This is a clever and attractive coupling: music for solo(s) and orchestra, including voices, nicely diverse and organized so as to make an intriguing complete program. The Serenade to Music appears in its version for chorus and four solo singers. It’s such a lovely work that even with a performance on the slow side, as here, it makes in impact. Soprano Carla Huhtanen has a lovely voice in her solos, but the tenor, Lawrence Wiliford, is just awful.
Constant Lambert facetiously described music of the English pastoral school as too much like “a cow looking over a barn gate.” Vaughan Williams’ Oboe Concerto fits that description perfectly. It’s not one of the composer’s stronger works, drifting about sweetly for 20 lyrical, relatively shapeless minutes. That said, oboist Sarah Jeffrey plays it very beautifully. Her attractive tone is matched by a welcome absence of mechanical noise in the process. It would be nice to hear her again in something more substantial. Unfortunately, in the world of oboe concertos, there isn’t much.
Flos Campi, for solo viola (and oboe, sort of), wordless chorus, and small orchestra is a series of vignettes based on verses from the Song of Songs. It’s a poignant, at times almost erotic piece that’s so indescribable in form and texture that it doesn’t get performed as often as it deserves to be. The music is wholly characteristic and original, and Peter Oundjian turns in a very effective and atmospheric performance, aided in no small degree by the fulsome moaning–er, singing–of the Elmer Iseler Singers.
All of which brings us to the main item: Vaughan Williams’ problematic Piano Concerto, in its original version for single soloist. There’s no question that this is the best way to experience the piece, and Louis Lortie plays it with aplomb, but there’s a certain dullness to the sound as captured here–a lack of sparkle in the keyboard’s upper register–that makes the already thick textures sound denser than they should. The opening toccata, in particular, needs to project more brilliantly, although matters improve as the work proceeds. Not a perfect disc, then, but despite slight disappointments still a very good one.
