British Music for Strings, Vol. 3 Gipps: Cinglemire Garden; Smyth: Suite for Strings, Op. 1a; Spain-Dunk: Suite in B minor; Lament; C Warren: Heather Hill Sudwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim/Douglas Bostock CPO 555 457-2 62:25 mins
Douglas Bostock’s love of runmmaging through British composers’ cupboards knows no end. Here, he’s focused on the numerous women busy at work, if rarely at large, in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Not content with resurrecting and editing Ethel Smyth’s Suite for strings, enlarged by the composer from her 1883 Piano Quintet, the conductor also presents a pastoral impression by Ruth Gipps and another by the barely known Constance Warren, who stopped composing, aged 27, in 1932, pursuing a career as a piano teacher. There are also two works by the scarcely more famous Susan Spain-Dunk (1880-1962).
None of these string orchestra works can really be claimed as great discoveries, yet there’s much to savour as Bostock’s German players brush away the music’s dust with elegance and passion. If the movements of Spain-Dunk’s miniature suite pass by too quickly to make much impression, her 1934 Lament, in memory of ‘P.A.H.’, is notable for its vigour, clearly giving thanks for a life rather than mourning its loss. Warren’s Heather Hill, fetchingly scored, muses over folksy cadences like so many of its British brothers and sisters working in the same field, but there’s no personality shortage in Gipps’s meatier, more decisive Cringlemire Garden, inspired by a Lake District arboretum. Meanwhile, Ethel Smyth’s suite alternates between being bustling and graceful, and is always pleasant.
Geoff Brown
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