The Lily of Killarney
Clarinet Fantasias from England and Ireland
Robert Plane (clarinet), Benjamin Frith (piano)
rec. 2025, Carole Nash Recital Room, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK
MPR 118 [79]
Three virtuoso fantasias on music from famous nineteenth-century British operas form the bedrock of this recital from Robert Plane and Benjamin Frith. Michael Balfe’s Fantasia on The Bohemian Girl and William Vincent Wallace’s Fantasia on Maritana are joined by Julius Benedict’s Fantasia on The Lily of Killarney. The first two are heard in the arrangements of Charles Le Thière (1855-1929), both edited by Howard Rogerson, himself a clarinettist who has a London-based ensemble called the Cosmos Wind Quintet. As he explains in his portion of the booklet notes, three decades ago he undertook the arrangement of The Lily of Killarney, modelling it on Le Thière’s work, and Covid-19 offered an opportunity to refine his work still further. Around these three pieces satellite much more recent works, widening the interest of the programme for the inquisitive listener.
All three nineteenth-century fantasias offer fulsome lyricism, virtuoso flourishes and clever bridge passages. If you know the highlights from these works you’ll recognise them in these potpourris, the ‘hits’ brandished with skill by the arrangers. Rogerson’s own arrangement of The Lily of Killarney is about twice as long as the two by Le Thière – in fact it’s as long as them both put together – but he justifies the length through dextrous arranging skills.
Elsewhere we can hear Ernest Tomlinson’s gentle Canzonetta, transcribed from an early ballet of his, Aladdin. Thomas Dunhill’s Phantasy Suite, Op.91 was composed in 1941 and is therefore a late work, consisting of six brief movements, cyclically organised and varied in tempo and mood, compactly exciting and suffused with genial folksong-like charm (one can imagine words to a couple of them). Flavour-of-the-month Ruth Gipps’ Cool Running Water is light and amiable, if little more, and there are a couple of brief pieces by Josef Holbrooke, one genial, the other wistful, that don’t really tell us anything about him that we didn’t know before.
Far more nutritious is the music of the best composer represented in the programme, Elizabeth Maconchy, whose Fantasia is initially redolent of a Bartókian nocturne before darting forward more avidly and gently relapsing into a languorous close, the clarinet spinning its line over the briefly-bardic piano. Inevitably her music is cast in the most modern idiom, being composed in 1979. Thomas Pitfield’s Conversation Piece is a brief, languid and charming dialogue, whilst Clarence Raybould’s The Wistful Shepherd offers all the right eclogue tropes in this easy-going, rather evanescent affair. Howard Ferguson offers antique pastoral in his Four Short Pieces, tight, concise and crafted with his characteristic skill and well worth hearing.
There’s some varied and attractive repertoire here and there must be one or two world première recordings though MPR is too modest to note this. The disc is attractively recorded and presented in trademark house style and the Plane-Frith duo certainly draw the very most from the music.
Jonathan Woolf
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Contents
Michael Balfe (1808-1870)
Fantasia on The Bohemian Girl (1843) arr. Charles Le Thière (1855-1929) ed. Howard Rogerson
Ernest Tomlinson (1924-2015)
Canzonetta (1991)
Thomas Dunhill (1877-1946)
Phantasy Suite, Op.91 (1941)
Ruth Gipps (1921-1999)
Cool Running Water, Op.77 (1991)
Joseph Holbrooke (1878-1948)
The Butterfly of the Ballet, Op.55 No.6 (pub.1918)
Canzonetta (Spring Song), Op.55 No.8 (pub. 1918)
Julius Benedict (1804-1885)
Fantasia on The Lily of Killarney (1862) arr. Howard Rogerson
Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994)
Fantasia (1979)
Thomas Pitfield (1903-1999)
Conversation Piece (1960)
Clarence Raybould (1886-1972)
The Wistful Shepherd (A Reverie) (1939)
Howard Ferguson (1908-1999)
Four Short Pieces (1936)
William Vincent Wallace (1812-1865)
Fantasia on Maritana (1845) arr. 1912 by Charles Le Thière (1855-1929) ed. Howard Rogerson
