Welsh Music for Strings
Côr Llundain
Jessica Robinson (soprano)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Owain Arwel Hughes
rec. 2024, Smith Square, London, UK
Reviewed as a download
Rubicon RCD1198 [60]

The recording presents us with seven pieces by six composers from Wales. The music spans over a century, and all the works are receiving their world premiere recordings. The music is light, tuneful and in every case wonderfully constructed. The sound is natural and warm, and the performances are fresh and alive. The title of the disc is Welsh Music for Strings, although one of the compositions is in fact for string orchestra, choir and soprano soloist and it is one of the best tracks on the disc.

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded a Sibelius symphony cycle with Owain Arwel Hughes; while it is never going to be anyone’s top choice for the works I enjoyed it – more, it seems, than my colleague Stephen Francis Vasta did (review). BIS records have him in a Rachmaninov symphony cycle he made with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (review), Holmboe symphonies (review) and much else beside. When I first started going to Hallé concerts in the very early 90s, Hughes would often be conducting, usually tasked with lighter programs and pops type concerts. This stereotyping along with his taste for novelty waistcoats put me off at the time. I was younger then and perhaps a little snobbish and that was a mistake, as one should never judge a conductor on anything other than his technique, musicianship and ability to serve faithfully the composer whose music he is performing. Owain Arwel Hughes is a consummate musician. Orchestras love working with him, I believe, and he has made some fine records. I had a similar block for years with Carl Davis too, a man whose music for films I now cherish very much.

The first piece is Grace Williams’ early Elegy which dates from 1936. It is dark and mellow, slow-moving but rich in string textures. After studies at the Royal College of Music, Williams spent time in Vienna studying with Egon Wellesz. At that time, he was finishing his opera Die Bakchantinnen. In this Elegy I hear the late Romantic influences of the Austrian in its very breath, that stretching of the tonality, the slow tread, pulsing bass momentum and the building up of tension in waves. Clemens Krauss introduced Wellesz’s work to Vienna in 1932 after months of preparation. Williams must have been around during these rehearsals. The same year Wellesz came to England where Oxford honoured him with a doctorate. I think Williams returned to the UK at around the same period. I have reviewed a couple of Grace Williams’ CDs recently (review – review) but nowhere have I been so aware of the Wellesz influence as here.

Arwel Hughes was Owain’s father. A selfless musician he studied at the RCM with Vaughan Williams and others. He was a well-known voice and face on both radio and TV in Wales and spent his energies as much on promoting others’ works as his own, contemporaries like Williams and Daniel Jones, younger men such as Hoddinott and Mathias. Perhaps his most famous piece is the Vaughan Wiliams-inspired Fantasia for Strings, an early work of 1936. Hughes has already recorded a disc of his father’s orchestral music (review) with this orchestra on BIS. He also has a recent record of Arwel Hughes’ Saint David, perhaps his magnum opus in the catalogue (review). Rubicon offer us two works hitherto unheard on record. The first is Gweddi which means A Prayer. This is a delectable piece of eleven-minute duration for soprano, chorus and strings. It was written for the Eisteddfodd of 1944, so is a wartime piece. For the first five minutes the choir sing the Kyrie eleison and Christe eleison. The soprano Jessica Robinson sings her lines in Welsh. They are clearly from the Mass Ordinary but there are no translations provided. She sounds youthful and bright. At 5:55 there is an instrumental interlude of glowing transcendence and a calming of mood. The soprano is solo for a spell, and it is pure magic. A solo violin adds colour before the choir return with the Kyrie. I have heard the music several times now and each time I love it more.

The other work by Arwel Hughes that appears a little later in the record is a Divertimento based on the hymn tune “Ebenezer”. Rubicon’s notes, which incidentally are by Dr. Rhiannon Mathias (yes, the composer’s daughter who, as her father did, works at Bangor University) tell us the divertimento was recently discovered amongst the composer’s things by Owain. It is in ternary form ABA. A playful, dancing outer section is fugal in nature. At 1:54 the central idyllic andante begins with tenderness. Intensity builds and I hear it as one great sighing. The jig theme comes back at 4:54. There is a solo violin at 7:00 before a final refrain. This is great light music in the best British tradition.

Paul Mealor, one of the two living composers on the record contributes a prayer without words for strings called O Sacred Heart. Mealor is known mostly for choral music. He has produced a number of works for Royal occasions and his Coronation Kyrie was sung at the Coronation of Charles III and Camilla. This string piece is clearly devotional and very touching. It feels a little as if he has been listening to Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis – and I mean that positively. It is a monothematic work but there is variety in how the chords are piled one on top of the other, the shifts in key we move through and in the rhythmic inflections. There is also a definite Celtic accent to the music as Rhiannon Mathias picks up on in the booklet. It is an interesting modern work that deserves to be taken up by string ensembles.

Morfydd Owen was prolific and had produced some excellent work by the time she died at the cruelly early age of twenty-six. Her little Romance of 1911 is a charming miniature full of wit, life and invention. Her most famous work may be the Nocturne she wrote a couple of years after this. Christopher Wood wrote a Requiem which was performed and recorded in 2012 (review). This doesn’t seem anything especially noteworthy until you realise Wood is really an amateur composer, a surgeon by training who later went into researching cancer treatment drugs. His Aberfan, a piece for strings from 2016, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the terrible disaster when a mining town was covered by the collapse of a huge heap of colliery waste. 116 children and 28 adults died that morning. The piece Owen writes, is not sad and gloomy, but rather inspiring, tender and ethereal. It is a noble and sincere tribute to these lost innocents and feels perfect.

Mathias studied at the RAM with Lennox Berkeley. His earliest success was the Piano Concerto No. 1 of 1955. In 1958 he wrote his popular Divertimento for Strings. In 1961 he produced a follow-up Piano Concerto, the splendid Dance Overture and, as well as other things, Music for Strings which has up to now never been recorded. It was a good year for him. At just under seventeen minutes in duration, it is the most substantial piece on the record and sits at the end of the programme. The work is in three movements preceded by a maestoso introduction. This section has a fanfare-like theme in violins (Brittenesque, I thought) that will recur throughout the piece. The toccata movement which comes first, begins proper at 0:58 of track 7. The themes employed are related to that opening fanfare idea. For a toccata it doesn’t exactly move at pace, but the writing is highly interesting, the development of motifs quite clever. The second movement is a canto, a slow dark poignant song that reminds me of Shostakovich’s music of the period. It might be the slow movement of one of his quartets written about this time. It is not mere pastiche, you understand, but perhaps the mood is similar. We close with Music for Strings, a danza by Mathias. It is not joyful music, and one doesn’t sense the inexorable momentum of the dance as much as you might like, but it has a strong, insistent rhythm and a resolve that grows on you slowly. It is definitely a neo-classical work. It is unfathomable why it is has remained unrecorded until now and I am glad to finally make its acquaintance.

There is some really fine music here. If, like me, you enjoy discovering new works by names you know and some you don’t then you will surely not be disappointed.

Philip Harrison

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Contents
Grace Williams (1906–1977)
Elegy for string orchestra (1936; rev. 1940)
Arwel Hughes (1909–1988)
Gweddi (A Prayer) for soprano, chorus and strings (1944)
Paul Mealor (b.1975)
O Sacred Heart (2023)
Morfydd Owen (1891–1918)
Romance for Strings (1911)
Arwel Hughes (1909-1988)
Divertimento (based on the tune ‘Ebenezer’)
Christopher Wood (b.1945)
Aberfan (2016)
William Mathias (1934–1992)
Music for Strings (1961)