Premiere Recordings of Vaughan Williams Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra and Mathias Piano Concertos 1 and 2 – Ulster Orchestra

“Exploration of Vaughan Williams’s early work continues with 1896′s Fantasia. Mark Bebbington plays it brilliantly and enjoys the virtuosity. Does it sound like the VW we know ? I’d say the virility, expansiveness and drama are typical of him.”

4****

Michael Kennedy, The Sunday Telegraph, October 16th, 2011

“Begun in 1896 and, it appears, never performed prior to this recording, Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia for piano and orchestra is an unexpectedly confident debut, with a variety of contrasting subjects and a solo part that gives Mark Bebbington plenty of opportunity to show his mettle.
The spikier, cleaner, more neo-classical ethos of William Mathias makes an interesting foil. The Second Piano Concerto (1961), juxtaposing pastoral lyricism and dance-like energy, clearly shows Mathias’s debt to Tippett but is a highly attractive piece, orchestrated with panache. The First Concerto, composed in 1955 when Mathias was still a student, is in some ways tighter and more Bartokian. Bebbington does both composers proud on this excellent disc.

BBC Music Magazine 4****

December, 2011

“Vaughan Williams’ early Fantasia may get top billing on the sleeve of this fascinating Somm anthology of world premiere recordings, but it’s the first two of William Mathias’s three piano concertos that keep drawing me back for more.

The First Concerto in particular is a formidably confident effort for someone barely out of his teens. Mathias wrote it in 1955 while he was still an undergraduate at Aberystwyth University – and it so impressed the external examiner, Edmund Rubbra, that he promptly awarded its youthful creator a First Class Honors degree. Despite a clutch of performances following its May 1957 public premiere in London, Mathias subsequently elected to withdraw the work; however, shortly before his untimely death in 1992 at the age of 57, he had a change of heart and provisionally sanctioned its publication (taking the opportunity to insist upon some minor revisions).

It’s heard here in a new edition by Dr Rhiannon Mathias (the composer’s daughter, who also pens the useful annotation) and Geraint Lewis. There are three movements. A satisfyingly taut opening Allegro and notably sinewy finale flank the Bartókian Lento centerpiece, which manages to distil both lofty eloquence and enviable concentration.

By contrast, the Second Concerto (written for the 1961 Llandaff Festival) wears a more lyrically effusive and poetic demeanor, allied to a natural flair and extrovert ebullience that sweep all before it. It’s a hugely endearing, big-hearted creation, approachable without being facile, and would surely go down a storm at the Proms (the same applies to Mathias’s exhilarating First Symphony of 1966, with which it shares many a stylistic trait).

Vaughan Williams began work on his Fantasia for piano and orchestra in October 1896, eventually completing it over five years later in February 1902. Further revisions followed in June and October 1904, all of which suggests (as Michael Kennedy sagely opines in the booklet) that the composer took a special interest in it. One even begins to speculate whether an intended performance fell through – or did the appearance of Delius’s Piano Concerto (another single-movement canvas, and one which held a fascination for a number of British composers, among them VW and Moeran) cause the budding composer to consign the piece to the bottom drawer?

Cast in six interlinked sections, the Fantasia (the manuscript of which has been edited by Graham Parlett) emerges as a 21-minute work of generous spirit and no mean craft. Thematically, the music falls some way short of distinction but nonetheless contains plenty of fascinating pre-echoes of achievements to come (notably Toward the Unknown Region) and also betrays the influence of Stanford, VW’s teacher at the Royal College of Music in London (beam to the jig-like passage beginning at 14’31”).

Suffice it to report, Somm stalwart Mark Bebbington responds with some scintillating and deft pianism, while George Vass ensures that the Ulster Orchestra is on its toes throughout. Really truthful sound, too (in Belfast’s Ulster Hall); full-bodied, wholly natural in timbre and always musically balanced. No doubt about it: this beautifully presented release warrants a very strong recommendation.”

The Classical Review – January, 2012

Andrew Achenbach

“A late developer, Vaughan Williams took many years to ‘find’ his voice, and this, it could fairly be said, emerged with the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending before the First World War, after he had finally assimilated the influences of Parry, Elgar and Wagner. This early Fantasia for piano and orchestra (edited by Graham Parlett), written in a one-movement form, uncannily anticipates the series of Cobbett ‘phantasy’ works yet to be composed. Begun in October 1896, though not finished until 1902 (and even later revised)…..it is a work of late-Romanticism and provides fascinating glimpses into a future world with its spacious diatonic melodies.

