Pitfield: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 And 2 / Xylophone Sonata

The British Piano Concerto Foundation is making me conscious of the haphazard nature of musical fame and fortune. The concertos of Britten, Bliss and Ireland, say, are fairly well established. William Alwyn is well known for his film scores but not for his concertos, and Alec Rowley, Christian Darnton and Howard Ferguson are mainly familiar as composers of pieces set in piano examinations. Before the issue of this disc I have no idea how many music-lovers had even heard of Thomas Pitfield, but I was not among their number. Once again I am confronted with lively and interesting music that seems to have sunk below the horizon when the old professorial school of Stanford, Parry and Mackenzie have managed to stay above it, and while I make no comparative value judgments I certainly know which school interests me more.

If I previously knew nothing about the composer, I am very familiar with the performers and the recording studio. The Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester is a place of frequent resort for me, partly because I cannot abide the Bridgewater Hall, a ghastly glass-and-mirrors gin-palace that has replaced the beloved Free Trade Hall where Barbirolli used to reign. The level of talent and attainment shown by the youngsters is astounding, and one gets the chance to hear them making music before they have turned fully professional with the loss of some spontaneity that that tends to involve. The RNCM set up its own orchestra in 1973, and at the date of this recording in 2003 I must have been familiar with most of the players from hearing them as soloists and chamber players. To make a recording they have to be at their most professional, and I don't think you would know that this is an ensemble of students. They have made the recording in one of the concert halls where they regularly perform, I know its fine acoustic from much experience of it, and I am pleased to say that it has been reproduced admirably.

The soloists are two of the RNCM's more famous former pupils, Anthony Goldstone in the first concerto, which he performed at the composer's retirement concert as professor of composition at the RNCM; and in the other works the superlative Peter Donohoe, who was percussionist in that very performance and who reminds us of his versatility by giving us Pitfield's xylophone sonata as a welcome extra at the end of the disc. It is all a labour of love, a kind of family event featuring a family of prodigious musical gifts, and the sense of enthusiasm and belief carries me as a listener through the second-best parts of the music as well as the most attractive and engaging items. Like John Ireland, Pitfield was mainly a miniaturist who had one-and-a-bit piano concertos in him. The first concerto is to the standard 3-movement scheme, its idiom more along the lines of Britten than suggestive of Bax, Bliss etc. It could fairly be described as lightweight but it is far from undistinguished, and it avoids trying to be `amusing' in the way that makes some contemporary French music unutterably tedious for me. The second concerto had to be short (only 11-12 minutes) by reason of the occasion for which it was composed, and it is perfectly attractive, but to me it shows some signs of the composer's needing to let the bucket down quite a long way in the well of his inspiration. The movements had to be short but they seem to say all they have to say, the composer is resorting to fancy titles for them, and above all there is what always fills me with alarm in English music unless the composer is Britten - he is falling back on the tired old resource of traditional tunes.

However the work could not have a more persuasive advocate than Donohoe, who goes on to delight us with three solo works for piano and one for xylophone. The solo pieces are very effective I should say, and in the `octaves' study on track 16 Donohoe turns out some really exciting virtuosity, as indeed he had already done at the end of the concerto. The toccata is not a bad bit of prestidigitation either, this being a piece in the perpetuum-mobile style that commandeered the title of toccata from Schumann onwards. I wasn't expecting anything epic or Wagnerian in a sonata for xylophone, nor, to my relief, did the composer attempt anything so foolish, and the work is a now a thoroughly entertaining addition to my collection, and one that I expect to play often.

You ought to enjoy this disc thoroughly. I certainly did.

This CD is part of the valuable ongoing series devoted to British piano concertos on the Naxos label, spearheaded by pianist Peter Donohoe. It includes two piano concertos plus a gaggle of solo piano music and, startlingly, a xylophone sonata by British composer Thomas Pitfield (1903-1999). The Second Concerto, all the solo piano music and the xylophone sonata are played by Mr Donohoe. (It will be remembered that Donohoe was a student percussionist as well as pianist before winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982 which launched his international career.) The First Piano Concerto is played by pianist Anthony Goldstone. Both concerti are accompanied by the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Penny.

