SOMM
Recordings’ The Deeper the Blue offers an intriguing exploration of
colour and timbre in music and a revealing investigation of the
connections between four very different composers over a near-100-year
period.
Taking its title from painter Wassily Kandinsky’s
assertion that a deepening colour ultimately “turns into silent
stillness and becomes white”, the recording illuminates the intimate
relationship between student and teacher: Vaughan Williams and Maurice
Ravel, Kenneth Hesketh with Henri Dutilleux and the influence on
Dutilleux of Ravel.
Hailed by The Washington Post for her “riveting” playing and “exquisite tone”, virtuoso violinist Janet Sung and the Britten Sinfonia – one of the UK’s “most flexible chamber orchestras” (Evening Standard) – make their SOMM debuts alongside long-time label artists, conductor Jac van Steen and pianist Simon Callaghan,
the latter partnering Sung in Ravel’s jazz- and Blues-accented Sonata
for Violin and Piano. The last chamber music Ravel composed, it is a
colouristic extravaganza brimfull with joy and irrepressible energy.
The harmonic language of Dutilleux’s piano suite Au gré des ondes boasts a wide colour palette enhanced in brilliance and charm by his former pupil Kenneth Hesketh’s orchestral arrangement, here in its first recording. Harmonic and instrumental colour is central to Hesketh’s own music.
Also receiving its first recording, and composed in 2016 for Janet Sung, Hesketh’s Inscription-Transformation for violin and orchestra is a richly intricate weaving together of the textures and tones of violin and orchestra. Commemorating Dutilleux and Hesketh’s grandmother, who died during its composition, it’s a febrile, endlessly mutating work that pits stratospheric violin against agitated orchestra in music as complex as it is gratifying in the intensity of its expression.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ compact, muscular, Bach-influenced Concerto for Violin and Orchestra combines meditative repose with dance-like extroversion, Maurice Ravel’s ever-popular Tzigane a fiery, virtuosic homage to Hungarian folk music.
The harmonic language of Dutilleux’s piano suite Au gré des ondes boasts a wide colour palette enhanced in brilliance and charm by his former pupil Kenneth Hesketh’s orchestral arrangement, here in its first recording. Harmonic and instrumental colour is central to Hesketh’s own music.
Also receiving its first recording, and composed in 2016 for Janet Sung, Hesketh’s Inscription-Transformation for violin and orchestra is a richly intricate weaving together of the textures and tones of violin and orchestra. Commemorating Dutilleux and Hesketh’s grandmother, who died during its composition, it’s a febrile, endlessly mutating work that pits stratospheric violin against agitated orchestra in music as complex as it is gratifying in the intensity of its expression.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ compact, muscular, Bach-influenced Concerto for Violin and Orchestra combines meditative repose with dance-like extroversion, Maurice Ravel’s ever-popular Tzigane a fiery, virtuosic homage to Hungarian folk music.
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