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Red Leaves - Works by 20th Century Composers - Brunel Ensemble - Christopher Austin

 
Red Leaves - Works by 20th Century Composers - Brunel Ensemble - Christopher Austin-Chamber Ensemble-Chamber Music
ID: SIGCD053 (EAN: 635212005323)  | 1 CD | DDD
LABEL:
Signum Records
Collection:
Chamber Music
Subcollection:
Chamber Ensemble
Composers:
LUTYENS, Elisabeth | Mc CABE, John | SAXTON, Robert | WILLIAMSON, Malcolm
Interprets:
CAHILL, Teresa (soprano)
Ensembles:
Brunel Ensemble
Conductors:
AUSTIN, Christopher
Other info:

Signum Classics are proud to announce The Brunel Ensemble's first disc on Signum Classics - Red Leaves.

No ensemble other ensemble is as committed to the performance of such works from all decades of the twentieth century. Formed in 1992, the group gives thrilling performances under Christopher Austin’s inspired direction.

John McCabe’s Red Leaves was commissioned by the European Community Chamber Orchestra and the 1991 Istanbul Festival. Composer Malcom Williamson studied with Elisabeth Lutyens (as did Robert Saxton) and he was Master of the Queen’s Music until his death in 2003. One of Lutyens’ first major success was a setting of Rimbaud, O Saisons, O Chateau encored at the first performance in 1947 - but noteable for having previously been turned down by the BBC as unsingable!

The McCabe and Williamson pieces are linked by the common theme of nature, the latter being inspired by Australian landscape and history. It was commissioned for the 150th Anniversary of the State of Victoria. For his anniversary greeting of 1986 on the occasion of his colleague’s half century, Robert Saxton presented his Birthday Piece for Richard Rodney Bennett. In which he chose in time-honoured manner to extract from Bennett’s name the musical notes available as a thematic cipher, and to fashion them after his own manner into a bracing invention for strings. Red Leaves is a disc of modern works by British composers.
Tracklist
 
SAXTON, Robert (b. 1953) 
1. Birthday Piece for Richard Rodney Bennett3:14
 play
Elijah's Violin 
2. i.5:58
 play
3. ii.4:11
 play
4. iii.5:05
 play
5. iv.6:16
 play
LUTYENS, Elisabeth (1906-1984) 
Six Bagatelles, Op.113 
6. i.1:46
 play
7. ii.4:37
 play
8. iii.1:49
 play
9. iv.2:12
 play
10. v.2:14
 play
11. vi.1:22
 play
12. O Saisons, ô Châteaux*, Op.136:26
 play
Mc CABE, John (b. 1939) 
13. Red Leaves10:02
 play
WILLIAMSON, Malcolm (1931-2003) 
Symphony No.7 for strings 
14. I7:08
 play
15. II3:43
 play
16. III8:16
 play
17. IV2:43
 play

Review:
 

The four composers represented in the programme recorded by the Brunel Ensemble include Elizabeth Lutyens, whose centenary falls in 2006. The two works, separated by 30 years, suggest a preference for relatively small orchestras and demonstrate the consistency of her mature style. O Saison, o Chateaux, a setting of Arthur Rimbaud, for soprano and small orchestra, is characteristic of her lyrical impulse. The Six Bagatelles, for chamber orchestra, completed in 1976, but not discovered until the 1990s, combine the precision of Webern with a harmonic language indebted to Berg and Schoenberg.
Elizabeth Lutyens was a fine composition teacher, numbering Robert Saxton and Malcolm Williamson among her pupils. Saxton’s identity is immediately apparent in his brief Birthday Piece for Richard Rodney Bennett, for strings. It functions as an apt prelude to Elijah’s Violin, for chamber orchestra, one of Saxton’s most impressive pieces which does not quite amount to a concerto, though it incorporates a solo violin, in accordance with the title.
It is sometimes maintained that, in contrast to Bliss, Malcolm Williamson’s creative imagination began to falter after he became Master of the Queen’s Music. He seems to have missed some commission deadlines, but he was still producing powerful scores well into his sixties. His Seventh Symphony, for strings, was his last. It is undeniably traditional, yet it also encompasses a variety of styles. It certainly fits well into the large body of British music for strings. Likewise, John McCabe’s comparatively brief Red Leaves belongs to those works inspired by nature in general and forests in particular.
John Warnaby


BBC Music Magazine
Performance **** Sound ****

On paper this looks a random assembly of disparate pieces, but proves instead to be an absorbing, even fascinating, collection of some splendid contemporary, and causelessly neglected no-longer-quite-contemporary works by British composers (plus one Australian). From the dramatic unisons of Robert Saxton's unexpectedly weighty Birthday Piece for Richard Rodney Bennett to the marvellously varied writing of Malcolm Williamson's late Seventh Symphony for strings, with its Macedonian dances and warmly elegiac Andante, there are continual surprises and satisfactions. The continuing strength of the lyric, broodingly pastoral post-Maw, post-Tippett tradition with its lush post-tonal harmony, hinted at in these works, seems to be affirmed by John McCabe's title piece, inspired by the forests of New England in the Fall, and by the four movements of Saxton's quasi-symphonic cycle Elijah's Violin, a work puzzlingly left unmentioned in Nicholas Williams's booklet notes. Counterpoised to this is the fiercer, flintier mode
Callum MacDonald


 

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