This delightful and moving disc offers a whole sequence of orchestral works which for whatever reason Howells hid from the world. Only since his death have such pieces as these emerged, and one can only marvel that so accomplished and imaginative a writer for the orchestra should have let any of them be buried. One reason he was shy about offering such music for performance was that it often involved such deeply personal feelings. One remembers his reluctance even to allow the most ambitious of his works, the Hymnus Paradisi, to be performed, and here the two concertante works for cello similarly reflect Howells’s anguish over the death of his ten-year-old son. He wrote the longer and more complex of the two, the Fantasia, in 1936-7, when he was still in deep mourning, and though the predominant mood is elegiac, with occasional echoes of the Elgar Cello Concerto, there are understandable flashes of violence and anger.
The Threnody was sketched rather earlier, and Howells completed the short score with piano accompaniment in 1935 as his first task after his son’s death. Probably planned as the slow movement of a three-movement cello concerto, it is given here in the orchestration made by Christopher Palmer for the Howells centenary concert in 1992. More direct in style and structure, it is an effective pendant to the Fantasia, with the two movements together forming a rhapsodic concerto lasting almost half an hour. Whether or not Howells would have wanted to add a vigorous movement to the two elegiac ones, it is good to have such a substantial piece added to the repertory.
The other major piece is the Pastoral Rhapsody, written earlier in 1923 and more conventionally English except for a radiant climax with anglicized echoes of Daphnis and Petrushka. In his note Lewis Foreman speculates that Howells may have let the piece be forgotten after a couple of performances, feeling that Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony was too close a model. In fact the Rhapsody is totally distinct, and so is the Paradise Rondel, named after a Cotswold village, a generally vigorous movement dating from 1925, which over a shorter span is full of sharp contrasts, including one passage (track 2, at 6'10'') which in its addition of a piano offers clear echoes of the “Russian Dance” from Petrushka.
The collection opens with the boldly extrovert King’s Herald, bright with Waltonian fanfares. Drawn from a brass band piece of 1934, it was arranged for orchestra as a Coronation offering in 1937. Procession, which closes the sequence, is the earliest work here, adapted from a piano piece written in 1920, and in this orchestration of 1922 brings more echoes of Petrushka, again reflecting Howells’s response to appearances in London by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Helped by rich, atmospheric sound, Richard Hickox draws performances both brilliant and warmly persuasive from the LSO, with Moray Welsh a movingly expressive soloist in the concertante works.'