Howard Blake
Orchestral Music: Symphony No. 1 ‘Impressions of a City’; Concert Dances for piano and orchestra; The Court of Love; A Month in the Country*
Philharmonia Orchestra/Howard Blake (piano); *English Northern Philharmonia/Paul Daniel
SOMM Recordings SOMMCD0678 61:31 mins
The haunting song ‘Walking in the Air’, from the popular animation The Snowman, is far from Howard Blake’s only composition. Three years ago, the opus numbers of this versatile musician had reached an impressive 730 (still some way off Villa-Lobos’s formidable work total, supposedly around 2,000). Quality in such a large output, whether light or serious in mood, must inevitably vary. Released to mark the composer’s 85th birthday, this album presents previously unreleased recordings dating back to 1991 and 1993. Pride of place definitely goes to the eloquent string orchestra suite derived from music written for the 1997 film A Month in the Country, a thoughtful drama centred on two soldiers in a Yorkshire village recovering from the First World War. The score’s vintage English stamp (early 20th century) is unmistakable; so is the strength of feeling conveyed in movements that encompass moods that vary from martial to elegiac – with multiple shades inbetween.
The 14-minute symphony, a musical response to London life and landscapes, bustles along nicely enough, with a particularly striking scherzo section featuring pizzicato strings. But the rewards elsewhere on the album are thinner. The nine sections of the piano-and-orchestra Concert Dances, riffing on popular styles from waltz and ragtime to boogie and cha-cha-cha, prove at least four too many, while the suite extracted from his score for the 1977 ballet The Court of Love only proves that the original reviewer who complained about the number of clichés in each bar was only partially exaggerating. Performances are enthusiastic rather than ultra-refined, and the recordings by today’s standards are more mid-fi than hi-fi, but there’s still easily enough string lustre about to make A Month in the Country stand tall. Geoff Brown