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Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Various Composers - British Violin Concertos (Clare Howick)


Information

  • (01) Paul Patterson - Violin Concerto No. 2 ('Serenade')
  • (04) Kenneth Leighton - Concerto for Violin and Small Orchestra, Op. 12
  • (08) Gordon Jacob - Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra

Clare Howick, violin
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Grant Llewellyn, conductor

Date: 2017
Label: Naxos
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.573791

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Review

All three composers were (or are) career academics, but it’s notable how Paul Patterson’s concerto of 2013 wants most to step out of the ivory tower and entertain. Kenneth Leighton’s concerto isn’t his best piece despite containing some of his boldest (albeit conservative) music while Gordon Jacob’s appears to be hung up on a certain strand of modality from which his teacher Herbert Howells managed to unlock far more progressive and less self-satisfied ideas.

All three works are scored for relatively small orchestra and Paul Conway’s booklet note describes the soloist-tutti interaction as ‘telling dialogues … rather than … an individual pitted against the mob’. Again, all three handle that element of concerto form differently and I’m afraid, once more, it’s Jacob who comes off worst with the ‘now me, now you’ exchanges in his first movement not doing much to aid interest or momentum.

On that front, Patterson’s piece is the most appealing. The opening movement has something of Martinů’s spirited, kinetic bustle, unperturbed even when it runs into tangled woodwind thickets (the instrumentation, all over the piece, is delicious). I love the final movement’s brisk orchestral unfurling towards the cadenza and the increasing harmonic grind thereafter, heading to the hinterlands of Szymanowski. Clare Howick is often more muscular than she is nostalgic and that’s fine – especially in the slow movement with its own whiff of stale English modality – and her performance tells you the piece was written for her.

Leighton slices through his opening movement with a jagged blade of a theme à la Bartók but the rest of the piece, particularly its elegiac epilogue movement, can’t quite follow the imposition of that idea and we hear too little of the counterpoint and etched detail at which Leighton could excel. For all the finding of faults, it’s good to hear these pieces in such agile, colourful and committed performances.

-- Andrew Mellor, Gramophone

More reviews:
BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: **** / RECORDING: ****
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2018/Mar/British_VCs_8573791.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2018/Apr/British_VCs_8573791.htm
https://www.allmusic.com/album/british-violin-concertos-mw0003120257
https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.573791&languageid=EN
https://www.amazon.com/British-Violin-Concertos-Grant-Llewellyn/dp/B077HFZC98

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Paul Patterson (born 15 June 1947) is a British composer and teacher. Patterson studied trombone and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. He returned there to become Head of Composition and Contemporary Music until 1997, when he became Manson Professor of Composition. A regular guest on composition competition panels, Patterson himself has also produced a number of large-scale choral works, most notably the Mass of the Sea (1983), Stabat Mater (1986), Te Deum (1988) the Millennium Mass (2000), which are performed regularly by leading performers in the United Kingdom and abroad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Patterson_(composer)
https://paulpatterson.co.uk/

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Kenneth Leighton (2 October 1929 – 24 August 1988) was a British composer and pianist. He studied at the Queen's College, Oxford with Bernard Rose, and in Rome with Goffredo Petrassi. Leighton taught at the University of Edinburgh and the Oxford University, where his students included Donald Runnicles, Nicholas Cleobury, Nigel Osborne and James MacMillan. He composed a wide range of music (over 100 works) for many different configurations of instruments. His output includes church music, chamber, organ and solo piano music, as well as large-scale orchestral works and an opera.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Leighton

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Gordon Jacob (5 July 1895 – 8 June 1984) was an English composer and teacher. Jacob was a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams (composition), Herbert Howells (music theory) and Adrian Boult (conducting) at the Royal College of Music. He became a professor at the RCM in 1924, and, until his retirement in 1966, published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific with more than 700 works, including a number of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works, such as music of William Byrd, Edward Elgar and Noël Coward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Jacob

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Clare Howick was a student of Maurice Hasson at the Royal Academy of Music, and also studied with Anne-Sophie Mutter, Zahkar Bron, Ida Haendel and Dorothy DeLay. She won First Prize at the Jellinek Competition as well as many other prizes and awards. Howick has performed most of the violin concerto repertoire (encompassing 52 concerti and works) with several orchestras, including the Philharmonia and BBC Scottish SO, and has performed at major festivals in the UK. As a champion of new music, she has premiered many new works, both on disc and in performance.
http://www.clarehowick.co.uk/

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