Recording Review
Sir Hamilton Harty
Piano Concerto; A Comedy Overture: Fantasy Scenes
Peter Donohoe piano
Ulster Orchestra
Takuo Yuasa conductor
Naxos 8.557731
Classical Source web site, March 2006
by Michael Quinn
Peter Donohoe’s survey of British Piano Concertos for Naxos continues with one of the strongest performances yet in the five-year series.
This is only the second recording of Hamilton Harty’s 1922 B minor concerto and its most immediate difference to Malcolm Binns’s 23-year-old account for Chandos in the same Ulster Hall venue with the same orchestra (conducted by Bryden Thomson) is its pace, Donohoe clocking in a full seven-and-a-half minutes before Binns reaches his final bar.
Which is not to say that Donohoe’s superbly nuanced reading is rushed. A touch breathless in places, perhaps, but necessarily so and none the worse for that. The crucial difference is one of approach, Donohoe taking Harty’s cod-Romantic roller-coaster at face value, motoring through its unabashed intermingling of Rachmaninov, Chopin and Irish folk-music with a winning élan and displaying enough melodic polish and driving energy along the way to make even the most grandiloquent musical statements here immediately endearing.
The more-brightly recorded Binns chooses instead to pause and dwell throughout as if mesmerised by the sirenic melancholia that underpins this comparatively lightweight but altogether beguiling work. And, in doing so, he excavates and accentuates a strain of Britishness in the music that grounds it in a specificity that eludes even the insightful Donohoe. Each complements the other and both provide eloquent support for an unduly neglected work.
Overlooked, too, has been the colourful quartet of Fantasy Scenes (from an Eastern Romance) of 1919. Absent from the Ulster Orchestra’s earlier Harty survey on Chandos, this score appears here to great effect, the orchestra clearly relishing the multiple opportunities the pieces afford for vibrant strokes of colour, surges of rhythmic vitality and some ear-catching solo sequences: take a bow the brass, woodwinds and strings. You’ll hear Rimsky’s Scheherazade here in the lustrous ‘Arabian Nights’ exotica of Harty’s evocative scoring, but a telling touch of Mahler in the detail, too, to leaven and ground.
The more-familiar A Comedy Overture does what it should in a sprightly, effervescent reading full of vim under Takuo Yuasa and his Belfast-based players that serves as an engaging opener for a disc characterised by excellence throughout.
BBC Music Magazine, March 2006
by Calum MacDonald
Rightly remembered as a great conductor, Sir Hamilton Harty was also well thought of as a composer in the first decades of the last century. Fluent, skilful, with a tinge of Irish folk music and sometimes Irish subject-matter, his music fits comfortably into the late-Romantic mould and, if hardly world-shaking, is always enjoyable.
The Piano Concerto of 1922, a sort of Ulsterman’s Rachmaninov, is a spirited, highly attractive work with some melodic freshness, both in the gently melancholic slow movement and the more overt Irishry of the finale, which quotes the Fenian tune The Wearing of the Green, possibly a rather daring gesture at the time. There is a very good, though ageing, version from Malcolm Binns on Chandos, but this Peter Donohoe performance seems more alert, making more of the interplay between piano and orchestra in the first movement.
Of the fillers, the eventful and genial Comedy Overture remains one of Harty’s more-often played pieces, but the 1919 suite Fantasy Scenes, subtitled From an Eastern Romance, is an extreme rarity - it didn’t feature on Chandos’s Harty series under Bryden Thomson and this may well be its first recording. Reinforcing the impression of Harty’s skill as an orchestrator, it’s almost light music, though drawing on the ‘oriental’ idiom made common currency by, for example, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade; one could also imagine it as a little ballet. Certainly it rounds out a very agreeable disc.
PERFORMANCE ****
SOUND ****