This disc makes a very welcome return to the catalogue
after its first issue on Argo in 1991-2 and subsequent nose-dive into
deletion purgatory.
The BBC Concert Orchestra have this music (Rio
and Horoscope) in their blood and must have performed it
time without number under Vilem Tausky and Ashley Lawrence long before
Barry Wordsworth became their principal. This is jazzy, nostalgic, piercingly
poignant, bluesy, rhythmically vital and louche. Lambert can be devastatingly
effective - listen for example to the way the Concert Orchestra's trumpet
principal plunges and weaves with a triumphantly emotional scalpel at
9.13 in Rio Grande. Kathryn Stott is alert and vivaciously
responsive to the mercurial mood-swings of this work. Della Jones is
also magnificent as you can hear in the way she rolls, as no-one else
has, the words 'the soft Brazilian air' at 12.27.
Next comes the Piano Concerto - a concerto for
piano and nonet - written in memory of Peter Warlock. It too has its
darkly jazzy side as well as Hispanic and Moorish inflections, There
are heroic moments in the first movement often redolent of Ravelian
orchestration but in its last two movements Lambert pushes the boat
out into the self-same astringent waters where we find Goossens and
Van Dieren. This is a work of a quite different cloth than Rio Grande.
The soloists in the Concerto are all principals from the Concert Orchestra.
They are; Ileana Ruhemann (fl), Michael Pearce (cl), Michael Angress
(cl 1), Ruth McDowall (cl 2), Robert Ferriman (trpt), James Casey (tromb),
Nigel Blomiley (vc), Christopher Westcott (dbl bs) and Alasdair Malloy
(perc).
After the sobering yet probing douche of the Concerto
we move on to the world of ballet which Lambert helped transform through
the 1930s and 1940s. The transition is however smooth. Horoscope's
Palindromic Prelude emerges from lichen-shaded brackish waters
as if from Goossens' By the Tarn and Frank Bridge's There
is a Willow. The Dance for the Followers of Leo is effervescently
put across going at a rate faster than the Robert Irving's classic account
that used to be found on old Decca Eclipse LPs. This is a concert-hall
approach rather than being danceable. The Gemini waltz is quickly
pulsed.
The Concert Orchestra are not the first nor yet the
second BBC orchestra. While they are well inside the idiom there are
rough edges here and there in ensemble especially in some of the quicker
passages in Horoscope. This ballet score allows them opportunities
(well taken) for ballroom grandeur. At those moments a bigger string
section would have helped.
The notes by Calum Macdonald are good though one or
two sentences have become garbled. Good to see the full text of Sacheverell
Sitwell's Rio Grande poem given complete in the booklet.
Rob Barnett
Kathryn Stott (piano)