Adrian Sutton (b. 1967)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (2023)
Short Story (2022)
A Fist Full of Fives (2016)
War Horse Orchestral Suite (2016-2023)
Five Theatre Miniatures (2005, 2023)
Fenella Humphries (violin), BBC Philharmonic / Michael Seal
rec. 2024, MediaCity UK, Salford, UK
Chandos CHAN20349 [74]
You may have heard of Adrian Sutton through his music for National Theatre productions such as War Horse (review) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but since being given an incurable cancer diagnosis his focus has turned entirely onto music for the concert hall. Finding oneself in such circumstances, we can only hope to face such a challenge with similar fortitude: “We all have limited time – and resources. How to make best use of them? In my situation, there’s only one answer: avoid egregious waste of both time and energy ruminating on things I can’t change. Instead, I can choose how I react to the facts – and I’m choosing not to be a victim.”
The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is of course the main feature here. Jonathan James’s booklet notes tell us that its origins can be found, among other things, in observations on the majestic flight of a seagull and a response to Vaughan-Williams’s The Lark Ascending, which accounts for some of the rhapsodic elements in the music. Adrian Sutton is himself a violinist, and you can hear this in his expert expression of its most effective high range, the soloist representing flight and that sense of freedom to which we earthbound creatures can only aspire. Fenella Humphreys’ superlative playing and refined tone suits this music perfectly. The concerto runs through a single narrative but in three distinct movements: ‘Thermals’, the calm stillness of a central movement called ‘Far Cliffs’, contrasting with the final ‘Life Force’. This ending brings back themes from the opening, infused with rhythmic impulse and dramatic atmosphere that ultimately resolves once again into rhapsodic flight and a final, satisfyingly triumphant conclusion.
The rest of the recording is by no means occupied by mere ‘fillers’, and there is something of substance for everyone here. Short Story invites listeners to “hear their own story in the music” rather than presenting anything directly programmatic. Marked ‘andante’, the piece processes through various moods but with a clear narrative shape, embracing some of life’s headwinds but delivering what to me sounds like an ultimately uplifting message.
A Fist Full of Fives announces itself with a distinctively asymmetrical five in a bar rhythmic basis, and the musical content is further reinforced with melodic lines that work intervals of a fifth as well as presenting five main themes, the list goes on. You can of course ignore all of that technical stuff and just enjoy the piece for what it is, a work “with huge fire and rhythmic energy”. Subtle orchestration gives the whole a pleasant transparency to go along with the dance-like impulse driving everything along, and the whole inhabits Sutton’s easily digestible idiom with a delightfully compulsive air.
War Horse and its stage adaptation from Michael Morpurgo’s book set in World War I, demanded music with both symphonic qualities and an English folk-music idiom reflecting the bucolic origins of Joey the horse and Albert, who sets out to bring Joey home from the front. The orchestral suite consists of six movements from War Horse: The Story in Concert, which formed an entire evening’s programme including narration. Romance, a forbidding military presence, moments of drama and peril as well as musical descriptions of countryside innocence combine to form a brief but wide-ranging musical journey that creates its own evocative world.
The programme has a rousingly bookended finale in the Five Theatre Miniatures, which opens in time-honoured style with a steam train setting off on ‘The Departure’ composed for a production of Murder on the Orient Express. Gentle lyricism and tortured passions can be found in an ‘Intermezzo’ that owes some of its DNA to Mahler and Strauss, and the following ‘Gigue’ gets us all onto the dance floor with its jaunty lightness. ‘Polperro Beach’ is part of the score for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in a nostalgic reminiscence of happy times on holiday, and the final ‘Contagion’ is a representation of energetically spreading bacteria expressed in a tarantella used in the play Dr Semmelweis. Sutton lays his classical music credentials on the stage with this final piece, and each movement is a masterclass in descriptively effective theatre music.
Superbly performed and recorded, this is an excellent programme that represents Adrian Sutton both in his newest work, and in “a showcase for what I’ve always been about… ranging from the bracing and instrumentally challenging A Fist Full of Fives through to orchestral suites derived from my theatre works.” Sutton’s music is very English and doesn’t offer gnarly avant-garde edginess, but even with some detectable hints of musical forebears his skill in delivering communicative, tonal and lyrically expressive music without sounding derivative or occupying a kind of homage-mode is quite remarkable.
Dominy Clements
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