Welcome though it is, particularly at its modest price, the Fourth Symphony has to contend with formidable competition from two modern full-price recordings but the present disc does bring a rarity in the form of the Piano Concerto in G major which is currently unrepresented in the catalogue. Indeed the only other version I know is Denis Matthews’s pioneering record with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Malcolm Sargent, who also gave the premiere in March 1956 (EMI, 4/58 – nla). Fine thought that performance was, this seems to me even more searching and eloquent. Malcolm Binns, Vernon Handley and the LSO recorded it in the presence of the composer as part of the BBC’s celebrations marking his seventy-fifth birthday, and that no doubt served to encourage all concerned to give of their very best. One is left in no doubt from the very first bar that this is music of a strange and compelling beauty. Malcolm Binns seems to penetrate more deeply into the tranquillity of spirit of the opening, and bring us closer to the contemplative spirit of the central “Corymbus” movement. The concerto was inspired by the great Indian sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, an artist often heard on the Third Programme in the 1950s, and its thoughtful, meditative character marks it off from the usual run of virtuoso concertos. Although there is inevitably some element of display, the heroic and combative element that you find in, say, the Bartok or Prokofiev piano concertos are foreign to its thinking. There is a simplicity and depth about this concerto – and particularly the first two movements – that draw one back again and again into its world.
Vernon Handley’s account of the Fourth Symphony is a noble one and hardly less fine than its rivals, except in one respect – namely the acoustic of the BBC’s Maida Vale Studio 1, which lends the orchestral texture a certain opaqueness. A fine performance of the Soliloquy written for William Pleeth (whom older readers may remember from the Rubbra-Gruenberg-Pleeth Trio) completes the disc. Ronald Stevenson spoke of it as “a meditation with flashes of interior drama” and this performance beautifully captures its spirit. The commercial recordings both of this and the piano concerto may have had slightly greater transparency but the BBC recording is more than satisfactory. Strongly recommended.'