Sergei RACHMANINOV (1873-1943)
Preludes Op.23; No.6 in E flat major [2:39]: No.10 in G flat
major [3:33]: No.9 in E flat major: No.4 in D major [4:28]: No.5 in
G minor [4:02]: No.1 in F sharp minor [2:59]: No.2 in B flat major [4:06]
Preludes Op.32; No.1 in C major [1:18]: No.25 in G major [3:10]:
No.12 in G sharp minor [2:27]: No.3 in E major [2:40]: No.10 in B minor
[5:52]: No.4 in E minor [5:41]: No.13 in D flat major [5:17]
Transcriptions: Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(Mendelssohn) [4:29]: Lilacs Op.21 No.5 (Rachmaninov) [2:26]: Lullaby
Op.54 No.16 (Tchaikovsky) [4:37]: Flight of the Bumble Bee - Tsar Saltan
(Rimsky-Korsakov) [1:15]: Gopak - Sorotchinski Fair (Mussorgsky) [1:55]:
Minuet - L’Arlesienne Suite No.1) (Bizet) [3:24]: Wohin? - Die
schöne Müllerin (Schubert) [3:14]: Liebeslied (Kreisler) [4:27]
Colin Horsley (piano)
rec. c.1954 and 1959? London
ATOLL ACD 442 [76:00]
Lovers of British music in particular have real
reason to be grateful to the memory of New Zealand-born Colin Horsley
(1920-2012), who spent most of his life in Britain, where he journeyed
in 1936 to study at the Royal College of Music with Herbert Fryer and
Angus Morrison. Later he took lessons with Tobias Matthay and worked
with one of that pedagogue’s best pupils, Irene Scharrer.
Horsley is remembered for a number of associations. He recorded John
Ireland’s Concerto with Basil Cameron [EMI Classics 7 64716 2],
which stands worthily alongside recordings by Eileen Joyce and Eric
Parkin as one of the most devoted of Ireland’s concerto performances
on disc. He was part of a trio with Dennis Brain and Manoug Parikian,
and fortunately transfers of their recordings of Berkeley’s Trio
can be found; so too can Horsley’s performance with the Dennis
Brain Wind Ensemble of Mozart’s Quintet in E flat (if you collect
Brain’s music, look no further for both than the inexpensive ‘Icon’
box 2 06010 2). Horsley premiered Medtner’s Piano Quintet, though
no evidence of his Medtner on disc seems to have survived.
Horsley also formed a sonata duo with violinist Max Rostal. I’ve
never been wholly impressed by all their recordings, but that’s
largely because I’m not always persuaded by Rostal. But certainly
a number are well worth hearing; Symposium issued a raft of them over
the years.
Though he also performed Searle and Rawsthorne - is there a surviving
tape of Horsley and Beecham performing Rawsthorne’s Second Concerto?
- he’s perhaps above all associated with the music of Lennox Berkeley,
who wrote two concertos for him as well as smaller pieces. To get to
grips with Horsley’s immensely understanding way with Berkeley’s
music you will need to hear Lyrita REAM.2109 which contains the A major
Sonata, the Six Preludes, Op.23, three of the four Concert Studies,
Op.14 and other smaller pieces. This is core Horsley. Though just to
complicate matters, he had earlier recorded the Six Preludes for HMV
in 1949.
In addition to such British music, Horsley retained an interest in a
wide range of the repertoire. At the start of his career, his solo concerto
debut had been in Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, and it’s
this composer who is the focus of the CD. It derives from two LPs, one
of which was recorded in 1954, though HMV CLP1268 - which contains a
sequence of Op.32 Preludes and transcriptions - seems to have been issued
long after the companion (in 1959?). It’s certainly possible,
indeed probable, that it was recorded after the companion. That disc,
CLP1048, also contained Franck’s Prélude, Aria et Finale.
Horsley was an excellent technician and had good instincts for the music.
In the core repertoire, it was probably Rachmaninov with whom he was
most linked. He had made a 78 of a Rachmaninov Prelude on 78s and he
continued to perform the solo works and the concertos. He seems to have
got on well with Beecham, with whom he gave at least one performance
of the Paganini Rhapsody - not the most obvious repertoire for
the peppery baronet. True, Horsley lacks Moiseiwitsch’s sense
of colour and tensile control in Op.32 No.12, and Ashkenazy’s
spacious gravity in the D-flat major (No.13), in 1974, possesses more
magisterial control. It’s a shame that HMV didn’t have the
courage to record all the two sets of Preludes but we must be grateful
for what they did set down. In the selections from Op.23 - as with the
Op.32 set, he recorded seven of them - one finds he misses something
of Earl Wild’s wit in No.9. He also lacks the sense of purposeful
development in No.10, where Horsley tends to be a bit discursive. He
makes no attempt to replicate Rachmaninov’s rubati in the Liebeslied
transcription but plays the slower pieces with fluency and poetry. He’s
hardly alone in failing to match the iridescent beauty of Moiseiwitsch’s
Lilacs and the famous Mendelssohn Scherzo recording. CLP1268
seems to have been recorded rather bass-shy, but the transfers are perfectly
acceptable and the notes helpful.
Surely the BBC has archive Horsley performances up its sleeve? I appreciate
its main market is international, promoting the phalanx of important
soloists who visited London in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond but good
musicianship, allied to interesting repertoire has a cachet, some may
argue, beyond the endless regurgitation of standard repertoire by familiar
starry soloists.
Jonathan Woolf
