Campion Records
www.dimusic.co.uk
dimus@aol.com
I’m not really quite
sure about the musical significance
of "fantasising" – which my
dictionary tells me involves "creating
strange or whimsical ideas". There
are plenty strange sounds in much contemporary
music, but here, whatever the intention,
it suggests much musical wizardry! There
are plenty of attractive sounds, and
plenty of technical wizardry in this
delightful music and its performance,
conceived around the idea of a railway
journey through rural mid-Wales and
making allusions en route to
associations with Warlock, Walford Davies,
Morfydd Owen and the Davies family.
This imaginary journey
sets off with the perky Welsh tune Dygan
Caersws, cheerfully elaborated by
Ian Parrott for John Turner’s recorder
and the other winds before melting into
the oboe’s delicious little waltz tune
– a melody that lives long in the mind!
There is whimsy as the little train
puffs, chugs and toots its way through
the rural Welsh scene. A contemplative
stop somewhere between stations provides
a richly haunting, nostalgic melody
for bassoon and piano by Peter Crossley-Holland
– and in contrast a series of virtuosic
variations by Alun Hoddinott for solo
recorder illustrating Gwyn Thomas’s
poetic evocation of a lizard sunning
itself on a railside rock. The train
sets off again with a delightfully bumbling
Rondo Giocoso by Ian Parrott for bassoon
and piano.
Virtually the centre-piece,
with its wistful opening bars, William
Mathias’s three-movement Concertino
(opus 65) maintains the rustic mood,
the scoring with harpsichord colouring
suggestive of the village green. Beneath
the slow movement’s statuesque drooping
quasi-Celtic melody (a danse sacré
or profane) lurks the image of a darker
past – the harpsichord chords suggesting
the role of the seannachie. This is
followed by an energetic fugal finale.
The next stop is a
melancholy wayside halt – Ian Parrott’s
"Autumn Landscape" (oboe and
piano) seems to look out, with Thomas
at Adlestrop, on a deserted panorama
– and certainly there are birds? The
journey continues with a ‘jaunty’ trip
on the narrow-gauge from Aberystwyth
to Devil’s Bridge, before letting off
steam! All forward movement is halted
however with Jeffrey Lewis’s Risoluto
- a series of declamatory chords – perhaps
at signals? – culminating in a harsh
series of piano chords full of tension.
The final item might be subtitled "my
friends pictured within" - a series
of variations by Ian Parrott on a descending
C major chord. With it the composer
tracks imaginatively how he thinks that
some of his colleagues would have treated
this chord today – there are echoes
of the composers he envisages – that
of Finzi perhaps the most readily recognisable.
This is altogether
a most companionable record.
Colin Scott-Sutherland
John Turner (recorder) 
