Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim
Douglas Bostock conductor
CPO 555 808-2
This latest issue in a valuable series finds the SKP in rejuvenated form, and they give excellent performances throughout. The repertoire, likely to be unfamiliar to the vast majority of listeners, is a fascinating and generous (70 mins) collection of extreme rarities.
Imogen Holst’s The unfortunate traveller comprises four immediately attractive sketches, prompted by Thomas Nashe’s novel relating the adventures of a rascally page at the court of Henry VIII. It was originally scored for brass band; but in order to be accepted as her final exam submission at the RCM, where she was studying under Gordon Jacob, it was required to be recast for strings. Drenched with folksong and morris tunes (the Interlude is particularly haunting) it might be thought of as an English Till Eulenspiegl without a scenario.
Jacob’s own work, Variations on an Air of Henry Purcell (1930), is founded on the Minuet from the incidental music to Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1693). This substantial score—at over seventeen minutes, the longest on the CD—was first heard in a Macnaghten-Lemare concert on 28 January 1932, where it was the principal work in the last concert of the first season; but was then unaccountably lost and not rediscovered until 2002. It was worth the wait. Jacob keeps the melody very much in the forefront throughout, but displays his skills of orchestration through the myriad colours on which he draws, which the SKP clearly relish.
Eugene Goossens’ Miniature Fantasy, op. 2 dates from his time as a pupil of Stanford at the RCM, a quietly assured essay written in the halcyon days before the Great War.
Perhaps the most intriguing and appealing discoveries here are Dorothy Howell’s Two Pieces for Muted Strings. Although listed in New Grove, they were only unearthed from her archives in 2020. The gorgeously shimmering Nocturne is balanced by a scampering Moto perpetuo, and both demand an instant replay in their first recording, made exactly one hundred years after composition.
Balfour Gardiner’s Movement for Strings in C minor, which pays passing tribute to Wagner, began as the last movement to a now lost string quintet, and was later arranged for string orchestra by his fellow Frankfurt Group member, Percy Grainger, to whom it was dedicated. Mathias’s Prelude, Aria, and Finale was commissioned for the Caerphilly Arts Festival in 1964 and first performed by the Boyd Neel Orchestra, whose pioneering work, not only in commissioning works but continually promoting them, was so pivotal to British music.
The SKP under Bostock are their worthy successors.
Review by Andrew Plant