A most welcome issue. At a stroke it more than doubles the amount of Elisabeth Lutyens's music available on CD at present. Her reputation is that of a lone, brave modernist voice in the conservative Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, which carries the implication that she's of little importance today, now that that battle has been won, or lost, or at all events succeeded by others. This collection demonstrates that she was also a composer of real distinction and originality.
Serialism for her was no dogma or easy route to 'modernity' but a refining process, and with it she distilled a very individual voice. It's salutary and in a way thrilling to set her First Chamber Concerto of 1940 (the BBC's complete list of premieres for that year consisted of Britten's Canadian Carnival, Howard Carr's overture Sir Walter Raleigh, Rawsthorne's Kubla Khan and Eric Thiman's Variations on a Theme of Elgar) in the context of its age: who else in Britain at that time was capable of such elegant rigour, channelling such an intense lyricism? It is—or should be—a landmark of recent British music. The Six Tempi are its lineal descendant of nearly 20 years later: still more pared-down, 'late serial' in their bare economy but all of them radiating out from the tenderly haunting funeral march at their centre and all rooted in a lyricism which we can now recognize as Lutyens's own: no wonder this piece prompted, at a chance meeting with Stravinsky, an embrace and a cry of ''That is the music that I like!''
The Valley of Hatsu-Se is more familiar; Jane Manning has retained it in her repertoire since giving its first performance in 1965. In terms of thematic organization it's freer than the others, but no less beautifully crafted, the musical lines and masses balanced and juxtaposed in a way that may recall Japanese water-colour painting or calligraphy. The cycle of the seasons and its analogue, the passages of youth to age, are evoked with a delicacy that makes the moments of directness—the description of lonely autumn in the seventh song, the beautiful retrospect at the end—all the more poignant. The ''Lament of Isis'', extracted from Lutyens's long-meditated, unsuccessful, never revived opera Isis and Osiris, is moving in its bareness: an expressive unaccompanied arioso that gradually descends the voice's compass. So is the restrained, quiet intensity, built from the close canonic working of austerely narrow melodic figures, of Lutyens's loving tribute to Stravinsky. Moving in another way are the two late Triolets, each composed when the pain of arthritis made writing an ordeal: 'miniatures' in which the craft of a lifetime is used to draw big images with the fewest possible notes.
The performances are eloquently phrased, amply expressive, refined of sound: the recording is clean and natural. I can think of a dozen other Lutyens compositions that would be welcome on CD, but this collection has been very shrewdly compiled to represent her at her best. Gratefully and enthusiastically recommended.'