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BBC Concert Orchestra/Keith
Lockhart with Charlie Albright at
Dreyfoos Concert Hall, West Palm
Beach – Ravel, Walton, Vaughan
Williams & Britten
Tuesday, April 14, 2015 Dreyfoos Concert Hall,
Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, West Palm
Beach, Florida
Reviewed by David M. Rice
http://classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=12778 1/4
This appearance, the second of two in West Palm Beach by the
versatile BBC Concert Orchestra and principal conductor Keith
Lockhart, presented a program of music by Ravel and three
English composers, all played with idiomatic charm and warm
affection. Charlie Albright, who joins the BBCCO on its tour of
fourteen American cities, gave an exciting account of Ravel’s G
major Piano Concerto and thrilled the audience with a brilliantly
improvised encore.
When Maurice Ravel orchestrated Le tombeau de Couperin he
omitted the ‘Fugue’ and ‘Toccata’, refashioning the piece as a
suite of three dances and a ‘Prélude’. Lockhart gave the work a
sprightly and clear reading. At the very outset English horn and
clarinet embellished the oboe solo. In the ‘Forlane’ the
woodwinds created interesting textures, and in the Menuet,
once again with a lovely extended oboe solo, featured a fine
collaboration between strings and sweetly lyrical trumpet. The
lively ‘Rigaudon’, strategically moved by Ravel to the final
position, brought a rousing finish, but not before giving way to
languorous wind solos.
In the Piano Concerto Albright displayed technical skill and
outstanding musicianship. Even when the piano was silent, his
body language reflected the bouncy rhythms, and his playing
was particularly expressive in jazzy and bluesy passages and
virtuosic when his hands seemed to be doing battle, the left’s
melodic lines pitted against the right’s interjections and, in the
cadenza, its persistent trills. Albright played the Adagio’s long
opening solo meaningfully and alternated with orchestral solos
to sustain the dreamy atmosphere. The finale was a wild gallop.
Albright offered a rather unusual encore – an improvisation
based on four notes called out by members of the audience (B
flat, D, A flat and E). The spectacular result, about five minutes
long, was suggestive of the great Romantic composer-pianists,
leading one to wonder whether their now-familiar works might
have had similar improvisational origins. Albright has a bright
future not only as a pianist but as a composer as well.
The remainder of the concert was
devoted to music by
twentieth-
century English composers. First a suitably majestic
traversal of William Walton’s coronation march, Crown Imperial,
in a scaled-down version by Vilem Tausky (and not to be
confused with Walton’s own revision), a former conductor of the
BBCCO. The brass and percussion – the latter appropriately
restrained – have major roles, and the strings created an elegant
aura. Then, in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody
(1906/14) – the Second such work was withdrawn but has
anyway been recorded, and the Third is lost – Lockhart and the
orchestra captured the spirit of the folksongs that the composer
gathered in his travels to England’s easternmost region. Lyrical
solos on clarinet and viola brought the delicate melody of ‘The
Captain’s Apprentice’ vividly to life, contrasting with the faster
‘The Basket of Eggs’ and ‘A Bold Young Sailor’, the latter
melody beautifully intoned on English horn.
Benjamin Britten’s Purcell Variations and Fugue (Young
Person’s Guide to the Orchestra when narrated) served as a
showpiece for the BBCCO with standouts for clarinets, violas,
harp and horns, and the trumpets’ contrasted nicely with the
‘pomposo’ trombones and tuba. After the remarkable section
featuring percussion, the Fugue with each instrument returning
in turn culminates with brass restating the Purcell Theme (the
‘Rondeau’ from his Abdelazer score) to usher in an explosive
coda. Added to the second-half survey of English music were
two extras, both by Edward Elgar: Salut d’Amour and ‘The Wild
Bears’ from The Wand of Youth.