Championing A Maverick

It is a little ironic that one of the final ventures of the Warner Classics label, before Warner pulled the plug and abandoned any new recordings, was the exploration of little known 20th century British composer John Foulds. Championed by conductor Sakari Oramo, two disks were released of which this is the second. Oramo conducts the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in five pieces, the most substantial of which is Dynamic Triptych for piano and orchestra, a kind of piano concerto played here by Peter Donohue. Foulds was a maverick character who lived a colourful much travelled life and suffered an untimely death from cholera as a result of his travels in India. His works covered a wide range from an interest in orientalism, to a feeling for British folk music, to a more bland and accessible kind of light music. Dynamic Triptych is recognisably a work of the first half of the 20th century. Written in 1931, it is coming out of the same sound world as a Shostakovich or Prokofiev might have inhabited. Donohue plays with verve and committment. April - England is more akin to contemporaries like Bax and Moeran with a melodic, dare I say pastoral, feel. Music - Pictures Group III is one of those works coming from the light music direction and as such sounds more dated and anchored to a particular time and place. Two short pieces close the disk, The Song Of Ram Dass which aims at an Indian style but ends up more in the Rimsky-Korsakov / Borodin area of orientalism ( none the worse for that ) and Keltic Lament which could almost be a traditional Scottish folk tune. A very interesting character but once the novelty of the rediscovery has worn off, I think the consensus must still be that he is ultimately a minor figure.