Not having heard it for quite a while I was rather apprehensively wondering how well the Ireland Piano Concerto would have worn since the days when it was always affectionately welcomed at a Prom. 'Astonishingly well' is the answer. Yes, there are a few pages in which Ireland indulges his love for filigree ornament a little too lavishly, and one or two others where his keyboard-writing is just a touch clogged, but how fresh so much of it still sounds! If you, too, haven't heard it for ages, I would almost defy you not to be enchanted by the ingenious simplicity (and the beautifully clean sound) of that passage in the slow movement where the second subject of the opening allegro unexpectedly (but so rightly) returns, or not to smile with pleasure at the rhythmic variant of the finale's main theme that Ireland cunningly keeps up his sleeve until the exuberant final pages. It is interesting, too, to discover or rediscover how much Ravel, how much Bartok, how much Stravinsky (all of them thoroughly digesed) circulated in the veins of a composer who is even now thought of as archetypally English.
The Concerto has certainly not staled in the hands of Eric Parkin, who phrases the theme of the slow movement with no less quiet poise than he did 18 years ago for Lyrita, and has found even more raptness than before in its later pages. His touch is a shade lighter in the opening movement, and Bryden Thomson's alert yet relaxed tempo for the finale allows him more blitheness than Boult's bluffer approach on the older recording. The piano sound of the new version, too, has more presence and is better focused than its predecessor. The overall perspective is very like that which one would experience at a concert: a large orchestra, with some instruments quite evidently further back than others. The ear has to search for a few of the details, therefore, but I greatly enjoyed the impression of a real performance in a real place.
The two mythic tone-poems, in their 1966 Lyrita recording, are coupled with the orchestral Prelude The forgotten rite, with which they belong, somehow, as a sort of triptych, and many listeners will want to hang on to the earlier version for the reason. For another, Thomson's account of that intermittently enjoyable but frustratingly uneven and disjointed score Mai-Dun has less urgency and momentum than Boult's, and Thomson makes rather less of the showy but thrilling dissonances in the coda. On the other hand he holds the Legend together very convincingly: his eloquent climax almost avoids sounding 'Hollywooden', the end of the piece feels more like an end, and even the baleful opening section, which both conductors demonstrate to be one of Ireland's most compelling evocations of savage antiquity, is steelier and more tense still in Thomson's reading than in Boult's, and the recording has the same virtues as that of the Concerto.'