Toccata Classics is making a bit of a thing out of the music of Charles O’Brien (1882-1968). It has already embarked on a survey of O’Brien’s piano music, and now it is planning similar coverage of his orchestral works.
Though he was born in Eastbourne, O’Brien’s family was Scottish and he grew up in Edinburgh, where he was taught composition by Hamish MacCunn, composer of the overture The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, and then studied at Oxford and Trinity College, Dublin, before settling again in Edinburgh, where he worked as an organist and conductor. Whether O’Brien’s own music really merits revival seems arguable on the evidence of this disc. Ellengowan, the 1914 concert overture inspired by one of Scott’s Waverley novels, would hardly have surprised Mendelssohn, while the symphony dates from a few years later, but seems oblivious to anything that had happened in music since early Brahms. Perhaps a top-flight orchestra could make both pieces more texturally alluring, but the performances by the Latvian Liepaja Symphony under Paul Mann are distinctly routine.
