It’s not often that a disc can include two works by the same composer written more than 50 years apart. But the whole point of Minna Keal’s career is that its special, even unique circumstances (family commitments that obliged her to abandon her ambitions to compose for so long) do not require special criteria to be applied to the result. Her music speaks, clearly and directly, in its own way, just as it would if her career had been completely ‘normal’.
The Ballade she wrote as a student in 1929 has personality in abundance, with precisely the kind of confidence and strength of purpose needed to justify its rather flamboyant gestures, reminiscent of John Ireland, Cyril Scott or even Frank Bridge. It must have seemed quite something at the Royal Academy of Music in those days, and yet, inevitably, the world of Keal’s more recent music is very different. In the Cello Concerto (1988-94) emotional intensity is more immediate, and as far as form is concerned, she now prefers terseness to elaboration. Such strongly focused expressiveness might evoke a composer like Berthold Goldschmidt: or is it the kind of music that Elisabeth Lutyens might have written had she lived for another decade? All kinds of echoes can be heard here, and yet the music has its own unmistakable personality, using its forces with an individual flair for sonority and structural proportion. This Cello Concerto is not a curiosity, but a worthy addition to the repertory, and both performance and recording do it justice.'