Perhaps it’s inevitable, but the current emphasis on promoting the work of female composers tends to focus on those working today, while a whole generation of female composers, born in the decade or so before the first world war, is consistently ignored. The most notable of those figures were Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens and Priaulx Rainier (who was born in South Africa, but lived in Britain for most of her life). And of that trio perhaps the most egregiously overlooked has been Lutyens, who was the first British composer to adopt 12-note technique, and who in the middle decades of the 20th century was arguably the most radical composer working in Britain.
Though Lutyens’s music was often dismissed in her lifetime, it has been quite scandalously overlooked since her death in 1983 at the age of 76. Her output was enormous – more than 150 opus numbers, not including her numerous scores for film and television – and relatively little of it is available on disc. But Martin Jones’s survey of the piano music – in meticulous, clearly affectionate performances – should fill at least one of the yawning gaps. He begins with the pieces Lutyens composed in the last years of her life, between 1972 and 1981. Two are sets of miniatures: the Seven Preludes Op 126, each with a title taken from John Keats, and the Five Impromptus Op 116, all of them tightly organised and laconic, sometimes recalling Debussy and Messiaen, sometimes Webern.
Their terseness contrasts sharply with the steady unfolding of the earliest piece here, Plenum I, and with the expansive, almost rhapsodic flourishes and echoing silences of the longest, The Great Seas. But moments of silence infiltrate that work, and they take on almost a structural role in Lutyens’ final work for piano, La Natura dell’Acqua, completed two years before her death; everything is pared right down, sometimes to a single, eloquently unadorned line.
This week’s other pick
The acerbic Lutyens was also responsible for coining the phrase “cowpat music” to describe the work of a previous generation of British composers, with their “folky-wolky melodies on the cor anglais”. Several of those who fell into her cowpat category are represented in Nicholas Daniel and the Doric String Quartet’s collection of British oboe quintets for Chandos, all of them originally composed or arranged for the peerless oboist Léon Goossens. Even if the Delius arrangements and the Vaughan Williams Folksong Studies are pretty insubstantial, Daniel’s creamy tone and unfailingly elegant phrasing are beautifully matched to all this music, and he and the Doric make strong cases for at least three of the works here – the quintets by Bax and Bliss, and Finzi’s beautiful Interlude.
