Jon Lord - Concerto For Group And Orchestra (2012)

This is the now the third recording of the Concerto, following the 1969 premiere release (originally Harvest, subsequently on DVD) and the 1999 revival of the reconstructed lost score with the LSO (Spitfire). Recorded in Liverpool and London last year, this revised version of the score – the outer movements are shorter and the feel of this studio performance a touch less rock‘n’roll-y – was the last major project Lord worked on before his death in July.
In my college in 1969 the verdict was clear. The rock cognoscenti (who smoked strong cigarettes and at that time preferred their music to be from the West Coast of America) said it didn’t rock; the classical cognoscenti wouldn’t dream of listening to anything with a rock group’s name attached to it. Forty-three years down the line, the piece sounds lovable and punchy: Lord puts the two parts of his musical life into one frame – at first as rival opponents of the same musical material and then (after two conciliatory vocal passages in the second movement) coming to work together. The ‘classical’ side is dominated by his abiding affection for Sibelius – the melodic and formal homages to the Fifth Symphony are less quotations than wish-fulfilling attempts to write the piece again himself. The ‘rock’ side has plenty of the jazzy Hammond organ boogie in which Lord himself specialised and the blistering Fender Stratocaster solos of (originally) Ritchie Blackmore and here Darin Vasilev.

The Concerto crossover elements were influential in the rock world (hear Paul Buckmaster’s string arrangements for Elton John and the Rolling Stones’ ‘Moonlight Mile’, the Robert Plant/Jimmy Page ‘Kashmir’ on ‘No Quarter’ or Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Pictures at an Exhibition). It still entertains, should get a more sympathetic hearing across the board today from our media-opened ears and, like several of Lord’s pieces reviewed in Gramophone, could make a successful return to the Royal Albert Hall in the Proms. And, guys of yesteryear, the guitar solos do rock, although I miss Ritchie Blackmore’s no-holds-barred Jeff Beck-style playing of them. As with the various versions of The Who’s Tommy, this might be a case, pace Lord’s retouchings, of the original-instrument version (conducted by Malcolm Arnold) still being the best performance.