Thomas Pitfield: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2

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.