Concerto for Piano and Nine Instruments
Overture: Allegro
Intermede: Andante recitando - Allegro scherzando
Finale: Lugubre
Constant Lambert is remembered today for a variety of accomplishments - by those who knew him, as raconteur, wit, and brilliant practising musician, conductor, arranger and organiser; by those who did not, as a composer of erratic but distinctive genius, and - perhaps most especially - as the author of a spectacularly wrong-headed book on modern music between the wars called Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline.
His concerto being performed tonight was written in 1931 and dedicated to the memory of Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) who had died, supposedly by his own hand, the previous year.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the work's style is that it owes hardly anything to contemporary trends in the mainstream of English music (Vaughan Williams, Delius, Warlock himself). Instead it follows Walton's Façade and certain early works of Bliss in adopting a brisk, assured cosmopolitan style whose roots might be found in the Paris of the twenties and early thirties - the Paris of Les Six, of Stravinsky's early neo-classical works and Prokofiev's violent Second Symphony, of Ravel's sophisticated piano concertos with their borrowings from jazz and popular song. Lambert was particularly drawn to jazz, and his concert is dominated by its rhythms and harmonies. Its instrumentation - flute doubling piccolo, three clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), trumpet, trombone, an exotic percussion section, cello and bass - is Stravinskian.
The Concerto is quite a long work in three movements, though its resemblance to any classical prototype is largely coincidental. The first movement is built from a series of irregular rhythmic ostinati which grow, in a protean way, from the syncopated rocking motive of the opening bars. The piano part is percussive yet somehow winsome, and hardly ever silent, with a big solo cadenza as the movement's centrepiece. Much is made of the contrast between type of attack, and when lyricism intervenes, it is the mood rather than the material which changes.
This is not true of the Intermede. Here the opening is slow and expressive (though the piano's brief contribution is declamatory, even tragic - a reminder of the work's dedication). It is succeeded by a jagged scherzo with the same type of material as the first movement. The end is quiet, with a brief reference to the opening. In the finale, significantly marked "lugubre", the piano comes into its own as a vehicle for human feeling, though the musical content is still jazzy, Gershwinesque, revolving round the "pesante" main theme. The piano is given the last work, and the ending is, once again, soft and wistful.
© Oxford University Press
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