David Lloyd-Jones - Constant Lambert: Piano Concerto, Symphonic Works (2005)

In the twenty first century it appears that as a composer, Constant Lambert has finally arrived. Lambert's countrymen have finally accepted that his idiosyncratic and jazzy scores of the 1920s constitute something unique in the British musical firmament as opposed to the prevailing view that Lambert was a sort of second-string William Walton who only realized his potential as a conductor. Hyperion's Lambert: Romeo and Juliet, Piano Concerto, featuring the English Northern Philharmonia under David Lloyd-Jones, is remarkable not so much as it contains premiere recordings of Lambert -- it does not -- as it presents second, and even third recordings of these works.

Although pianist David Owen Norris seems to have scooped Jonathan Plowright on getting the first recording of Lambert's 1924 Piano Concerto onto disc, Plowright was the first to perform the work in public after its 1988 realization by Edward Shipley and Giles Easterbrook and it is valuable to have Plowright's interpretation on disc at last. This is the main highlight of the Hyperion disc; this concerto is an extraordinarily moving and colorful piece, and Plowright devotes a great deal of care and sensitivity to its performance. The rest of the disc, including The Bird Actors Overture, the orchestral version of Lambert's tribute to black vaudeville star Florence Mills (Elegiac Blues), and the one-act ballet Prize Fight, is expertly, but at times rather listlessly rendered by Lloyd-Jones. One would like a bit more drama and punch in the one-act ballet Prize Fight; it seems to hang in mid-air at points, whereas a sharper delineation in the conducting may have helped it achieve more of a sense of forward motion. Romeo and Juliet, one of Lambert's greatest works, is played with precision rather than enthusiasm, whereas the partial performance on ASV by Barry Wordsworth and the complete one by John Lanchbery for Chandos are a bit more pointed in their presentation and are more exciting. The reverberant recording, made at Clothworker's Hall at the University of Leeds, might partly be to blame, sapping some of the snap from the orchestra, but Lloyd-Jones clearly takes a more "classic" and less rhythmically driven view of this music.

Nonetheless, it is nice to have all of these important works in one place, and as an introduction to what makes Constant Lambert's music so vital and engaging, Hyperion's Lambert: Romeo and Juliet, Piano Concerto is fully serviceable.