Imagine, now, a 21-year-old having a work premiered at the Proms and it gaining such a reception that a repeat performance is immediately shoehorned in for the following week. That happened in 1919 for Birmingham-born Dorothy Howell and her Keats-inspired tone poem Lamia, the only previously recorded work of the five on this persuasively enjoyable survey from the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Howell is one of the four female composers whose stories were told last year by Leah Broad in her book Quartet, and still the least familiar, thanks largely to bad luck plus the mix of disparagement and faint praise that would remain a female composer’s due for most of the 20th century. Yet if Lamia is a highlight here, so too are the Three Divertissements, written two decades later: sweet yet never saccharine, they brim with warmth and, in the case of the second, a lightly worn but haunting melancholy.
There’s also her still unstaged 1921 ballet Koong Shee, evocative of its chinoiserie subject without being twee; a knowing Humoresque; and The Rock, a light-footed overture inspired by a visit to Gibraltar. The close miking doesn’t always do the BBCCO favours, but Rebecca Miller conducts buoyant performances that show off Howell’s quicksilver gifts.
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