David Kent-Watson's Cameo Classics label has been around, to
my knowledge, since the 1970s. He was behind the startling series
of LPs made by Geoffrey Heald-Smith and the City of Hull Youth
Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s. It was through these recordings
that many of us were introduced, via those Gough and Davey LPs,
to Bantock's
Hebridean, Holbrooke's
Gwyn ap Nudd,
German's Symphony No. 2
Norwich and Bantock's
Sapphic
Poem played by Gillian Thoday (cello). Most of these vinyls
surfaced around 1978 which was centenary year for Holbrooke.
Those albums were made at the giddy vanguard of a renaissance
for melodic orchestral music lying at a periphery too remote
even for Lyrita. I wonder if they will ever re-surface. If they
do perhaps we can also hear for the first time their unissued
Cowen
Idyllic Symphony. DK-W also collaborated with the
Havergal Brian Society in systematically recording with Heald-Smith
and the young Hull players all of Brian's extant early orchestral
music. Enthusiasts queued up for the latest release and there
was a hum and buzz about the label's activity even if the bravery
of all concerned had to triumph over the very young players'
technical shortcomings. For some years you have been able to
get some sense of the Hull adventure on a two CD set of the Brian
works although it is not one that I have heard. I still have
the LPs on storage shelving upstairs. Hull must have been proud
of Heald-Smith which in an initiative perhaps comparable with
Venezuela's ‘La Sistema’ engaged young people in
a challenging enterprise that caught the imagination of collectors
and enthusiasts worldwide. Cameo issued the occasional LP and
then CD but were otherwise dormant until a few years ago. Now
they have the makings of an ambitious and irresistible catalogue:
Pabst Piano Concerto (CC9021CD); Jadassohn Symphony 1 and Piano
Concerto (CC9026CD) and Brüll Symphony and Serenade 1 (CC9027CD).
More details at www.cameo-classics.com.
Their latest disc features accomplished and enthusiastic playing
from an East European orchestra and a Kazakhstan-born conductor
who is a British citizen. Four days of rehearsal has lent a polish
and fluency to these revivals of three fascinating British orchestral
scores from the latterly neglected generation born 1878-98. Their
middle to old age was blackened by a change in musical fashion
that left their music seemingly unwanted. Unplayed - certainly
unrecorded. The number of concert performances of these works
was nil in the case of the Blower, none in living memory for
the Holbrooke and the last outing for the Howell appears to have
been a concert in November 1950 by the Croydon Symphony Orchestra
under Ralph Nicolson.
While these three tonal-romantic scores share a disc they are
not all cut from the same cloth. They are unwaveringly loyal
to melodic values but the Howell is most transparently scored
and beguilingly atmospheric, the Blower is a major British symphony
with similarities in sound to RVW and Bax and the Holbrooke is
a fantastically orchestrated yet compact plaything which revels
in its subject tune and throws in a few others for good measure.
This is Holbrooke the showman rather than Holbrooke the poetic
dreamer - for the latter we must encounter
Ulalume and
Queen
Mab … if only.
Dorothy Howell's works were feted and performed. They had Prom
premieres in the inter-war years. Henry Wood and Dan Godfrey
championed her scores. Her
Lamia - a subject that
years before had also attracted Macdowell in another fine tone
poem (recorded by Kenneth Klein on Albany and by Karl Krueger
on
Bridge's
SPAMH revival series) - is based on Keats. Its fascination and
enthralling power lies in its diaphanous scoring which is luminously
put across in this performance. The transparency of the writing
has the delicacy of Berlioz but the real redolence is of the
Diaghilev scores of the 1900s - lush yet pointillistic. One can
imagine the Ballet Russe making hay with this in much the same
way that they did with Balakirev's
Tamara. The music at
other times reminded me of Bantock's
Pierrot of the Minute and
at others of Rimsky's
Sadko, Liadov's
Enchanted Lake,
Biarent's
Contes Russes and closer to home of Bax's
Garden
of Fand. This is music expertly and transparently scored
and vicaciously coloured.
I know that
Holbrooke is a composer Cameo have some hopes
to record more ambitiously still. They will need to keep an eye
on a parallel enterprise by CPO and the conductor Howard Griffiths.
Let's hope that Cameo's plans will be fulfilled for this disc
is evidence that with rehearsal and preparation this splendid
music can enjoy new and vibrant life. While we wait we can be
impressed with the
Variations on an Irish tune. They are
a companion piece to another Henry Wood favourite which he recorded
in acoustic days (and now sounds like a gigantic wheezing squeeze-box),
the orchestral variations on
Three Blind Mice. These works
represent the lighter Holbrooke - continued in the 1920s when
he wrote dance-band pieces. They nonetheless reflect his brilliance
and his predilection for borrowing from the popular culture of
the times. His galley years in the drudgery of the music-hall
left their mark. Across 12½ minutes Holbrooke gives us
a great romp of a piece in which he has his orchestra turning
metaphorical cartwheels and somersaults. It's more densely scored
than the other two pieces - so much is going on. This might well
be a weakness. The impression that remains though is of exuberance
and mastery.
The
Blower Symphony is an impressive major piece with
its roots struck deep into the inspiration that brought the Moeran
symphony and Bax symphonies 5 and 6 into being. While he never
sounds like Moeran the splendour of his finale does in the stately
slowly unfurlng fanfares parallel that of Bax 5. Several times
I was also reminded of Bax's earlier Irish works. Earlier movements
occasionally inhabit the same region as Vaughan Williams in his
symphonies 3 and 5. This is a grand romantic British symphony
here receiving its first fully professional recording. You need
to hear this if you have any time for the stylistic references
I have given.
As for Blower I hope we can hear in future the Horn Concerto
which he wrote for Dennis Brain. Then again the queue is still
long: Holbrooke's
Queen Mab, Violin Concerto, Saxophone
Concerto and
Apollo and the Seaman, Alfred Corum's Symphony,
Howell's Piano Concerto,
The Rock and
Koong Shee,
Balfour Gardiner's
Berkshire Idyll, Sam Braithwaite's
Carnegie award-winning orchestral scores, Baines's
Thoughtdrift and
Isle
of the Fey, Coke's three Symphonies and, most clamant among
these scores, Benjamin Dale's powerful tone poem
The Turning
Tide - once broadcast in 1990s by Vernon Handley.
The extensive and fine liner-notes are by that new champion of
the Holbrooke cause: Gareth Vaughan. There's also a memoir by
Blower's son, Thomas who with the conductor Peter Craddock put
hours into making the Blower symphony a viable performing reality.
Another triumph for Sibelius software.
The concert premiere of the Blower Symphony has been issued on
CD by the Havant SO. It's still available from their site.
Do seek out these remarkably attractive and thoroughly enjoyable
revivals and ponder what else awaits.
Rob Barnett
Karelia Philharmonic Orchestra/Marius
Stravinsky 
