BBC Symphony Orchestra reviews

If you had to describe Florent Schmitt’s music for Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra – composed in 1920 for a production starring the Russian dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein – you would say it mingles Ravel and Debussy with a generous sprinkling of Rimsky-Korsakov’s orientalism. The results are, in the opening movement of the two suites recorded here, headily exotic, as harp, celeste and solo violin add sensual commentary to the lovers’ nocturnal assignation. 

Sir Adrian Boult was the dedicatee of Edmund Rubbra’s Second Symphony; he conducted its premiere in 1938, and included it many years later in his choice on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. Such a deep personal connection shines through every bar of this 1954 studio recording, whose near- incandescent intensity makes the strongest possible case for Rubbra’s powerfully felt and sustained, but riskily monochrome idiom, with its dominant emphasis on linear flow.

The remarkable listening experience here comes not just from William Mathias’s music alone, for all its enduring qualities, but from the combination of this and his own piano-playing. Fluent pianists are of course not rare in the composing world. Mathias’s performance of the world premiere of his Third Concerto, recorded at the 1968 Swansea Festival, shows that his artistry was on a totally different level from this.