Alongside the obligatory singing of Parry’s Jerusalem, and music by a couple of the usual suspects, Delius and Coleridge-Taylor, there were three world premieres in the opening concert of this year’s English Music festival, which was given by the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Martin Yates.
Only one of those novelties, though, was really new, and that was also the most interesting of the three. David Matthews’ Norfolk March began as an exercise in musical archaeology, an attempt to reconstruct Vaughan Williams’ lost Norfolk Rhapsody No 3, using the folk tunes that he is known to have incorporated and following a detailed programme note written for the 1907 premiere.
Matthews’ piece begins as totally plausible VW pastiche, but then takes a much darker, more dissonant turn, boiling up into an Ives-like concatenation of ideas before subsiding to an uneasy close. The rest, though very decently played by the BBCCO, was less consequential.
Paul Lewis’s An Optimistic Overture, composed for a competition in 1971 but never performed until now, was efficient enough, but the major disappointment was the substantial Vaughan Williams premiere. The Fat Knight was intended as a suite of orchestral extracts from his opera Sir John in Love, but only got as far as a short score. Yates has now faithfully orchestrated the piece – perhaps a bit too faithfully, as the seven movements last 50 minutes yet convey little of the opera’s dramatic substance. It’s at least 15 minutes too long and, as I remember it from the 2006 ENO staging, there’s a bit more to Sir John in Love than a potpourri of folk tunes.
• The English Music festival continues until 30 May.
