Finzi • Maconchy • Vaughan Williams Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony (arr. A Jacob); Maconchy: Preludio, Fugato e Finale; Finzi: Eclogue (arr. Ferguson/Charles Matthews) Lynn Carter (piano), Charles Matthews (piano, organ) Albion ALBCD046 64:18 mins
Following their previous release dominated by a piano duet version of Walton’s Symphony No. 1, Lynn Arnold and Charles Matthews offer the abstract-impressionist ‘London’ symphony that Vaughan Williams seemed loth to relinquish, pushing it through two revisions, shortening it each time, before letting the work come to rest in 1936. What we have here is its first revision of 1920, as transcribed for keyboards by Archibald Jacob (a brother of that master orchestrator and arranger, Gordon Jacob). Listening to the slower sections, you may pine for the original instrumentation, teasingly indicated in the arrangement’s score as particular bars pass by. On the other hand, it’s hard to resist the ferocious drama these sympathetic pianists generate elsewhere, as in the scherzo, with its clattering panache. At best, Jacob’s version resembles a skilful etching of a familiar oil painting: not its equal, but still valuable for casting new light on the work’s forms and rhythms.
Music by Vaughan Williams’s friends and pupils fill out the disc. Maconchy’s tonality-bending 1967 creation is eloquently angular, with a fugato section so spikily attractive that I wish it wasn’t so concise. The one disappointment is the version of Finzi’s Eclogue, remnant of an aborted piano concerto. There’s nothing wrong with the artists’ skills or the music, so comforting in its stately pastoral tread; but Matthews’s arrangement for piano and organ, mediated through Howard Ferguson’s two-piano transcription and a muddy acoustic, forcibly reminds us that pianos and organs mix together as smoothly as oil and water.
Geoff Brown
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