Premiere recording of War Horse composer’s new Violin Concerto
The Strad Issue: October 2024
Description: Premiere recording of War Horse composer’s new Violin Concerto
Musicians: Fenella Humphreys (violin) BBC Philharmonic/Michael Seal
Works: Sutton: Violin Concerto; Five Theatre Miniatures; A Fist Full of Fives; War Horse Suite; Short Story
Catalogue number: CHANDOS CHAN20349
Following an incurable cancer diagnosis in 2022, War Horse composer Adrian Sutton decided to turn from theatre productions to concert-hall works designed to hit ‘the sweet spot of being both invigorating and engaging for players to play, and listeners to be moved by’. Here are the first fruits of his labour, in recordings by the artists who premiered them at London’s Southbank Centre in June 2023.
The main event is the Violin Concerto, a response to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but evoking a gull; its three seamlessly running, through-composed movements serve up long violin lines alternately soaring and racing, together with wide intervals, Scotch snaps, fast-changing moods, translucent orchestral textures and folk-inspired pastoralism. The whole sounds like an eminently skilfully handled melding of late Romanticism with early 20th-century English music – think Vaughan Williams meets Walton, with a touch of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and Hollywood Korngold – and Humphreys, Seal and the BBC Philharmonic have its linguistic number. Humphreys brings to her endlessly unfurling violin lines a taut, silvery weightlessness. The recording beautifully captures her duets with woodwind, and a tremendous dynamic range.
It’s a similar programmatic-feeling (sometimes expressly, sometimes suggestively), spot-the-composer-being-channelled story in the remaining works, Seal and his musicians painting Sutton’s pictures with colour and commitment. If you’re after new, easy-on-the-ear music from the above-named stylistic stables, you’ll be well pleased with this.
CHARLOTTE GARDNER
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