Stanford reviews

This beautifully programmed recital will make you want to rush out and buy as many volumes of British songs as you can. It collects – imaginatively, coherently, and to deeply moving effect – 23 songs on the theme of war.

The fierce onslaught of the opening anthem, For Lo, I Raise Up, takes the breath away, even if you know in advance that there’s nothing wilting about Stanford’s English church music. Symphonic in scope, packed with drama, sturdy in build, throbbing with succulent melodies, these are pieces guaranteed to lift the soul and stiffen the backbone of believers and non-believers alike.

Last year brought Christopher Howell’s complete recording of Stanford’s 48 Preludes in all the keys – music written in the First World War’s shadow, but shadowed far more by Schumann, Brahms, Bach and other keyboard masters of the past. Now Sam Haywood arrives with a very different approach. Where Howell worked through the sets with scholastic purity, Haywood scrambles the running order, omits ten of the weaker brethren, and adds in one case a shortened reprise.

Stanford aficionados apart, this composer’s vast output presents a question to anyone else; if you don’t know his music and are curious, where might you start looking? This release supplies the answer better than any I’ve yet come across: here is Stanford’s idiom at its most likeable, and least prolix. He was an excellent pianist; could it somehow be that the instrument’s absence paradoxically freed up his imagination in some way?

Forty-eight preludes, 12 sketches, 10 dances, nine waltzes, five caprices, three fancies, one toccata: what do we have here, another Chopin? Hardly that, though Stanford’s piano output, from the 1870s to the early 1920s and written for concert or educational use (or the hazy area inbetween), reveals this stalwart composer as a committed student of keyboard literature. Brahms haunts some of the earliest works; Schumann is another friendly ghost. Bach trickles in from time to time, along with Baroque dance forms.

Compare and contrast: that’s one of the themes of this new King’s Consort disc, where five pairs of composers setting the same text are lined up alongside one another for aural inspection. The results can be strikingly different. Half a century separates William H Harris’s setting of the John Donne prayer Bring us, O Lord God from James MacMillan’s, and it shows. The lush, undulating eight-part textures of Harris bespeak a comfortable spiritual assurance, while MacMillan’s response is fierier, with darker, at times unsettling harmonic shadings.

Over 60 years after Kathleen Ferrier’s tragically early death, is she now more than a name to some listeners? She was the greatest British singer of her day, internationally famous, an outwardly straightforward Lancashire girl with a rich contralto voice of such singular, plangent beauty and sensitivity that it apparently moved Herbert von Karajan to tears.

Here is David Hill’s latest in a string of excellent choral recordings for Naxos. His fiery shaping of the Prelude to Stanford’s Stabat Mater shows how responsive the Bournemouth orchestra has become to his direction; and his powerful shaping of the ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’ movement locks players and singers tightly together in the sizzling crescendo at ‘Pertransivit gladius’, and again on the pulsatingly climactic ‘Et flagellis subditum’.

The compulsive fluency of Stanford’s music is part of its charm. The large-scale, three movement Second Piano Concerto, completed in 1911, sits comfortably in Stanford’s often-favoured Brahms-to-Dvorák territory; generous quantities of sturdy material in the outer movements are offset by a musing, fantastical streak which comes likeably into its own in the central Adagio molto.

Charles Villiers Stanford tended to hobble his strikingly original talent, derived from his Irish birth and background, with a relentlessly fluent devotion to the example of Brahms and Dvoπák. While both works recorded here are products of Stanford the euro-conformist, the good news is that they’re very far from disappointing (though I caught myself yearning, in vain, for a snatch of Irish roguishness now and again).

Despite a huge compositional output, Charles Villiers Stanford’s reputation rests today largely – and not unfairly – on his church music. Some of his symphonies, operas and string quartets really deserve to be better known, but it is harder to make a convincing case for his organ music, which seldom rises above the generic in its inspiration.

The contents of this serious exercise in completism (with numerous first recordings) are attractive enough to appeal well beyond the world of the specialist – a situation happily enhanced by the qualities of Alberto Bologni’s violin-playing. Besides his sure tuning and technical precision, what impresses above all is how Bologni’s style and sound so naturally suit the unusual mix of requirements in Stanford’s music.

A new label, and something very special to put on it: this is the hundredth CD made by The King’s Consort, and it explores thrillingly new territory, applying historical performance practices to a pair of composers who have never previously had the period-instrument treatment on record.

Will the real Charles Villiers Stanford please stand up? Sure enough, here they both do. The Stanford who personified the Royal College of Music’s reverence for Brahms is represented by his earlyish First Piano Trio and late Second Piano Quartet. Meanwhile, Stanford the Irish maverick steps forward in style with his violin-and-piano Legend and Irish Fantasies.