The pretext for this disc of excerpts from the recorded legacy
of the tragically short lived Australian pianist is a novel called
The
Virtuoso written by Sonia Orchard and published by HarperCollins/Fourth
Estate in 2009. Its author heard Mewton-Wood play the Khachaturian
Concerto at the London Proms in 1950 and got to know him. She
imagined him as ‘a lone explorer venturing into a blizzard’ and
saw him playing ‘at the very edge’. The novel - obviously
I’m paraphrasing as I haven’t yet read it - evokes
post-War London artistic life, with the pianist as its fulcrum.
Clearly she explores the emotional and sexual drives that were
so much at the root of Mewton-Wood’s life - or, to quote
the blurb in the booklet; he was ‘…dashing, gay and
notoriously promiscuous’.
But psycho-sexual fictive biography is not what we’re about
here. The excerpts are what will interest you and they are there
to whet your appetite. ABC has already issued a two CD set of
stature which comprises unfilleted performances; so you will
find the complete recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto,
Kinderszenen, the Weber and the Petrarch Sonnet there. Here,
in this tie-in disc, we also have isolated concerto movements
culled from complete recordings, generally made in 1952, the
year before his death. I reviewed that
ABC set
and wrote extensively about the pianist and biographical and
critical matters can be pursued there.
So this latest disc does at least ring some changes. There’s
the first movement of the mighty Bliss Concerto, previously the
preserve of Solomon. You can seek it out fully on a
British
Music Society release where you can also find Stravinsky
and Shostakovich (the Bliss is also on Pristine Audio
PASC153).
The complete Tippett can be found on an album called
The Age
of Gold (Pearl GEM0227). The Beethoven Concerto is available
on Pristine Audio PASC116 for purchase or download (the
Shostakovich is also on
PASC135), whilst the Chopin
is similarly available on
PASC114, and the Schumann on
PASC149. In fact Pristine Audio is the place to go for most Mewton-Wood.
We still await their - or someone else’s - transfer of
the Tchaikovsky Op.13 Concerto.
As a sampler this works pretty well. I doubt it would appeal
to many readers here, who would be frustrated by the brevity
and incompleteness of the music, but then it’s probably
aimed more at readers or prospective readers of the novel.
Jonathan Woolf
Noël Mewton-Wood (piano)
with other performers as above 
