of searing lyrical intensity, announcing Britten's three string Quartets. From there, I tried to buy every I could find of Foulds, but there wasn't much then - this Forlane set was reissued on CD in 1994. The St Joan-suite is all that is let from Fould's score for Shaw's play, one of his greatest successes in the mid-1920s (all the material of the incidental music was burnt during WW II). It starts with some beautifully atmospheric and pastoral music, with even echoes of Wagner's Magic Fire music. The penultimate movement, The Martyr, is an intense and dramatic funeral march. The rest isn't as striking, sometimes sentimental (evocation of The Maiden), sometimes heroic (Orleans), vaguely reminiscent of the lighter Sibelius. The individual movements aren't cued unfortunately (and apparently the epilogue follows the funeral march without a break).The Pasquinades Symphoniques were conceived as a triptych, #1 being entitled "Classical", #2 "Romantic" and #3 "Modernist", - but this last one, which was to have been a palindrome (reverse) of the first one, was never completed. The second, a lush late-Romantic piece, can be found on John Foulds: Le Cabaret; April-England; Pasquinade; Etc. . The generic title "Pasquinade", after a 16th Century Italian term designating an anonymous lampoon in verse or prose, Foulds had used in some other works, applying it to music of Scherzo character, and we get some of that here, in the scurrying music with grandiose brass fanfares framing an extended middle section in English pastoral-to-lyrical mood. The piece ends with another reminiscence of Wagner's Fire music. In the architecture more than the actual themes faint echoes of Bruckner can be heard, but I don't hear much that is "classical".Mirage, written in 1910, was the fifth and last of a series of "Music-Poems" composed by Foulds and, as I've commented in my review of the other recording by Sakari Oramo ( John Foulds: Three Mantras ), it is enjoyable but strongly derivative of Strauss and Wagner. The only truly original moment is a series of downward string glissandos in quarter-tones at 8:29 and again 9:14, possibly symbolizing Man's decline into despair. There are good things in Hager's reading but overall there is an extra urgency and bite and urgency with Oramo. Again the six individual sections aren't cued.Excellent sonics, informative liner notes, generous TT of 78:37 and 74:01.
Trustpilot
3 days ago
2 weeks ago
