BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sir Andrew Davis FINZI Cello Concerto - Eclogue - New Year Music - Grand Fantasia and Toccata

A broad and meticulous selection of orchestral works and concertos by Gerald Finzi is here matched by a first-class cast of soloists, supported by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sir Andrew Davis, expert in British repertoire and conducting this year’s Last Night of the Proms.

Paul Watkins displays exhilarating virtuosity in the Cello Concerto, a central work on this album, composed in the wake of the devastating news that Finzi was terminally ill, but yet filled with ‘vigorous, almost turbulent thematic material’, as he wrote in the programme note for the work’s premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival in 1955.

Louis Lortie, for his part, tackles the high-spirited and majestic Grand Fantasia and Toccata, the Fantasia originally conceived as part of a concerto for piano and strings and first performed on two pianos. This contrasts with the more restrained Eclogue for Piano and Strings, timeless, and blessed with a mood of benediction.

This album also features the orchestral Nocturne (subtitled ‘New Year Music’), dark, misty, and at times ironic.

“… it [Cello Concerto] ranks as one of the finest British works for cello and orchestra. When he [Finzi] started writing it in 1951, he already knew he did not have long to live, and the wistful land of lost content that never seems too far away in any of his music pervades this work. Watkins’ performance captures that mood perfectly. Nothing is exaggerated or over-assertive … Louis Lortie is the soloist in the ruminatively beautiful Eclogue for piano and strings, and is spiritedly athletic, with full orchestra, in the neo-baroque Grand Fantasia and Toccata. Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra make a fine job of the one near rarity in this collection, the strikingly atmospheric Nocturne …” (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)