I Musicanti strings
Leon Bosch double bass
Peter Donohoe piano
SOMM CD 0707
Percy Godfrey? No, me neither; but this 1900 Piano Quintet is quite the find. The first movement surges with full-bodied invention, and if procedures are text-book they are also confident and superbly fluent.
After such energy we pass straight to an even more boisterous and driven scherzo – think Elgar’s bulldog Dan! The slow movement is noble and eloquent – the eloquence of the public orator rather than the confessional; Godfrey keeps his emotions firmly under control. If the last movement had matched the first, we would have a truly substantial work, but here inspiration rather thins – witness the resort to a fugue two minutes in – and thus it ends in a somewhat throwaway fashion. Godfrey is like an immaculate dinner guest who entertains the table with a flow of carefully judged stories and before the end departs, leaving us wanting more.
Ivor Hodgson is a stripling of (I calculate) 66, and his Quintet is inspired by four Derbyshire inns. The music is pictorial lively and vivid, but to my mind sometimes too long for its length and a bit short on, well, interesting musical development; but presumably Peter Donohoe (dedicatee of the same composers Piano Concerto) finds far more in it than I do – and you may also.
We strike a deeper note with Richard Walthew’s 1912 Phantasy Quintet – one of the many inspired by Cobbett. Subtle, understated and elusive the work is mostly – though not exclusively – rueful in tone; in mood if not in style recalling Fauré at his most complex and subdued. At about thirteen minutes this is the deepest and the most rewarding work on the disc – what else did Walthew write?
There cannot be many Quintets based on TV theme tunes, but John McCabe’s draws inspiration from his 1970s series Sam (still on YouTube). Do not expect a fantasia on Crossroads – this is a scrappy little punch-up of a work, albeit with more searching passages led by the double-bass. Astringent and bracing, I really took to it, though given the many questions it raises it – to continue the analogy – punches well above its weight, and I could wish it had been just the start of a longer work.
The performances are so fluent and exactly judged that you’d think these musicians had been playing these works all their lives. The recording is as clear as a bell, and the thorough sleeve notes excellent. A quite splendid disc, and I would love to hear more of the same.
Review by Kevin Mandry