I don't know how many schoolchildren have
Alec Rowley dished
out to them for their daily piano practice these days. Always
supposing there are
isolated pockets of cultural backwater where schoolchildren still
learn the piano at all. He was still present, but on the way
out,
in my young days, but he certainly wrote a vast amount of teaching
pieces, from the most elementary levels to the upper grades,
and a
pretty vast amount of recital stuff that he often played himself.
Aside from this he wrote much vocal and organ music and some
for
orchestra. His music belongs now to childhood memories, as far
off as Jemima Puddleduck or the Roly-Poly Pudding, with its often
whimsical titles. "Witchery (to a winsome little maiden)" op.29
- a very pretty little piece, by the way - reminds us that he
regularly got besotted by his female pupils. One of those who
actually married him got such a crushing delusion that she would
not have his name mentioned in her presence even thirty years
after his death.
Even these little miniatures, delightful and
sometimes touching as they often are, raise doubts as to his
ability to put a larger work together. The ideas are
short-breathed and even on a small scale the only way forward he
can manage is often to repeat his tune in a suddenly unrelated
key. These doubts appear justified in the present Concerto which
presents one idea after another - some rather nice, some banal,
some just noisy - without discernable logic. The listener will not
get bored since new ideas spring up like mushrooms, some bearing
the promise of better things to come, but he will hardly find deep
satisfaction either.
Christian
Darnton was barely even a name to me. Andrew Burn's
notes acknowledge Dr. Andrew Plant, author of a thesis on Darnton,
as his source of information. I learn from them that Darnton
started out as a modernist but embraced communism during the
war and adopted a style intended to appeal more directly to the
people. No doubt it was his political views that had him out
in
the cold, leading to a compositional silence of twenty years.
We don't have a Politburo in the UK but "we have our ways". The
present Concertino got its first performance in South Africa.
In
his last decade he abandoned communism and composed a number
of further works.
After a strident opening, what Andrew Burn
describes as the "languid elegance" of the opening theme promises
a work of some stature in a style vaguely reminiscent of
Shostakovich. Though he tends to take refuge in noise both here
and in the last movement there is a good deal more sense of
purpose to this work than to Rowley's. And I was genuinely taken
with the middle movement. In a sense the material is just
scurrying scales against a chugging accompaniment, but it takes
an original mind to say something new with such basic material.
This
Concertino, by the way, might make a very effective ballet
score.
Roberto
Gerhard has his place here on the basis of his
naturalization papers - he reached England in 1939 as a refugee
from Franco's Spain. All the same, I can no more think of him
as
British than I can think of Rachmaninov, Stravinsky or Schoenberg
as American. His music in this Concerto has a passionate, burning
intensity that seems authentically Spanish. By turns visionary,
brooding and exultant, this piece has a fiendishly complex
sound-world that nevertheless remains luminous and speaks to
the listener with clarity. It must have sounded awfully modern
when
Mewton-Wood premièred it in 1951 yet if you were to play Falla's
"Noches", his Harpsichord Concerto and this Concerto by Gerhard
one after the other - who will be the first to try this on disc?
-
it would form a logical progression. The Concerto may enter the
repertoire yet. It certainly deserves to. Incidentally, the Naxos
inlay gives the date of composition as 1961 while the notes give
the first performance as stated above. In view of Mewton-Wood's
tragically early death - and of the fact that it doesn't sound
like 1960s Gerhard - I take it the correct composition date is
1951.
Howard Ferguson's Concerto is one of his later works
before his withdrawal from composition, feeling he had nothing
more to say. His uncertainty is understandable. This piece veers
between a neo-classicism that looks to Mozart rather than to the
more usual baroque, mingling it with music of a Finzi-like
poignancy. It is all very attractive but the composer's voice
seems unfocussed. A clue comes about two-thirds through the second
movement when a lyrical theme emerges that is as Irish as they
come. Ferguson, it emerges, was really a misty-eyed, nostalgic
Irishman who wanted to write like Stanford but didn't dare given
the musical climate of his day. The finale has its Irish touches,
too.
If the masterpiece here is the Gerhard, the
disc gives us plenty to think about. All four concertos benefit
from a level of playing we can't always take for granted in fringe
repertoire. In spite of the illustrious precedent of John Ogdon,
winners of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition more often than
not
travel the world with a repertoire that will go into a single
small suitcase. Or do they? In 1975 or thereabouts I heard a
recital by cellist Moray Walsh in which he gave a trial run of
the repertoire he was taking to the Tchaikovsky Competition that
year.
Apart from the normal core repertoire there was a "Competition
Piece" specially composed by some official Soviet composer. It
was actually a bit like Alec Rowley.
Christopher Howell
see also reviews by
Rob
Barnett and John
France
Peter Donohoe (piano,
conductor)
