Britain's William Alwyn is often classed as a neo-Romantic traditionalist; the booklet for this Naxos disc likens him to the roughly contemporary American Samuel Barber. But this collection of chamber music and songs, most of it never recorded before, reveals a somewhat different Alwyn -- not a modernist surely, but a composer who was aware that Stravinsky and even serialism existed, and who forged an economical new language in a traditionally expressive, tonal idiom in response. From start to finish, this music doesn't ...
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Britain's William Alwyn is often classed as a neo-Romantic traditionalist; the booklet for this Naxos disc likens him to the roughly contemporary American Samuel Barber. But this collection of chamber music and songs, most of it never recorded before, reveals a somewhat different Alwyn -- not a modernist surely, but a composer who was aware that Stravinsky and even serialism existed, and who forged an economical new language in a traditionally expressive, tonal idiom in response. From start to finish, this music doesn't sound much like Barber or anyone else, and the disc marks a major accomplishment for Naxos' ongoing series devoted to British music of the twentieth century. Alwyn comes closest to pure late Romanticism in the songs, where compactness is a given. All the music, though, even the more extended Rhapsody for piano quartet and Ballade for viola and piano, is compact, built carefully from themes that are at once highly expressive and rather abstract in shape. The Sonatina for violin and piano...
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