Sadly, the composer John Foulds (1880-1939) is mainly remembered — when he is remembered at all — for his contributions to that regrettable little genre known as "British Light Music." Who would have guessed that in addition to crowd-pleasing, pastoral ditties, Foulds also wrote some remarkably progressive, innovative, and frankly ass-kicking stuff. Thankfully, Sakari Oramo and his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra have taken up the music of John Foulds as a cause of sorts recently, and their previous CD unearthing this neglected composer's revelatory Three Mantras was clearly more than just a flash in the pan.
Their new John Foulds recording features a piano concerto titled Dynamic Triptych, and if you heard this piece during a "blindfold test," you might think you were listening to the best damn thing the over-performed, over-celebrated (and arguably overrated) neo-romantic-post-minimalist composer John Adams ever wrote.
You would then be shocked to learn that this piece was actually written about 75 years ago by this "no-name" British composer who was way ahead of his time in his explorations of Asian music, microtones, and mysticism. Foulds was also a bit of a nut job who believed he possessed psychic powers and claimed that his music was often dictated to him by spirits. Well, whatever he was doing, it worked.
Triptych is action-packed, varied, arresting, and yes, "dynamic." The first movement brims with dazzling, shimmering pianistic and orchestral pyrotechnics reminiscent of Scriabin, Prokofiev, Poulenc and perhaps even Cecil Taylor with surging, goosebump-inducing climaxes and swirling modal scales. The mysterious second movement is meditative yet restless, and includes some strange and startling sliding string glissandi, while the final movement is propulsive, rhythmic, and almost jazzy, sounding like a wild hybrid of Bartok and Gershwin at times.
It's astonishing to me that this exciting and entirely appealing work has languished unrecorded and unperformed for so many decades. Cheers to Sakari Oramo (and the formidable pianist Peter Donohoe) for resurrecting it... and on a widely distributed "major label" release, no less!
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1 - Connie Phillips
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