John Gardner is a new name to me and I suspect to most Gramophone readers. With the notes for this CD he includes a potted autobiography. Born in Manchester in 1917 he served in the RAF as aircrafthand/bandmaster and navigator, and on demob joined the staff at the Royal Opera House, then the Royal Academy of Music and (following in Holst’s illustrious footsteps) St Paul’s Girl’s School at Hammersmith. His First Symphony was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival in 1951, his Cantiones sacrae at the 1952 Three Choirs Festival, his ballet, Reflection, during the Edinburgh Festival of the same year, and the opera, The Moon and Sixpence, at Sadler’s Wells in 1957. After that he suffered (like Sir Malcolm Arnold and many other composers of what I am tempted to call ‘real’ music), from the clampdown by the English musical establishment on almost anything with tunes and not sufficiently surrounded with barbed wire. Welcome back! The climate is improving.
The overture here, Half Holiday, shows an engagingly succinct talent. Rhythmically catchy, it has an engaging pastoral secondary theme. Appropriately it is half-length, and doesn’t go on a moment too long. The Flute Concerto, written for Jennifer Stinton in 1995, is equally well crafted. It has a relaxed but discursive opening movement followed by a bittersweet ‘Nocturne’, introduced by the soloist over gentle, ruminative pizzicatos. The third movement is an elegant ‘Gavotte’, with vivacious drone/musette interludes, and the rondo finale gives the flute plenty of bravura roulades and eventually recalls the first movement.
The Third Symphony (which might better have been called a sinfonia) soars off on the woodwind and its delicacy of orchestration does not reveal for a moment that it was scored for the same combination as Brahms’s Second Symphony, with which it shared the programme at its debut. Its later argument suggests influences from Shostakovich, which persist in the solemn threnodic Adagio. This opens on the lower strings, moves on to woodwind, develops a fugue on the brass before the strings return for the climax and the touchingly poignant close. The finale, introduced by the bassoon, followed by the horns, is much more good-natured, and during its course again reprises material from the first movement.
The Prelude for Strings, like Barber’s Adagio, derives from a String Quartet (now withdrawn) and has something of the same elegiac mood, although it is briefer and more romantic, and ends more positively. I liked best of all the Sinfonia piccola. (How is it that English composers write so naturally for strings?) Its opening Allegretto has a delightful English insouciance, yet an undertow of deeper feeling, and the closing mood is more restless, with a brief final comment from the solo violin. The Andante again features a thoughtful pizzicato tread, and proves to be a searching passacaglia, always a source of nourishment in the hands of a fine composer. The finale has a splendid ultra-rhythmic ostinato-like theme that has a whiff of Britten’s Simple Symphony about it, but lends itself to stabbing fugal treatment.
The Irish Suite genially celebrated the composer’s 80th birthday. It begins with a luscious horn quartet, and features four traditional tunes, but the fifth, the ‘Spring Song’, is the composer’s own. Fine, well-rehearsed but thoroughly spontaneous performances, and an excellent recording, serve to recommend this collection highly; and good for ASV for issuing it so invitingly at mid-price.'