This release by British music specialist Mark Bebbington and the attractively named Orchestra of the Swan began as a recording of John Ireland's Piano Concerto, but the real news came with a suggestion from the British Library that an unfinished Bax manuscript in its possession, a Concertino for piano and orchestra of 1939, might be successfully completed and performed. The work, intended for Bax's champion and paramour Harriet Cohen, was apparently abandoned amid the breakup of British musical life that occurred in months ...
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This release by British music specialist Mark Bebbington and the attractively named Orchestra of the Swan began as a recording of John Ireland's Piano Concerto, but the real news came with a suggestion from the British Library that an unfinished Bax manuscript in its possession, a Concertino for piano and orchestra of 1939, might be successfully completed and performed. The work, intended for Bax's champion and paramour Harriet Cohen, was apparently abandoned amid the breakup of British musical life that occurred in months surrounding the outbreak of World War II. It was left in open score on two staves, with a fairly clear division between soloist and orchestra aided by some explicit notations. The orchestration and some details of the piano part have been left to arranger Graham Parlett, whose end product shows little sign of a struggle to grasp Bax's idiom. Though termed a concertino (and it's not exactly clear where this title originated), the work is larger in scope than the Ireland concerto, and...
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