This re-release moves the highly-honored 1989 recording of Kenneth Leighton’s Cello Concerto to Chandos’ mid-priced line “Chandos Classics” and restores it to its original pairing, the same composer’s Third Symphony. (It also has been available on Chandos 9949, well-paired with Gerald Finzi’s Cello Concerto.) Leighton died in 1988, a few weeks short of his 59th birthday. He started his career with a loose commitment to serial technique and the British style of using it, although serialism later became less central to his musical thought. This pairing illustrates an unusual case where the work more strictly using 12-tone procedures (the 1955 cello concerto) is the more gripping and immediately communicative than the later and more often tonal Third Symphony (1984).
Not that this remark is intended to slight the Symphony. This work with an important vocal part for tenor sets three poems that are about music, plus a prefatory verse by the composer himself. The poetry is from Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Musical Instrument (which contemplates Pan’s creation of the first pipes), and Shelley’s Music when Soft Voices Die. The work is admirable, but is quite dark in mood, as if observing some European rule that important music should not be either pretty or fun. The listener realizes what it is all about in the final pages, when the turbulent, unsettled mood is finally calmed, presumably by music’s powers.
Neil Mackey, one of the fresher-voiced British tenors of the post-Peter Pears generation, sings passionately, and the late Bryden Thomson’s direction commands respect for the symphony, albeit the work is not very attractive or overtly exciting. It definitely repays several re-listenings; a taste for it can be acquired.
Less work is required to appreciate the Cello Concerto. Its unifying force comes from almost obsessive use of one of atonality’s favorite intervals, the major seventh, which gives it a bitter, aggressive feeling. The pressure builds through a bipartite first movement (faster, then slower), after which a brilliant central scherzo turns playful, with relief in the form of a gentle trio. The slow concluding movement is very affecting. Raphael Wallfisch is masterly, his rather cool, pointed tone proving effective in this emotionally charged music. The Scottish National Orchestra, as it was then called, is accurate and strong if not always alluring. The sound is perfectly acceptable but shows Chandos’ tendency to hard-edged sonics.
