Moeran: Cello Concerto – Guy Johnston

There’s a particular Englishness to Moeran’s melancholy — not the pastoral wistfulness we associate with Vaughan Williams, more restless than that, weather-beaten, a little drunk on its own harmonic wandering. He was a serious drinker, dead at fifty-five in Kenmare, found in the river under circumstances nobody has ever entirely explained. That biographical shadow hangs over everything he wrote after the 1930s, and the Cello Concerto of 1945 carries it audibly, even if you didn’t know the story going in.

Guy Johnston plays it as if he believes every note. That matters more than you’d think with this piece, which can sprawl in lesser hands. I’ve heard performances where the discursiveness of the first movement just sits there, undigested, the soloist waiting for something to happen rather than making it happen. Johnston doesn’t wait. His tone has a burr to it, something husky in the lower register that suits Moeran’s harmonic language, which owes as much to Sibelius as to Delius or Ireland. Falletta and the Ulster Orchestra give him a real partnership: inner voices audible, woodwind solos that actually converse with the cello rather than accompanying it from a respectful distance. The engineering helps enormously. You hear rosin-dust texture in the string tone, the kind of close-in immediacy that either flatters an interpretation or exposes it mercilessly. Here it flatters.

I’ve sat with this concerto since the Coetmore recording on Lyrita, which nobody could call ideal. She was the dedicatee, Moeran’s wife, and there’s a documentary fascination in hearing her play it, but her tone had thinned by the time the tape rolled, and the whole enterprise sounds under-nourished, straining. Raphael Wallfisch’s Chandos account improved matters considerably in the 1980s, more virtuosic, more shapely. But even Wallfisch’s version left me admiring rather than moved. Johnston is the first to make me believe the piece is genuinely searching for something, not just meandering toward it. The hush he finds at the close of the first movement — strings barely there, a kind of held breath — is one of the loveliest things I’ve heard on disc in this repertoire all year.

The Serenade in G is a different animal, and here I confess mixed feelings. This is the original 1948 version, longer and more discursive than the suite Moeran extracted from it, eight movements where the Sinfonietta gives you tighter argument and more emotional heat. Prologue, Air, Intermezzo, Galop, Minuet, Rigadoon, Forlana, Epilogue: the titles alone tell you we’re in a neoclassical mood, antique dances refracted through a 1940s sensibility not unlike what Walton was doing in his Henry V score around the same time, all those studied archaisms dressed up in modern orchestral clothing. Moeran was a superb orchestrator of bustle — nobody wrote a better galop, frankly — but bustle isn’t depth, and parts of this Serenade feel like decoration in search of an argument. Falletta paces it shrewdly, keeps the textures light, doesn’t oversell the folksy bits. Still, I missed the concentration of the shorter suite.

“Lonely Waters” and “Whythorne’s Shadow” round out the disc, and Rebekah Coffey’s wordless soprano in the former adds an eerie, almost vocalise-like shimmer over the strings, very much of a piece with Moeran’s fascination with Norfolk’s flat, watery landscapes. Short works, easily undervalued, but they tell you where the composer’s imagination really lived: somewhere between folksong and fog.

Taken as a whole, this is now the Cello Concerto disc I’d recommend first. Johnston and Falletta have done for it what Wallfisch nearly did and Coetmore, understandably, couldn’t. The Serenade is a bonus of mixed persuasiveness, generous rather than essential. But for the concerto alone, worth the price of admission.