Guirne Creith - Concert in G for Violin and Orchestra - Richard Arnell - Violin Concerto in One Movement, Op. 9 - Thomas Pitfield - Concerto Lirico for Violin and Orchestra - RSNO, Martin Yates - Lorraine McAsland, Violin - Dutton Epoch 2009

*I tried to post this morning, several things actually, and of course that's when zippyhare decides to have issues (uploading would have taken 30 min per file!) So, things seem to be ok now, here's the first post at least for tonight..

Here's another Dutton Epoch gem offering three British violin concertos by three obscure composers (especially the unknown Guirne Creith, whose actual birth name was 'Gladys Mary Cohen'..her concerto is gorgeous). I forgot I owned this disc, and was very happy to find it yesterday whilst looking for my collection of Richard Arnell discs. I bought this for the Arnell but the two other works were a great surprise, every bit as good as the Arnell-and every bit as memorable as the Arnell-perhaps even more so (the Arnell concerto is a very early composition (his Opus 9) I will be posting several all-Arnell discs soon.

Guirne Creith (1907–1996), rather like Roger Sacheverell Coke, Walter Gaze Cooper  and Sam Hartley Braithwaite, remains a mystery figure. Dutton dispel some of the mist and add to the fascination with this recording of her Violin Concerto. As mentioned above she reinvented herself under the exotic name Guirne Creith during her student years at the Royal Academy of Music. She reinvented herself, in fact, several times during her lengthy life: first, as a struggling but successful composer; then as a concert pianist and pupil of Edwin Fischer. This was followed by a brief singing career, after an accident left her with a permanently injured right hand. When this didn’t work out particularly well, she became a teacher of piano, and finally an authority on French food and wine. Her Violin Concerto was premiered in a 1936 live BBC broadcast with Albert Sammons as soloist and Constant Lambert at the helm. When performers of this level take major roles in a debut, their presence in itself constitutes high praise, but the Violin Concerto then vanished, along with most of Creith’s music. This piece, at least, reappeared in handwritten full score after the composer’s death, with markings and a few corrections noted by Lambert. It's a very attractive work in the same part of the firmament as the violin concertos by Bax, Elgar and Coleridge Taylor-if this doesn't sound like too strange a confection. It's a serious concerto with a stirring dramatic mien. It might be seen as the 'Bax concerto Bax might have written' had the inspiration caught him in the middle of his Nordic period rather than when he was left only with sputtering recollections of the Ballets Russes, Richard Strauss and the lighter aspects of his music. The Creith is not of the English pastoral school. It is a full-blooded romantic work with great ideas in the solo line and in the orchestra. It's really a work of great depth of sentiment and strength of purpose, and it moves easily between the Wagnerian intensity of the 'Tristan' harmonies through moments of incredible lightness and whimsy to the wonderful sweetness and shimmer of the slow movement, which flowers with coaxed tenderness. There is also a violin sonata which really should be included in one of Dutton Epoch's sonata anthologies. Hopefully more of her orchestral works will be discovered and recorded (and as convincingly as this!) Creith’s concerto is a major find indeed. 

Guirne Creith

Enthusiasts will already know of Thomas Pitfield but this is the first time his beautiful "Concerto Lirico" from 1958 has become available, written against a contemporary tidal surge of dissonance by a composer who held true to his style. That style is melodic and carefree, the concerto here in the same singing company as the Respighi, the Finzi Introit, the Moeran and the Ivanovs, and partaking a little of Rubbra's "Collana" dance movements. Its central movement makes passing contact with Warlock's "Frostbound Wood". There is a distressing story of the premiere with an unsympathetic conductor; this recording is only possible due to the discovery of a microfilm of the full score found in the composer's garage after his death. Typically his music is very much in the English folk-song tradition, and well deserving of its "lyrical" title. The Concerto is structured as a single, continuous movement that falls into the usual three sections; and if the finale is slightly too long and repetitive to sustain its otherwise fine material, the central elegy possesses a fine, melancholy eloquence. Pitfield was also a craftsman in many other fields including typography, calligraphy, line drawings, and also woodcuts. 

Thomas Pitfield

Richard Arnell's substantial Concerto in One Movement, Op.9, is from 1949-preceding Samuel Barber’s Concerto by two years but clearly celebrating the same world. It's a flamboyantly romantic piece-rather akin to Rawsthorne yet without the tart astringency. It was written during Arnell’s time in New York and premiered in Carnegie Hall in 1946. It reveals the same influence of Hindemith that his "Sinfonia quasi variatione" of the following year would show. A few more years would make all the difference for Arnell, whose recognizable and masterful style makes an early appearance in the Symphony No. 1 of 1943.

Richard Arnell

Enjoy everyone

Creith_Arnell_&_Pitfield-Violin_Concertos-Tzadik.zip

http://www27.zippyshare.com/v/rmrUlkah/file.html