Concertos for Orchestra – Hoddinott and McCabe

There used to be an easy consensus, back when these pieces were fresh, that British orchestral music of the postwar decades ran on two separate tracks — pastoral on one side, modern on the other, sheep in one meadow, serialists in the other. Nonsense, and this disc is Exhibit A for the prosecution. Three composers, three concertos for orchestra (two concertos for orchestra and one dressed up under another name), all written within a few years of each other in the early 1980s. Not a lamb in sight. What you get instead is craft, hard-won orchestral craft, the kind that used to be taught by apprenticeship and hardly gets taught at all now.

Edward Gregson’s piece started life as Greenwich Dances, written for the National Centre for Orchestral Studies. You can hear the pedagogical DNA in it: every section of the orchestra gets its moment, nobody sits idle for long. He retitled it Contrasts, honest advertising, since the piece is built as a set of variations bookended by a four-note motto. That motto opens the first movement, “Intrada,” with real swagger and returns, transformed, to cap the closing “Toccata.” In between sits an “Elegy” that Gregson himself calls the emotional center of the work. He’s not wrong. There’s a hush to the string writing there that stops you cold, brass held back until exactly the right moment. Gregson came up through brass bands, and it shows in the best way: he knows precisely how far he can push an ensemble before the sound turns to mud.

Alun Hoddinott’s Concerto for Orchestra, op. 127, dates from 1986 and wears its composer’s fingerprints all over its sleeve: bold, angular themes in the outer movements, harmonies that lean and never quite resolve where you expect. The slow movement is where the piece really lives. It’s a nocturne of extraordinary atmosphere, scored with a percussion section so large and so unusual that it’s almost comic how sparingly Hoddinott actually uses it. Restraint from a man who clearly could have thrown the whole kitchen at us. There’s a disarming moment in the interview that closes the disc, Hoddinott confessing to Lewis Foreman that the work’s opening rhythmic cell came to him from two doves cooing in his garden. Small revelation, big consequence: that rhythm threads through the entire span of the piece, returning varied and reharmonized, and it’s the glue that keeps a fairly discursive structure from falling apart at the seams.

John McCabe’s Concerto for Orchestra, from 1982, is the beast of the program: symphonic in scale and argument, the most intricately worked-out of the three by a considerable margin. McCabe calls its architecture an “enlarged passacaglia,” and once you know that, the piece’s obsessive returns and transformations make sense. It opens in bright fanfare, jubilant almost to the point of brashness, then pivots into a long Adagio of real weight before breaking into a sequence of shorter character pieces, three of which nod, slyly, toward Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien. The finale is enormous, building in waves of sound that crest and crest again before subsiding into what McCabe wryly terms a “tape-loop” ostinato, which simply tiptoes off into silence. It’s a marvelous piece, fully the equal of his numbered symphonies, and it belongs in the standard repertoire far more than it currently does.

The performances here are dedicated, alert, unglamorous in the best sense. Nobody is trying to make a career statement; everybody is trying to serve the score. That matters in music this reliant on ensemble precision and color — a smeared percussion entrance or a lazy horn attack could sink whole paragraphs of Hoddinott’s nocturne, and it never happens. Balances are natural, without the artificial spotlighting some engineers can’t resist when a triangle or vibraphone wanders into view.

The closing conversation with Lewis Foreman, all three composers together, turns out to be more than a bonus track. Each man, unprompted, insists that his music exists to communicate, not to solve puzzles or prove theorems. Coming from three composers this different in temperament, the agreement is striking, and the music itself bears it out. None of this is difficult listening dressed up as accessible. It simply is accessible, without condescending for a second.

I don’t know of rival recordings that gather these three works together, which alone makes the disc worth having. But taken purely on merit, this is British orchestral writing of real substance, unfairly neglected, and this release makes as persuasive a case for all three composers as I’ve heard. Not to be missed. I don’t say that often.