Gerald Finzi’s Cello Concerto was his last completed work, first performed in 1955, a year before his death. It is also by a long way his most substantial orchestral score – Paul Watkins’ performance lasts 37 minutes – and for a composer whose output was so closely entwined with words and their setting, it is a rare extended essay in abstract musical thought. But after Elgar’s concerto, which it occasionally echoes,it ranks as one of the finest of all British works for cello and orchestra, standing alongside Bridge’s Oration and Britten’s Cello Symphony.
When he started writing the concerto in 1951, Finzi already knew he did not have long to live, and the wistful land of lost content that never seems too far away in any of his music certainly pervades this work.
Watkins’ performance, which manages to be warmly expressive while remaining slightly detached, captures that mood perfectly. Nothing is exaggerated or over-assertive, even in the hefty cadenza that provides the climax to the first movement, allowing Finzi’s very individual musical voice to speak for itself, as it does so clearly in all the other performances on this disc too.
Louis Lortie is the soloist in the ruminatively beautiful Eclogue for piano and strings, and is spiritedly athletic, with full orchestra, in the neo-baroque Grand Fantasia and Toccata, which, apart from its obvious Bachian flourishes, seems a curious stylistic mix of Hindemith, Walton and Vaughan Williams. Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra make a fine job of the one near rarity in this collection, the strikingly atmospheric Nocturne (New Year Music) from 1940, inspired by a poem by Robert Bridges.
This week’s other picks
There’s a second disc of British works among Chandos’s batch of September releases, this one devoted to the music of Ruth Gipps (1921-1999), who is perhaps best remembered now as a teacher and as the founder of the London Repertoire Orchestra, made up of students and freelance professionals, which she conducted for more than 30 years.
Rumon Gamba’s disc with the BBC National Orchestral of Wales includes two of Gipp’s beautifully fluent symphonies, the Second and the Fourth, as well as her early symphonic poem Knight in Armour, which was premiered at the Last Night of the Proms in 1942. That work, and the single-movement Second Symphony, from 1945, are clearly both indebted to Gipps’s teacher Vaughan Williams, while the Fourth, from 1972, seems to belong securely and less distinctively in the mainstream of mid-century conservative British music.
