Clare Howick/BBC SSO/Llewellyn
British Violin Concertos
Naxos
UP until now, violinist Clare Howick’s catalogue of British music on budget label Naxos has been entirely of chamber music, including a disc of the sonatas of Cyril Scott and one focused on women composers including Ethel Smyth and Elizabeth Maconchy.
How the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra came to be the band selected for her orchestral disc under the baton of Welsh conductor Grant Llewellyn I can’t say, but the resultant recording, made at the City Halls in Glasgow last year, is well worth the investment. The work that opens it, subtitled “Serenade”, was written for her in 2013 by Paul Patterson and is the lightest and most gently melodic of the three pieces here. After it, Kenneth Leighton’s Concerto for Violin and Small Orchestra, from 60 years previously, is much more robust and enthralling. Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University from 1970, he is the composer that many will want this disc for, and this performance makes the most of all the colour in the scoring, with great playing by the SSO winds as well as from the soloist, especially in the first movement cadenza and the riveting “Epilogo” finale.
The Gordon Jacobs concerto that follows is almost exactly contemporary. It was also dedicated to Canadian violinist Frederick Grinke, who premiered both works, and has the SSO strings in more of a supporting role, but is no less demanding of the soloist.
Keith Bruce
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