Moeran: Cello Concerto and Serenade – Johnston/Falletta

There is a particular quality of English light that gets into Moeran’s music — not the pale wash of Vaughan Williams’s Gloucestershire, something wetter, greener, more inclined to sudden weather. You hear it in the first bars of the Cello Concerto, where the orchestra seems to be clearing its throat in fog before the soloist even enters. Guy Johnston, when he does enter, plays as if he has been listening to that fog for some time and has decided not to argue with it.

This is not an easy piece to bring off. I say that having sat through performances that made me wonder why anyone bothers. Moeran wrote it in 1945, for his wife, the cellist Peers Coetmore, a fraught dedication given what we now know about the state of the marriage and the state of his mind. The composer was already sliding toward the breakdown that would eventually kill him in 1950, drowned off the pier at Kenmare. None of that biography needs spelling out in the notes for you to feel it in the slow movement, which sags and rights itself and sags again like a man trying to stay upright on a moving train.

Johnston’s tone is leaner than Wallfisch’s on the old Chandos version with Norman del Mar — less honeyed, more sinew — and I find I prefer it here. The concerto can tip into salon-music prettiness if the soloist leans too hard on vibrato, and Johnston mostly resists. His pianissimo in the upper register, right before the cadenza in the finale, has an almost vocal catch to it, not quite a sob, but adjacent to one. JoAnn Falletta and the Ulster Orchestra support him with playing that has grit in it: the horns snarl rather than croon at the climaxes, which is right for music that keeps threatening to become Delius and then thinks better of it.

Falletta is an odd name to find on a Moeran disc — her American engagements haven’t exactly demanded fluency in this repertoire — but odd names sometimes bring fresh ears. She never oversells the pastoralism. Too many conductors drown Moeran in dew; Falletta lets the orchestration breathe instead, and the woodwind solos in Lonely Waters have an astringency that keeps the piece from turning into wallpaper. Rebekah Coffey’s wordless soprano floats in at the close like something remembered rather than something arriving, the effect Moeran surely wanted and doesn’t always get.

The Serenade in G is the real discovery here, or rediscovery. This original 1948 version hasn’t had much of an airing since Handley’s old account, itself now pushing toward thirty-five years old. Seven movements, nominally a light suite in the eighteenth-century sense, but there’s more sinew in it than the “Intermezzo” and “Air” titles let on. Moeran had already used some of this material in Farrago back in 1932, and you can hear the seams if you listen for them. Not a flaw exactly, more a reminder that this was a composer who recycled out of instinct, the way Sibelius did, rather than laziness. The “Rigadoon” has real bite; the closing “Rondel” drifts off rather than concluding, which used to bother me and no longer does.

Whythorne’s Shadow is the makeweight, five minutes of Elizabethan pastiche filtered through 1930s harmonic language. It’s a lovely little thing, played here with more wit than weight. Correctly, I think.

Where does this leave the discography? Wallfisch/del Mar remains a strong, warmer-toned alternative in the concerto, and nobody who cares about historical rendition should ignore the pioneering Coetmore album from 1969, rough as it is. But for modern sound, and for a Serenade that hasn’t been well served on disc, this newcomer earns its place. Grab it before the catalogue, as it periodically does with this composer, goes quiet again.