British Music for Strings Vol.3 (Works by Smyth, Gipps, Spain-Dunk, Warren)

British Music for Strings III

Dame Ethel SMYTH (1858-1944)

Suite for Strings, Op. 1a (1883/1890) 

Susan SPAIN-DUNK (1880-1962)

Suite for String Orchestra (1920) ed Peter Cigleris 

Constance WARREN (1905-1984)

Heather Hill, for String Orchestra (1929-32)

Susan SPAIN-DUNK

Lament, for String Orchestra (1934) ed Peter Cigleris 

Ruth GIPPS (1921-1999)

Cringlemire Garden, Op. 39 (1952) 

Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim

Douglas Bostock

rec. November 2020, Congress Centrum, Pforzheim

The third volume in this series is devoted to British women composers. The genre is the suite or the impression, the composers ranging from the oldest, Ethel Smyth, to Ruth Gipps. Smyth’s Suite for Strings dates from 1890 but has roots in her String Quintet, her Op.1 composed in 1883 when she was studying in Leipzig. It seems from Lewis Foreman’s notes that though a score of the orchestral version was apparently published in 1891, it has proved impossible to trace (though a piano duet version has been sourced) and so the work has been edited by Douglas Bostock for this recording. The work has lain unperformed since its performance in London in 1890. It’s a five-movement work, and includes some wholesome-sounding themes, some slightly folksy, and an attractive though hardly deep slow movement. To balance the 9-minute opening movement there’s a similarly expansive finale, which feints at a fugato and then behaves itself.

Susan Spain-Dunk has earned some airtime on national radio in Britain recently. She wrote a Phantasy Quartet in 1915 – most British composers did, it was the equivalent of writing a fugue - and later came to the notice of Henry Wood who invited her to conduct at the Proms between 1924 and 1927. Later still she became a teacher of harmony and composition. Her Suite for string orchestra was composed in 1920 – equidistant between the Cobbett-inspired Quartet and the Wood-backed appearances at the Proms - and, like the Smyth, is in five movement though it’s half the length. It’s a very lyric, professional piece of work in the lighter style, though it’s never frivolous. There’s a tinge of melancholy in the Romance central movement – it was written two years after war’s end – and altogether it’s an accomplished though hardly memorable work.

Her other work here is the Lament of 1934, edited – as was her Suite – by Peter Cigleris. It’s an unusual kind of lament, sounding more celebratory than anything, an in memoriam that seems to have inspired happy recollections rather than loss and despair. The jauntier elements are almost disconcertingly paradoxical.

Constance Warren (1905-1984) was a pianist – a student of Curzon, in fact, and a composition student of Benjamin Dale and York Bowen. Her later success as a teacher in Birmingham curtailed her compositional life so the surviving music dates from her student years at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Heather Hill dates from 1929-32 is a tender pastoral with a more up-tempo B section. It’s a good example of the genre. Ruth Gipps is increasingly recorded these days and her mini tone poem Cringlemire Garden dates from 1952 when she was in her early 30s. It’s cast in folkloric-pastoral form showing more than a touch of Vaughan Williams in both thematic consequence and string distribution.

The acoustic of the CongressCentrum rather inflates the sound of the string orchestra – there are fourteen players in the photograph of the orchestra – but the results are not unattractive.

These are attractive works directed by Bostock with affectionate perception. There are no masterpieces here, though, so realism is required.

 

Jonathan Woolf