There is a long association between the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School, and this disc shows just how succssful it is. Together, they present a varied selection of Stravinsky’s music, valuable in itself for the rarity of some of the pieces.
First a nicely acerbic Dumbarton Oaks (Concerto in E flat). Th lines are all nicely rhythmic and placed. Perhaps not the finest Dumbarton Oaks, there is nevertheless plenty to enjoy:
The outer movements of the concerto are most successful, the final “Con moto” despite some string shrillness bubbling with life:
Alexandrea Heath is the superb soloist in the little Three Japanese Lyrics, written in the shadow of a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. I particularly like the delicacy of the first, “Akahito”:
Throughout the pieces, the college players are completely as one with Heath, an alumna of the Royal Academy and someone I would like to hear live, for sure. The even rarer Two Poems of Balmont (1911) use both diatonic and octatonic scales. This is rare – I don’t think I’ve ever heard this live:
Heath’s voice is so apt as there is body to her soprano (so no thin, reedy sound) and she is also vocally mobile and free. You can hear that again the Three Little Songs (Recollections of my Childhood), jaunty, innocences, and yet completely and utterly Stravinsky:
I do like Hannigan’s way with the instrumental tapestry in the Septet (a piece heard much less often than the Octet, for no real reason!). There is real life to the first movement:
The slow movement reflects Stravinsky’s interesting in older forms (it is a Passacaglia) and Hannigan clearly understands the piece (and transmits that understanding to her players);
In another nod to the Baroque, the finale is a Gigue, as angular as you like. Just a little more definition would have sealed the deal here.
The Octet is much better known. While I cherish a live performance by Boulez and the BBCSO players I heard live (a long while ago now!), Hannigan and her players offer a good recording, if not quite as Cubist as Boulez gave us. There’s aparicularly fine bassoonist amongst the players, incidentally (Florence Plane, and at the beginning of the finale you can hear her in conjunction with her excellent bassoon colleague Rory McGregor). Here’s the central “Tema con variazioni”:
Yet another RAM alumna, Charlotte Corderoy, conducts the deliciously spicy Concertino for twelve instruments (a 1952 redressing of the 1920 work for string quartet). The reinstrumentation is fascinating, and the performance neat:
.. and finally, Ragtime, Stravinsky’s imagined jazz, a populist style moulded into Stravinsky’s very individual sound:
A fascinating Stravinsky complication – the music colleges of today are clearly in fine fettle!
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