Ates Orga

listens to some of Eileen Joyce's concerto recordings
in a timely reissue from Dutton Laboratories

 << Continued from page 3 

Capitalising on the success of Brief Encounter and realeased in May 1947, the Rachmaninov was produced in Kingsway Hall. Like anyone else, Joyce had her off-days: 'her opening solo full of wrong notes,' Wood complained after she'd played it with him. 'We never want her again. No good in concertos.' Here, however, is a completely natural, spontaneously flowing performance - confident, lyrical and dazzlingly articulate (the fluent wrist action and easy chordal and octave repetitions - for example, the triplets at 5'36" of the Moderato and the brisk but unflustered alla marcia at 6'32", always a testing moment - are a delight to the ear). Joyce shows style, imposingly riding the climaxes, judging contrasts and grading her rubato to a nicety (her cadential cessations and resumptions of tempo, moderate rather than extreme, are sensitively eloquent), concerned always with lacing a beautiful sound (the expanding C major halo at 9'17" [fig 15]). True, compared with the composer's own, more urgently passionate, recording under Stokowski, she's slower (33'10" against 30'44" [the 1929 Victor version]), her smaller hands roll the opening chords, she understates the subsidiary textures, she finds less mystery in the oriental arabesque of the finale. No matter. Unsentimentally supported by Leinsdorf (her exact contemporary), this is a keenly competitive account, the young Malcolm Arnold's searing trumpet in the first movement (6'24") and his spotlit offbeat interjections at 1'38" of the last giving added pleasure.

Michael J. Dutton's digital remastering is to his usual, impeccable standards. But a query (unaddressed in Lyndon Jenkins's brief biographical notes). When precisely was the Rachmaninov recorded? The inlay card gives July 9th 1946: the day before, with a solo filler, is documented in Philip Stuart's London Philharmonic Discography (Westport CT: 1997).

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