The two Mathias piano concertos, performed here with great sensitivity by Mark Bebbington, also provide an important commentary on the Welsh composer’s early development and maturity between 1955 and 1961. The First Concerto was written when the composer was only 20 and reveals a fascinatingly wiry, ascerbic mindset which the composer largely jettisoned in his later style. With a greater sense of direction, the four-movement Second Concerto is at once more characteristic of Mathias’s individual chemistry of lyricism, mysticism, neo-romanticism and neo-classicism. It is a work full of imaginative, well-contrasted ideas and rich orchestration.”

Jeremy Dibble – Gramophone Magazine, December 2011

“Mark Bebbington continues to go where other pianists have yet to tread with this enterprising disc of works for piano and orchestra written half a century apart. It might seem surprising, in view of the success his Third Piano Concerto (1968) once enjoyed, that William Mathias’s earlier such works are only now receiving their first recording. The composer was barely out of his teens when a reduction of his First Piano Concerto (1955) impressed no less an external examiner than Edmund Rubbra and, though the piece went unheard for over 50 years, its combining of a lively harmonic sense with a lucidly neo-classical structure explains why Mathias was pondering its rehabilitation before his untimely death in 1992. Whether in the first movement’s interplay of energy and lyricism, the Lento’s skilful interweaving of soloist and orchestra on the way to its powerful climax, or the finale’s incisive and at times martial progress, this remains an apprentice work of some quality.

That said, the Second Piano Concerto (1960) is assuredly the work of a more experienced composer and one wonders just how many performances it has had since its premiere five decades ago. Tippett is a pervasive yet never inhibiting presence on an opening movement whose deftly elaborated melodies and intricate figuration place a premium on the parity of soloist and orchestra, though this is hardly to deny the quicksilver brilliance of the ensuing scherzo or the expressive potency of a slow movement which builds in a curve of heightening intensity; one which is brusquely curtailed to set in motion a finale whose moto perpetuo demeanour persists through a number of reminiscenses to earlier ideas (not least the eloquent ‘motto’ which opened the whole work) before culminating in an effervescent coda. Its successor may have brought the composer even greater success, but the present work may well represent Mathias’s contribution to the genre at its most distinctive.

Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia for piano and orchestra makes a thought-provoking coupling. Worked on between 1896 and 1902, revised two years later yet seemingly never performed, this is but the latest instance of those large-scale works from the composer’s formative years that he chose not to release, yet there is little to fault in the relationship between soloist and orchestra: the former’s role as commandingly conceived as the latter’s is assured in its ranging from chamber-like intimacy to imposing rhetoric. Ostensibly in six sections, the piece might be heard as a ‘three movements in one’ design as well as, more compellingly, a sequence of variations (so placing it in a notable line of British concertante works extending from Field to Birtwistle) on the hymn-like melody which follows the powerful introduction – with a brief though demanding cadenza prior to the unequivocal close. Whatever Vaughan Williams’s reservations, its revival could not be more welcome.

All three works benefit from the sensitive virtuosity that informed Bebbington’s earlier discs of British music, with the Ulster Orchestra giving of its best under the attentive guidance of George Vass. Clear and immediate sound, with informative notes by Michael Kennedy and Rhiannon Mathias, enhances a most desirable release.”

Richard Whitehouse

International Record Review November 2011

“Ralph Vaughan Williams withdrew most of the large-scale works he wrote before the first world war, but thanks to his late widow Ursula, who lifted his ban, they are gradually being revealed today, including his Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, rescued by Mark Bebbington and recorded here for the first time. Dating from his student days in 1896, it offers fascinating glimpses of his influences and clearly points the way towards the greatness that was to come. It joins another student work, William Mathias’s wonderfully angular first piano concerto, in a striking performance which, coupled with the second from 1961, brings an unjustly neglected composer back into the limelight.”
The Observer, Sunday 2 October 2011

Stephen Pritchard, The Observer, Sunday 2 October 2011

“William Mathias’s first two piano concertos are followed by Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra. Somm gives us the first recording of each and they benefit from the combined talents of Mark Bebbington, George Vass and the Ulster Orchestra… The performances from all concerned are splendid – Messrs Bebbington and Vass are seasoned practitioners of music’s worthwhile byways – and the recording is beautifully clear and truthfully balanced. A feather in Somm’s cap for this release.”
Full review on Classical Source