GRAMOPHONE Review: Bennett & Duke Violin Concertos – Chloë Hanslip, Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Litton
The great practitioners of Broadway and Hollywood – composers, arrangers, orchestrators – spawned catalogues of what might be considered more ‘legitimate’ music that the world rarely saw or heard. Broadway’s ‘Music Man’ Meredith Wilson’s symphonies, Hitchcock’s Bernard Herrmann’s operas – and the figures featured here: Robert Russell Bennett whose orchestrations enhanced the tunes of Rodgers, Kern and Gershwin in wonderful ways; and Vernon Duke whose songs became jazz standards and whose previous life as Vladimir Alexandrovich Dukelsky was everything the name might suggest in terms of the company he kept.
Hats off, then, to Andrew Litton and Chloë Hanslip for exhuming these prime examples of their concert repertoire and bringing them so vigorously to life here. Robert Russell Bennett’s Violin Concerto is a breezy and boisterous affair where syncopation rules and the soaring lyricism of his great collaborators is more than a little evident in his own prowess as a tunesmith. Songful and playful, there’s even a hint of Percy Grainger in the jauntiness of the opening movement. I love the variety in the invention (the soloist entering over a timpani tattoo) not least the soulful Hebraic heart of the movement. Interesting that no less than Leonard Bernstein was scheduled to conduct it in 1944 – a moment that could have changed the course of the work’s fortunes but was scuppered by Bernstein’s senior Artur Rodzinski who took over the concert.
The central Andante of the concerto has Americana written all over it, its main theme having something of the Spiritual about it. There’s a whirlwind scherzo (rollocking horns in evidence) and a kindred finale all of it brilliantly despatched by Hanslip and Litton whose Singapore Symphony have been well versed in the swaggering ways of American popular culture.
Hanslip and Litton also pair up in chamber mode for Bennett’s Hexapoda a suite of jazzy and bluesy – and jivy – sweetmeats.
Impressively, Hanslip catches the essence of a very different personality in the Duke concerto (a work, by the way, much admired by Serge Koussevitsky). There is no escaping the sensibility of Duke’s friend Serge Prokofiev in the pages of his concerto. That lush and harmonically decadent lyricism is unmistakable, as is the work’s rhapsodic quality (the first movement cadenza really does sound like a spontaneous improvisation). The finale’s Theme and Variations (a form much loved by Prokofiev) is showy but cerebral. Smashing disc.
