BBC Legends BBCL 4192-2, 73:32 (Distrib. Koch) ****:
Recordings late in the career of French horn virtuoso extraordinaire Dennis Brain (1921-1957) live from the BBC, featuring work recorded 1953-1957, the Fricker Quintet performance coming a mere week (24 August 1957) before Brain’s untimely death in an automobile accident. The disc opens with two works given 30 July 1953 at Royal Albert Hall: the Mozart Third Concerto and the Britten Serenade. Though the acoustic is distant, the playing from Brain is never less than exemplary, especially in the extensive horn solos for the Britten Serenade, which still sound daring from a valveless horn. The setting of Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” with its Mahler-like horn postlude, remains quite unnerving. Pears always strikes me as a rather pinched voice in this high tessitura and semblance of parlando-sprechstimme, although his diction can be strong. The Ben Jonson setting, marked Presto e leggier, has quickly brilliant riffs from Brain to Pears’s patter. The Mozart is so accomplished that the music proceeds almost glibly, though we are always convinced the rendition represents the paragon of excellence.
The easy, rapturous performance of Schumann’s tender yet punishing Adagio and Allegro with Benjamin Britten derives from Aldeburgh 21 June 1956, the slow, long-held notes proving no sweat for Brain’s seamless style. The ensuing leaps and metric acrobatics pass off like so much florid exercise. Only two days prior, 19 June 1956 at the BBC Studios, Brain and his ensemble recorded the frisky Mozart Divertimento Allegro molto and Presto from the K. 270 Divertimento, rife with high energy and excellent sound. Stephen Waters’ clarinet really cooks, especially in the brief Presto. The Milhaud excerpt from the same session is the sixth movement from The Chimney of King Rene, Op. 205. Finally, the Fricker Quintet (1947), composed by a colleague of Dennis Brain at the RAF. The work starts slowly, but then each of its movements picks up momentum–rather chirpy in the first section–and becomes a quite spirited scherzando. Gareth Morris has plenty to do on flute, his part sounding a bit like the bird in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. A canonic set of five variations follows, then the Finale: Vivo, in a performance that must have set the composer’s mind at rest, knowing his work had enjoyed a definitive moment.
— Gary Lemco
