Jacob | Dunhill | Holst | Bush | Pitfield | Gibbs
Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim
Douglas Bostock conductor
CPO 555 452-2
While welcome for its championing of rarely-heard repertoire, most of this disc (under the title British Music for Strings IV) falls squarely into the pleasantly conventional, regardless of the craftsmanship. Several works were intended for light music programmes or school orchestras.
The suites by Jacob (written for Howell’s School, Llandaff) and Dunhill (called after the Roman name for the Isle of Wight) follow well-trodden paths. Both borrow early dance forms, such as pavane or gavotte, and fashion attractive bonnes bouches from them that please, and do not outstay their welcome.
Pitfield applies such forms to a set of variations twice the length of Dunhill’s piece, but his musical ideas are insufficiently memorable to sustain his modest explorations over this greater span of time. Alan Bush is not represented by one of his thornier offerings, but with a meditation on a favourite passage from Bennett’s obscure piano sonata, The Maid of Orleans. This rescoring is a genuine tribute, not a pastiche, rather as if Finzi had arranged Grieg’s Last Spring. Armstrong Gibbs, a fine artist, was the author of some attractive miniatures, although the demand for such material declined through his life.
The four vignettes gathered here from the Britten–Pears Foundation Archive were not published until 2006, and Lewis Foreman, in his exemplary notes, posits that the collection may have remained unperformed until long after his death. (One cannot help wondering if the overall title was a wise choice for a scion of the toothpaste industry.)
The outstanding exception to its colleagues is Imogen Holst’s extraordinary four-movement Suite from 1943, the only work here to acknowledge the much more advanced harmonic developments of the time. First performed by the Jacques Orchestra at Wigmore Hall on 4 June that year, it received great acclaim, yet is barely mentioned in the current literature about her.
The constantly shifting time-signatures and internal groupings of the Prelude ably support Bostock’s apposite comparison with the ‘free music’ of Grainger. The work proceeds with an uncompromising fugue (ending with a chord of glassy harmonics), a moving Intermezzo and a hair-raisingly virtuosic finale, allotted the unassuming title of Jig.
The work was recorded for NMC last year by the BBC Concert Orchestra, whose warm tones, tight ensemble, and brisk approach place them in the forefront; so the appeal of the SKP’s well-recorded disc will probably rest on the lighter music. However, the last ounce of enthusiasm is occasionally lacking, and while the orchestra play competently enough, a little more flair might have lifted the weaker scores out of the commonplace.
Review by Andrew Plant