COWEN Concertstück. SOMERVELL Normandy. Piano Concerto in a • Martin Roscoe (pn); Martyn Brabbins, cond; BBC Scottish SO • HYPERION CDA67387 (68:06)

I suppose I’m not giving away any secrets to note just how much fanciers of 19th-century piano concertos that lie outside the Grand Masterworks of Forever and Ever owe Hyperion for this and similar releases in its Romantic Piano Concerto series. It reaches its 54th entry with this album. Far from losing steam, it continues to unearth attractive works with enthusiasm.

Though forgotten today, Frederic Cowen (1852–1935) was a prime force in 19th-century British music before the arrival of Elgar. While his piano teachers included Julius Benedict, Ignaz Moscheles, and Carl Tausig, it was ultimately decided that Cowen’s compositional gifts (trained under Carl Reinecke and Friedrich Kiel) were superior. He also became Britain’s first important homegrown conductor. A sample of the latter can be heard in the 1916 recording of his own The Butterfly’s Ball (Dutton 9777), though the acoustic horn does little more than provide a general sense of lightness and control.

A piano concerto Cowen wrote at the age of 17 has been lost. This Concertstück appeared almost 30 years later, and was first performed in 1900 by Paderewski. The language is Liszt at his most public, with an emphasis on tone, glittering figures, and evenness of passagework. Cowen employed a single-movement structure whose thematic subsections derive from the work’s opening motif. It’s very good second-drawer concert music, unabashedly tuneful, elegantly orchestrated, sometimes clever in its transformative pulse, invariably fun to listen to.

Arthur Somervell (1863–1937) was born just over a decade after Cowen, but his training under Stanford and later at the Royal College of Music with Parry resulted in a more recognizably “modern” sound (though there is a short passage of harmonic audacity in Cowen’s Concertstück that glances at Debussy—before glancing off, again). His career was spent in civil administration, as first Inspector of Music and later Principal Inspector to the National Board of Education. He was an educational theorist of some influence, and both a friend and opponent of noted musico-folklorist Cecil Sharp. Like Sharp, he took an interest in folk songs as an important part of a culture’s oral tradition, and this factors into Normandy, composed in 1912.

The title of these ambitious symphonic variations (with an embedded four-movement symphonic structure in its roughly 21-minute length) refers to the Norman village of Varegeville-sur-Mer, where Somervell collected the song before World War I. Its short, repetitive structure and modal pull provided the composer with ample opportunity to run chaconne-like harmonic changes, and expand thematically. The results are convincing, though more on the level of individual variations than as a single work of cumulative effect.

Somervell’s Piano Concerto was first performed in 1921. Though referred to by the composer as the Highland Concerto, its themes are entirely original—or as original as themes can be when they resort to Scottish musical stereotypes, such as pentatonic scales, familiar vocal-based progressions, and an endless supply of Lombard snaps.

There’s little more than that in the Highland Concerto’s overlong first movement. Its Adagio, on the other hand, taps into a vein of poignant poetry that appears in Somervell’s A Shropshire Lad (Helios 55089) and fitfully in the Clarinet Quintet (Helios 55110). Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto is in the mix, but more in the writing for the piano than the orchestra, and the simple lyricism Somervell evidently sought to achieve inspired his best writing in the work. The finale is as vigorous and limited as the opening Allegro, but tighter in its writing, and both lighter and more delicate in its orchestration. It makes for pleasant listening, but that slow movement is really the concerto’s gem.

For Martin Roscoe’s varied touch, immaculate technique, and enthusiastic embrace of 19th-century theatrics, I tender full praise. He understands the secret of these pieces—that they are a collaborative effort between composer and performer, where the latter’s musical personality is as much the matter of the moment as the music itself. Martyn Brabbins’s usual combination of clarity, elegance, and balance are supplemented by a fine drive, and the BBC Scottish Orchestra reaffirms its status as one of Europe’s finest ensembles.

The sound is nicely managed, with the piano well forward tonally but in good relationship to the orchestra. In short, there’s much to enjoy on this release. Warmly recommended.

FANFARE: Barry Brenesal