Enterprising Recordings Music for piano and orchestra reviewed by PATRIC STANDFORD Kleos    KL5137

The conductor Kirk Trevor seems to be associated with an increasing number of very enterprising recordings. In partnership with the New York pianist Joshua Pierce on this disc he directs attractive performances of two brief and well crafted English gems for piano and strings.

Gerald Finzi's plans for a piano concerto in 1928 came to a halt, partly because the first movement, a Grand Fantasia, failed to receive much encouragement from colleagues (Vaughan Williams didn't like it) and a third movement gave him so much trouble that it was eventually abandoned. The slow movement, written the following year, became the posthumous Eclogue, an exquisite evocation of the Gloucestershire countryside he loved [listen -- track 14, 0:00-1:31].

A decade later the young Benjamin Britten began a temporary emigration west at the onset of war, travelling with Peter Pears to New York through Canada, but leaving his other inamorato Wulff, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen, in Cambridge. Wulff was the subject of Young Apollo, an eight-minute 'fanfare' for piano, string quartet and strings, disguised in the programme notes with quotations from Keats' Hyperion which describes Apollo's beauty, 'golden tresses' and 'limbs Celestial'. Britten gave the first performance in Toronto with the CBC Symphony in August 1939, after which he withdrew the piece, and it was not to be heard again until after his death. A pity, for it is a fascinating balance of direct pianism and inventive string colours -- his Frank Bridge Variations had emerged two years earlier, giving his remarkable imagination great confidence with the strings [listen -- track 1, 2:20-3:42].

Milhaud's Le Carnaval d'Aix is great fun. It is an exuberant reworking for piano and orchestra of music from his ballet Salade, a wonderful concoction for instruments and voices created for Diaghilev in 1924 and based on old Italian pieces and some Sardinian folk music [listen -- track 3, 0:00-1:13].

Joshua Pierce also takes the piano part in the far less boisterous and, after Milhaud, positively dignified suite Le bourgeois gentilhomme by Richard Strauss, colourful and orchestrally well controlled and performed with, among others, a strong trombone player [listen -- track 17, 0:00-1:10].

For help listening to the sound extracts here, please refer to our questions & answers page.

Record Box is Music & Vision's regular series of shorter CD reviews