Sawyers Symphony No 4. Hommage to Kandinsky BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Kenneth Woods Nimbus Alliance F NI6405 (65’ • DDD)
Like all great symphonists, Philip Sawyers approaches symphonic form from a different direction in each work. Nos 1 (2004; 2/11) and 3 (2015; 10/17 and my selection for Critics’ Choice that year) followed the four standard movements – though with vastly different expressive trajectories – while the Second was a shorter, compelling single-movement design (2008; 10/14). The eagerly awaited Fourth (2018) is in three, structured not unlike Bruckner’s Ninth (or even Harold Truscott’s solitary Symphony): a highly dramatic opening Moderato in B flat followed by a fleet-footed Presto scherzo in F which reworks – even reinvents – material from the first span, and a sombre but ultimately luminous and serene concluding Adagio in D minor, again with thematic cross-connections to the preceding movements (and some other Sawyers scores). Just as vital to the musical and expressive flow, however, is his orchestration, beautifully realised here by the BBC NOW and Sawyers’s champion, Kenneth Woods.
Kandinsky’s “Composition IV” first ‘heard’ in bar 5 of the piece
One of the works alluded to in the Symphony’s finale is the symphonic poem Hommage to Kandinsky (2014), dedicated to David Lockington, who commissioned and recorded the First Symphony. Hommage to Kandinsky is a terrifically vivid and, again, brilliantly orchestrated score, a response to Sawyers’s late-burgeoning appreciation of Kandinsky’s paintings – some of which, of course, bear musical titles. While the focus is on Kandinsky’s art as a whole, the composer acknowledges that the artist’s Composition IV (1911) provided the initial impetus. The performance is again wonderfully realised, the orchestra relishing the many opportunities to shine. Praise, too, for the technical engineering by Simon Fox-Gál.
Guy Rickards
Recent Comments