E J Moeran - Sketches for Symphony No.2 completed by Martin Yates & Overture for a Festival / John Ireland - Sarnia: an island sequence for orchestra [Classical]

As for many collectors when this appeared in the new releases listing I was both intensely curious and keen to hear the disc. I have delayed writing this review for some time because I'm wrestling with the dilemma of sounding ungrateful. I have this nagging doubt about just how much 'real' Moeran is on offer here. I don't mean that Martin Yates has made anything but an excellent job of his reconstruction - I wonder at the real quality/inspiration of the material Moeran bequeathed to posterity. I would strongly recommend the curious to read the extensive and fascinating article by Fabian Huss from the University of Bristol which outlines in considerable detail just what material exists[...]. Of course the obvious analogy is with Anthony Paynes' similar resurrection job on Elgar's 3rd Symphony. My abiding impression is that that work sounds more like real Elgar than this does Moeran. The themes sound Moeran-esque but somehow the instrumentation and the way the themes develop doesn't. I keep returning to this disc hoping to be more convinced but as yet I'm not. The 4 stars are for the quality of the reconstruction and the committed performance. I do personally find the chosen Dutton recording style to be rather big and blowsy using generous acoustics to inflate the orchestral sound. Yates orchestration of John Ireland's Sarnia I'm less convinced by. Lets be honest - you don't remember Ireland for his orchestrational skill so dressing this masterly piano suite up 'in the style of Ravel' right down to some Ma Mer L'Oye glissando harmonics doesn't work for me at least. Ireland was a master of the concise concentrated miniature - not one of his orchestral scores (with the possible exception of the Piano Concerto) could really be considered his finest work. My reservations extend to the final work too - the Moeran Overture. The fact that most of the material turns up later (and much better) in the G minor Symphony shows that this is really no more than a fully worked out sketch - as such it has academic interest but it is very small beer compared to his proper works. Again well played and decently orchestrated but little more than that. I do wonder how much more music of real quality Dutton will be able to mine from the vein of the English Musical Renaissance. Clearly reading the other reviews most are far more convinced than I. For a listener at all new to the wonderful music of E J Moeran there are many other discs to visit first - none finer than Boult's version of the Symphony & Sinfonietta on Lyrita Moeran - Symphony in G minor

Ever since Deryck Cooke's performing version of Mahler's Symphony No.10, arguments have raged over whether, or how far, it is legitimate to "complete" a composer's unfinished works. Perhaps it all depends on how unfinished those works are. Cooke no doubt had plenty of Mahler to work with. But what about Anthony Payne's "elaboration" of Elgar's Third Symphony where the original fragments seem only to have served as a starting point, and Payne's own creative contribution was considerable? Much the same problem applies to Martin Yates' "realisation and completion" of the Moeran sketches for his Second Symphony. Moeran himself indicated as late as 1948 that the work was fairly close to completion, although he subsequently seems to have had serious doubts about it, and even considered scapping it altogether. Whatever the truth of the matter (a brief account of which is given in Geoffrey Self's biography of the composer) all that could be traced after his death were several pages of sketches which Moeran's wife, the cellist Peers Coetmore, had deposited with the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne.

It is out of these fragments that Martin Yates has produced a full-blown symphony of almost 35 minutes duration. He admits himself that it is not the symphony that Moeran would have written, but it is constructed entirely out of the sketches that Moeran left behind. As such the music is characteristically Moeran, and adopts his mature style (there are, for example, echoes of the Sinfonietta of 1944). What Yates has given us - with Moeran's help - is a powerful, impassioned work with many recognisable Moeran fingerprints. As in the Symphony in G minor of 1937, the "Second Symphony" opens with a robust, forthright theme, followed by a lush, romantic second subject, and the characteristic gale-like cascade of strings is evident at several points, as is the affirmative coda. It is difficult not to assess the quality of ths work without Moeran's G minor Symphony hovering in the background, and in a sense, anyone who has never heard that work will have the advantage of approaching the present one without prejudice. In any case, should we think that Yates' realisation is not quite up to the standard of the earlier work, we must bear in mind that Moeran himself indicated that his new symphony was intended to be completely different from the G minor. On balance we can be grateful to Yates for making available music by Moeran, fragmentary though it is, which otherwise we would never have had a chance to hear.

The other Moeran work on the disc, the short Overture for a Festival, is also a premiere recording. It apparently dates from the time of the G minor Symphony to which it is closely related musically, but Moeran only got as far as the piano score. It was left to Rodney Newton to orchestrate the work in 1994 (which he revised for this recording). Here there can be no argument that the construction and themes are pure Moeran.

The final work on this CD is by Moeran's teacher at the RCM, John Ireland (1883-1962). "Sarnia: An Island Sequence for Orchestra" is Martin Yates' orchestration of what was originally a three-movement piece for piano solo documenting Ireland's love-affair with the Channel Islands. Although Ireland was a piano miniaturist, some of the textures cry out for orchestration, and Yates' transcription here seems natural, almost as if it is what the composer had always intended.

All in all, this is an intriguing disc. The works are played by a fully-committed Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted, of course, by Martin Yates.

This new recording of music by E J Moeran and John Ireland deserves a very warm welcome and not only from people who love the work of these composers, but from anyone who delights in music that has what one might call an outdoors quality:music that seems to evoke landscape, light, colour and atmosphere.

The main work by Moeran is described as a realisation and completion by Martin Yates, the conductor on this compact disc, of sketches made by the composer between 1939 and 1950 which remained incomplete at the time of his death. The supporting Moeran piece is an orchestration by Rodney Newton of an undated piano work written during the 1930's.

The three movement work by John Ireland is an orchestration by Martin Yates of Ireland's 1940-41 piano suite, "Sarnia".

All three works are beautifully performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, recorded in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in the summer of 2011. The recording engineers, Dexter Newman and Dillon Gallagher, as well as the musicians, deserve special praise because the sound on this disc is rich, full, appropriately resonant and entirely realistic.

As to the music itself all three works are enormously worthwhile and fully deserving of being heard in this way. Of course many aspects of what we hear are speculative and we cannot know if the composers themselves would have sanctioned or even recognised the results. But while the ethics of realisation and orchestration remain problematic, the outcome sounds absolutely right:authentic and idiomatic. It would have been a great pity to have left the Moeran sketches, in particular, unperformed and accordingly available only to researchers. I hope this recording leads to some concert performances of the Second Symphony, it is full of Moeran's wonderful melodies, which are bracing and wistful by turns.

Highly recommended all round and many thanks to Michael J Dutton for facilitating this recording.