VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Piano Concerto; The Wasps; English Folk Song Suite (excerpts); The Running Set
Naxos 8.572304
Here’s yet another feather in the cap of Ashley Wass, as he turns his attention to one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s most searching and criminally overlooked canvases.
Begun in 1926 but not completed until 1931, the Piano Concerto bears a dedication to Harriet Cohen (Arnold Bax’s muse and paramour), who gave the February 1933 world premiere at London’s Queen’s Hall with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult. That the work was afforded a comparatively frosty reception should perhaps come as no surprise given the music’s uncompromising toughness of idiom, percussive energy and penetrating harmonic scope (although, apparently, Bartók, for one, was mightily impressed). A number of colleagues suggested to the composer that it might be worthwhile recasting the muscular solo part (consciously influenced by Busoni’s Bach transcriptions, which VW so admired) for two pianos. This he did, in 1946, with the assistance of Joseph Cooper (of BBC TV’s Face the Music fame), also taking the opportunity to devise an entirely new, radiantly hushed coda.
This is the first recording of the concerto in its original guise we’ve had since Piers Lane’s 1994 version for EMI Eminence, also with the RLPO, under the seasoned guidance of Vernon Handley and last reissued on Classics for Pleasure. (Handley’s pioneering Lyrita recording with Howard Shelley and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was set down 10 or so years prior to that.) VW’s big-boned piano writing holds no terrors for Wass; even in the most thunderous passages he never makes an ugly noise nor forces the tone.
However, where he really comes up trumps is in his intensely poetic handling of the introspective Romanza slow movement (whose ravishingly romantic central section makes magical play with the main theme of the Epilogue to Bax’s Third Symphony). Throughout James Judd and an audibly geared-up RLPO provide immaculate support, and the performance as a whole does full justice to one of VW’s most remarkable, deeply personal utterances.
The couplings are just as successful. Judd’s affectionately shaped and exquisitely pointed account of the ‘Aristophanic Suite’ from The Wasps incidental music easily merits place alongside Handley’s (CfP) and Del Mar’s (EMI) – though it’s a crying shame the latter’s outstandingly well engineered Bournemouth Sinfonietta recording from 1981 seems to be languishing in the vaults once again. The ubiquitous English Folk Song Suite likewise comes up as fresh as new paint, while I can’t immediately recall a more joyfully alive, rhythmically pert performance of The Running Set (which VW penned during 1933 for the following year’s annual gathering of the English Folk Dance Society).
The sound is admirably realistic, detailed and full-bodied, with no attempt to spotlight the soloist (indeed, the piano/orchestra balance is pretty much as one would expect from a centre seat in the stalls of Philharmonic Hall). What’s more, Andrew Burn supplies a customarily knowledegable and highly readable booklet essay. At Naxos price, this exciting release is absolutely not to be missed and duly whets the appetite for this sensitive partnership’s forthcoming recording of Bax’s epic Winter Legends (another neglected British masterpiece for piano and orchestra).
Leave a Comment
