This release presents music by a pair of composers whose reputations have been on the rise in Britain and are starting to show up more often elsewhere as well. It was not so much the jazz element in the music of Malcolm Arnold and Constant Lambert that led to the disfavor with which these piano works met after World War II, as Robert Matthew-Walker argues in his booklet notes. What really raised the ire of modernists was that both composers dared to write music that was fun. The connections between the two composers, about ...
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This release presents music by a pair of composers whose reputations have been on the rise in Britain and are starting to show up more often elsewhere as well. It was not so much the jazz element in the music of Malcolm Arnold and Constant Lambert that led to the disfavor with which these piano works met after World War II, as Robert Matthew-Walker argues in his booklet notes. What really raised the ire of modernists was that both composers dared to write music that was fun. The connections between the two composers, about half a generation apart, are nicely sketched out by Matthew-Walker, and they result in more than just a highly individualistic treatment of conventional tonality and a continuing openness to Gershwin's influence. There's a rapid-fire shift of perspectives, a sort of stylistically careening quality, that's common to the music here, but in neither case does that mean the loss of intellectual rigor and an underlying sober quality. Consider the Lambert Suite in 3 Movements (and note that...
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