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 Humphreys (violin), BBC Philharmonic/Michael Seal
rec. 2024, MediaCityUK, Salford, Manchester, UK
Chandos CHAN20349 [74]
Adrian Sutton’s Violin Concerto runs for 25 minutes and is in three linked movements. The booklet note makes much of the fact that, having observed the flight of gulls, Sutton was inspired to create a kind of ‘musical counterpart’. The sea, therefore, is omnipresent in the headings Sutton has given to each movement, ‘Thermals’, for instance, or ‘Far Cliffs’. The work was composed for Fenella Humphreys, and her reading of it is superb. She has all the technical ability to surmount even the most challenging passages, allied with a beautiful, singing tone when the music turns to lyricism, as it frequently does. Walton is named as one of Sutton’s ‘first loves’, and if another violin concerto comes to mind when listening to Sutton’s it will surely be Walton’s masterpiece. There are many aspects of the music in the outer movements that evoke the earlier composer, most notably in respect of the tautness of rhythm and the bitter sweetness of many of the harmonies. There is also a most pleasing use of another Walton fingerprint, that of allowing a chromatic passage to come to rest on a richly scored diatonic chord. The timing of climaxes and calmer passages is managed with extreme skill, arriving just when needed, this perhaps a sign of the composer’s extensive work in the theatre. A cadenza subsides into a tranquil passage that is among the work’s most beautiful and which closes the first movement. The slow second movement features melodic and harmonic devices that may originate in a suggestion made to Sutton to write something as a companion to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. There are no larks, however, in the finale, an swash-buckling movement whose positivity and vitality more than live up to its title, ‘Life Force…oceanic’. This is accessible, immediately enjoyable music that leaves the listener happy, wanting more and, crucially, wanting to return.
The harmony, scoring, and principal theme – beginning with three repeated notes – of Short Story could almost take us back to English light music of a couple of generations ago. There is a pastoral feel to the music here – ‘bucolic’ is the word used in the booklet – but the theme is skilfully developed and modified throughout this short piece allowing the music to pass through a number of different moods. There are a few challenges to the easy-going atmosphere – Jonathan James, in the booklet, describes these as ‘something more Expressionist’ – before the piece ends comfortably in the major key.
Many listeners will have enjoyed counting the beats in Paul Desmond’s classic, Take 5, probably in the Dave Brubeck version. Then, in the classical domain, there is the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’, a ‘waltz with a wooden leg’, as one of my teachers once referred to it. In A Fist Full of Fives – appropriately enough the fifth track on the disc – Adrian Sutton gives us his take on the matter. Counting the five beats certainly works for large stretches of the piece – I haven’t tried to get to the end – but less immediately obvious is the interval of the fifth in the melodic and harmonic writing. Many won’t be listening for this, in any case, and more important is whether or not the piece makes a convincing listen. The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. The music overflows with energy, much of it in the rhythm and the tempo, but the bewildering variety of orchestral texture flashes by so that the only moment of peace is one short, rather more pensive passage where a wind quintet spars with the string section’s extended melody. The piece is huge fun to listen to and, to judge from the brilliant performance, to play also.
Michael Morpurgo’s World War I novel, War Horse, and its various adaptations, all passed me by, and this has included, so far, the revival of the play on the British and Irish stage. Several short YouTube videos make me regret this even more. The puppet horses are astonishingly convincing, even moving, when seen in these short extracts. Sutton created a concert work in 2016, entitled War Horse: The Story in Concert, from which he extracted this suite last year. Young Albert and his horse, Joey, live on a farm in Devon. Joey is sold into the army, and lives through many dangers and adventures before his safe return. This suite, in which each of the six movements takes an event from the story, gives a flavour of how the music will have enriched the play. Listen out for the pounding hooves in the second piece, ‘First Gallop’, and the sensitive use of the harp in a portrait of Emilie, a French girl who looks after Joey. A beautiful, and beautifully played, clarinet solo expresses the calm contentment once Joey is restored to his owner and the farm.
Five Theatre Miniatures is a set of short pieces taken from music Sutton composed for the theatre. The first, ‘The Departure’, was written for Murder on the Orient Express and is an original and vivid representation of a steam locomotive, closer to Honegger than to Villa-Lobos, but quite different and just as convincing as both. Of the two rapid pieces, the Handel-inspired ‘Gigue’ and the relentless tarantella entitled ‘Contagion’ will have your feet tapping, the second bringing the collection to a near-explosive close. ‘Polperro Beach’, from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time evokes an idyllic memory of earlier times. Only the Mahlerian richness of ‘Intermezzo’, from a 2023 theatrical adaptation of D H Lawrence, gave me a few doubts. Lovely though it is, does it really capture ‘the aspirations of women left behind by their miner husbands and now trapped in drudgery’? Otherwise, these pieces, the War Horse music too, make an enjoyable listen and will no doubt have had an even greater effect in their original contexts.
A review of this disc that does not mention that, in September 2022, Adrian Sutton was diagnosed with incurable cancer, would be incomplete. In a far-reaching and moving article in The Guardian in December of that year he explored the effect this event had on him. His main message, as a composer, was to use whatever time is available to the best advantage, which is to say, by composing music. He threw himself into work, and much of the music in this programme, the concerto and Short Story, in particular, was composed after the diagnosis. In The Guardian again, in February 2023, he writes that ‘the concerto is taking shape’: given that the concerto was first performed the following June we can only wonder at the extraordinary burst of energy that followed the diagnosis and the sheer facility to produce music that Sutton possesses. He will be thrilled with this disc. The BBC Philharmonic, under Michael Seal, play with fabulous virtuosity and commitment, and their ravishing sound has been well captured by the Chandos team. The orchestral writing is hugely inventive and the music itself is immediately enjoyable, positive and life-enhancing.
William Hedley
Previous review: Dominy Clements (October 2024)
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