"a really remarkable recording" — Flora Willson
Flora Willson: But we're going to start with a different disc. This is a disc of 20th-century piano works with orchestra by Britten, Tippett, and Walton. You might think, okay, so what's unexpected about that? But these are not big-hitting, well-known pieces of repertory. We've got Britten's Diversions for the piano left hand and orchestra. That's one of the Paul Wittgenstein pieces that he commissioned. That was the great pianist who lost his right arm in World War I fighting. The Tippett Concerto for piano and orchestra that was commissioned by the CBSO in the 1950s. But we're actually going to hear part of Walton's Sinfonia Concertante, not a well-known work.
Andrew McGregor: It's not well known, but it's got a really convoluted history, hasn't it? Because this is the last revision from 1943, isn't it? And so, big orchestra. So, obbligato piano, but it didn't sound like this.
FW: It did not, no. This started life as a ballet score. It was actually written speculatively by Walton for Diaghilev, no less, and his Ballets Russes in the 1920s. Walton was only in his mid-twenties himself, and Diaghilev politely declined and said, you know, have another go when you're a little bit older, young man. Funnily enough, Walton did have other goes. He wrote more ballet scores, this time choreographed by Frederick Ashton, the great British choreographer, but as far as the Sinfonia Concertante was concerned, Walton wasn't put off. He turned it first into a concert work, which was effectively a piano concerto, and then he returned to it a good 15 years after that world premiere and actually reduced the prominence of the piano. He effectively sort of stopped it being a piano concerto and turned it more into a symphony with piano. And the pianist, Clare Hammond, has recorded this with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Vass. And we're going to listen to the third movement. This is an Allegro Vivo.
[Walton - Sinfonia Concertante, m. 3]
AM: The end of William Walton's Sinfonia Concertante, originally a ballet score from 1927, eventually turned into that symphony with piano obbligato, as Walton called it. And that's the new recording from pianist Clare Hammond with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by George Vass. Flora. I was surprised to see how much of a rarity this still is on record. I mean, there are very few recordings, two of them conducted by Walton himself.
FW: Yes, I think this is really significant that we've actually got another modern recording here, and it's so persuasive. I mean, you hear the relationship between the piano and the orchestra. and the movement we've just heard. The piano is almost like another percussion instrument, at times, more tuned percussion alongside the others that Walton's got there. It's such a musical dialogue, both in terms of how Walton has written this later version of the piece, but also the way Hammond plays it. She's, you know, so utterly at ease stepping in and out of the spotlight. You know those moments of virtuosic, really flashy finger work; she's absolutely got them in her fingers.
AM: I jotted down that she makes it seem quite straightforward, but in a lovely way.
FW: Exactly, it sounds easy, but then she's also willing to recede to be among the kind of rank and file of all the musicians of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
AM: So she gets what he meant because it is that with piano obbligato, it's not a concerto, it’s a conversation.
FW: Well exactly. And I think the words piano concerto immediately set off, since the 19th century, a series of associations for us about, you know, what a soloist is, what a soloist should do, and especially there's something about pianos, you know, you're playing a big instrument placed in front of an orchestra. That too has a series of associations. And yet Hammond and the BBC Symphony here are just willing to kind of gently dismantle some of that, all in the service of this really, I'm going to say, fun music. It's got such spirit It really carries you along.
AM: It's really entertaining. What about the Tippett Piano Concerto though, just briefly, because, well, it's got a reputation of being sort of almost unplayable, although Stephen Osborne, or John Ogden, or even Lang Lang would disagree.
FW: Well, quite. I think, you know, the fact that the pianist originally booked to give its premiere declared it unplayable and walked out of rehearsals, that is meaningful, even though some have proved it definitely playable ever since. You know, I don't think you'd get Hammond pulling something like that. Put it this way. It's a really remarkable recording. Again, that real apparent ease. The Tippett Concerto, I mean, it takes in really ethereal glistening of the first movement. There's some thunderous piano playing. I mean, there's nothing gentle about the way Hammond's going here. But then you get some of, you know, Tippett's classic groove as well. It's a great recording.
AM: It is. Concertante pieces by Walton, Tippett, and Britten from Clare Hammond and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Vass, released yesterday on BIS. It's a hybrid SACD. And there'll be music by Sir Michael Tippett at the end of Record Review this afternoon. A new concert recording of his oratorio A Child of Our Time. That's at about ten to four. And I think you're going to be able to hear Clare Hammond's complete recording of the Tippett in Radio 3's Classical Live this Wednesday afternoon from one o'clock.