MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


CD REVIEW

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

alternatively
Classicsonline AmazonUK   AmazonUS

 

Sally BEAMISH (b. 1956)
Concerto No. 2 for Viola and Orchestra “The Seafarer” (2001) [27:46]
Whitescape (2000) [10:22]
Sangsters (2002) [19:42]
Tabea Zimmermann (viola)
Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Ola Rudner
rec. August 2003 (Whitescape; Sangsters); November 2005 (Viola Concerto), Örebro Concert Hall, Sweden. DDD
BIS BISCD1241 [58:47]
Experience Classicsonline


Six years on from the end of her joint residency - alongside Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist - with the Swedish and Scottish Chamber Orchestras, Beamish’s relationship with both orchestras, coupled with her equally significant relationship with the Swedish label BIS continues to bear fruit.
 
This is the fifth CD and the third of her orchestral music, that BIS has dedicated to Beamish’s music; music that was written principally during her tenure with the Swedish and Scottish orchestras between 1998 and 2002. Few British composers are able to lay claim to similar dedication from a record company, a point the composer has personally acknowledged on numerous occasions.
 
Beamish’s relationship with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra goes back to 1987 when she spent a year in the orchestra’s viola section, since when she has become permanently resident in Scotland along with her cellist husband, Robert Irvine. The culture and landscape of Scotland has gradually come to inform much of her music and on this latest disc is heard to most telling effect in Sangsters, perhaps the most noticeably “Scottish” of the three works, in inspiration if not melody.
 
Drawing inspiration from the poem of the same name by Betty McKellar, the three movements of Sangsters correspond to the three verses of McKellar’s poem, with Beamish drawing out differing groups of soloists from within the orchestra in each of the movements. The skylarks of the poem’s first verse are represented by the higher pitched voices of the orchestra with a prominent part for solo timpani in music that is largely airborne, evoking the song and freedom of the skylark whilst skilfully interwoven with the rhythmic inflection of pibroch. The second movement turns to the sea and the “selkies” (seals) of McKellar’s poem, with the lower voices of the orchestra conjuring darker hues in harmony that occasionally recalls Rautavaara and his Cantus Arcticus - try from around 2:30. It is the brass that comes to the fore in the final movement, the initial trumpet fanfares evolving into chorale-like figures that are overlaid with echoes of the opening two movements.
 
In the single movement of Whitescape, Beamish’s music is concerned with her opera, Monster, based on the life of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley. The composer describes Whitescape as a “sketch pad” of ideas for the opera, concentrated into a ten minute span that explores the desolation of the arctic wastes to which Frankenstein follows his creation in order to destroy it, allied with the mental traumas of Shelley’s troubled early life. Haunting, other worldly echoes and simpler strands of melodic material combine to compelling effect in a work that gives the impression of something far more substantial than its relatively brief duration implies.
 
Beamish’s first Viola Concerto was written in 1995 and along with the Cello Concerto River and Tam Lin, for oboe and orchestra, was included on the first BIS CD dedicated to the composer’s orchestral music in the late 1990s. The single movement of the first concerto took as its basis the New Testament story of the denial of Christ by his apostle Peter. In the three movement Second Concerto it is the ninth century Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer from which Beamish draws her inspiration and more specifically a new translation of The Seafarer. It is the work of Charles Harrison Wallace, a man whose Scots/Swedish roots give what Beamish regards as “a very Nordic take on the poem” and seems wholly appropriate given the Scottish and Swedish connections of the composer’s residency. That the poem had a potent effect on Beamish is clearly borne out by the fact that Wallace’s translation had already inspired two works before the composer turned to the Viola Concerto No. 2 as the final panel in her “Seafarer Trilogy”.
 
Cast in three substantial movements, it is the formal cogency of the work as much as the material itself that impresses; one senses that Beamish is a composer that is never less than in complete control of her musical direction. Every note is conceived with a sense of place and purpose allied with a deft economy of means that is never overstepped. Not surprisingly for a composer who spent a good many years as a professional viola player, the solo part is beautifully written, taking flight in the opening Andante irrequieto before ultimately subsiding via a series of lyrically searching “cadenzas” in the final Andante riflessivo to a conclusion of spiritually reflective resolution.
 
The BIS recording can only be described as exemplary capturing the music in vivid, transparent colour, whilst Tabea Zimmerman, Ola Rudner and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra are truly worthy exponents of Beamish’s strikingly evocative, personal and atmosphere-rich scores. The result is a beautifully realised CD.
 
Christopher Thomas
 


 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.