Pitfield was for many years a professor of composition at the RNCM. Among his students were John McCabe, Ronald Stevenson and John Ogdon. He was also an accomplished artist and he designed the cover design for the first edition of Britten's Simple Symphony. Most of his music is light in nature, often quite witty, sometimes jazz-inflected and usually tinged with gallic harmonies and élan.

None of this music has gained much currency in Britain or elsewhere, a fact indicative of how much good music gets lost in the hurlyburly of modern concert life. Although nothing presented here is deathlessly great, it is certainly well-constructed, tuneful and life-enhancing music. The two concerti are generally light-hearted, easily assimilable, and do not aspire to more than giving pleasure to the listener, which they certainly accomplish. It is no surprise that the very informative booklet notes were written by a doyen of British light music, conductor John Turner.

Pitfield often used folk-music as a source for his music. The latter portion of the Second Concerto is a set of variations on the folk-tune, 'The Oak and The Ash', and the 'Studies on an English Dance-Tune' is based on 'Jenny Pluck Pears.' French influence is particularly obvious in 'Arietta and Finale', the first section of which sounds like the close-hand style of George Shearing (but written in 1932, long before Shearing) that recalls the ninth-chord harmonies of Debussy and Ravel. 'Toccata' reminds one of Poulenc's own solo piano 'Toccata,' at least partly because of its reliance on quartal harmonies, one of Pitfield's harmonic fingerprints. Other Pitfield characteristics include the use of scintillating 5/8 and 7/8 meters and flourishes of alternating-hand chords and scales.

The performances are, as far as I can tell, quite expert. They certainly do well in presenting the limpid, lean, tuneful joie de vivre of these works. The CD has all the hallmarks of a labor of love by musicians associated with Pitfield's longtime home, the RNCM.

I had no idea what to expect when I played this CD, having never heard of Thomas Pitfield. I have to say that I was utterly charmed by what I heard, much the way one is by music of Poulenc, Milhaud, Riisager, Lambert and Gershwin. This is not profound music, but it is certainly heart-easing music, and there is never enough of that, is there?

Recommended.

Scott Morrison

I cannot muster much enthusiasm for this one. Thomas Pitfield (1903-1999) was to a large extent self-taught as a composer and his musical voice does indeed have some touches of individuality, but the incessant running scales is rather tiresome, and the main impression is one of a rather bland, tonal modernism. Pitfield wrote his first piano concerto in 1947 in a traditional three-movement formal; it is tuneful, slightly folksy and very much lead by the piano with only sparingly used accompaniment. Still, I catch myself just waiting for movements to finish, being more annoyed than pleased by the relatively simple and banal gestures. I cannot complain about Goldstone's performance, however.

The second concerto is short (though still cast in three movements) and slightly more modern sounding, though hardly more interesting. This time it is Peter Donohoe who takes the solo part and does so pretty well, I guess (he is fairly well supported by the Royal Northern College of Music Orchestra under Andrew Penny, as is Goldstone in the first). Donohoe also plays the three modest piano solo works; all of them are quick and requires some nimble fingerwork, and none of them are really at all memorable (even though the brief Studies on an English Dance Tune probably contains the most interesting music on the disc, or at the very least some flashy virtuoso pyrotechnics).

The disc is rounded off by the xylophone sonata from 1987. The xylophone isn't exactly staple fare as a solo instrument, and the fear is always that the music may come out sounding like the soundtrack to an old TV game. Pitfield does absolutely nothing to avoid this (although I should maybe not have mentioned it - once it is mentioned you'll very likely be unable to avoid thinking about it when hearing the work) and walks straight into early Arcade land with open eyes (the music is arguably inferior to most TV game soundtracks from the same period). It is, in short, a piece of genuine drivel with nothing even remotely interesting; motoric and driven and generally rather repulsive. Donohoe runs up and down the scales in quick tempo, and although he seems at times to be technically challenged this far out of his general field, he wouldn't have been able to salvage anything from this one in any case. The sound is good, for all it matters; exclusively for hardcore fans or scholars.