BBC Concert Orchestra
Martin Yates conductor
DUTTON EPOCH CDLX 7420
I have long had a recording of the Homage to the Queen Suite that I have never played – lazily assuming it to be all fanfares and Elgarian marches. Now here is the complete ballet (nearly 50 minutes) and indeed from a misty opening there do emerge fanfares…before the music swells to full-on classic Arnold of the English Dances, with all the familiar fingerprints – jaunty woodwinds, booming – or delicately tinkling percussion, exultant horns, and sometimes alarmingly intense string melodies.
With 18 tracks there is a variety of mood and pace, and all eminently danceable. But if the writing is always richly melodic there are not that many actual take-away melodies, and without visual interest the music does sometimes rather tread water. Of course there are highlights – the rollocking opening, the luridly dramatic Fire dances, and a final pas-de-deux that has all the yearning ache of Lambert’s Horoscope – before whooping horns return us to an unabashed pageant of rumbustious celebration.
But for all the high level of invention the overall effect can become wearying (‘Our business is rejoicing/Our business is rejoicing’ to quote Volkov on Shostakovitch’s 5th) so that played straight through it finally becomes a somewhat exhausting listen. In the end I wonder if the composer would have been wise to reduce the score to a suite?
You would expect a work about Sweeney Todd to be darker, and so it proves; though after a stealthy opening broadly hinting at Grande Guignol, the composer typically wrong-foots us with a jaunty cakewalk. But this is a tighter more integrated score, building largely on a soaring and searing melody that clearly prefigures the anguished Seventh Symphony.
True, there is a certain amount of mickey-mouse stuff underlining the action, but the hair-raisingly dramatic climax is a passage of truly symphonic weight and power…before a knockabout Finale (complete with oompah brass and mechanical twittering birds) reminds us that it is all been just Good Innocent Murder!
Throughout the BBC orchestra sound like they are having a real blast, and the (SACD) sound is spectacular. Recommended for the shorter work, and for dipping into the longer!
Review by Kevin Mandry