New Releases (details)

Sir Lennox Berkeley
(England, 1903–1989)
Symphony No. 1
Serenade in Four Movements

Michael Berkeley
(England, b. 1948)
Concerto for Horn and String Orchestra
(revised version, 1994) premiere recording
Coronach

One of Lennox Berkeley’s best-known works is the Serenade for strings, which he composed in 1938 and 1939. It shared its first performance with Britten’s Les Illuminations. This was a significant juxtaposition as Berkeley had had a close personal and professional relationship with Britten, and the Serenade shows the influence of Britten’s brilliant writing for strings as well as his firmly tonal musical language.

Berkeley’s Symphony No. 1 represents an unusual mingling of traditions. For much of its length it employs the texture and language of French neoclassicism: melodies with repeated accompanying patterns and firm bass lines interspersed with episodes built up in counterpoint, and clear key centres – often including the ‘blue-note’ or flattened thirds of jazz – and harmonically ambiguous passages.

Michael Berkeley, Lennox Berkeley’s eldest son, followed in his father’s footsteps to become one of the leading British composers of his generation. He began writing in a conservative, tonal idiom, but by the late 1980s, against the grain of the times, his musical language became tougher, with a higher level of dissonance and a frequent use of loosely co-ordinated textures.

His Concerto for Horn and String Orchestra in effect straddles this transition and the composer considers that the work belongs to a group of works in which he has explored ‘the complex emotions of grief: the rage and the anger, as well as the sadness’. Another such work is Coronach, which is Scottish Gaelic for ‘funeral dirge’. The single movement piece includes quotations for the tragic Scottish ballad ‘The Bonny Earl o’ Moray’.