The Verdict: One of the jewels in the crown of Naxos’s Alwyn series, featuring playing and engineering of exquisite allure, and expert annotations from Andrew Knowles. © Classic FM

…the Violin Concerto comes as a huge surprise. Three massive chords from the orchestra herald a scintillating annunciatory passage à la Walton, which contains the main motive of a marathon first movement. The violin enters with a Romantic, heroic part, essentially decorating and elaborating the basic idea, a rising and falling scalar fragment with a syncopated hiccup in it. Again, compared to the first piano concerto, the emotional depth astonishes. You have left a relatively safe port for the mighty ocean. Furthermore, Alwyn has begun to find a way to admit high Romantic elements into his 20th-century language, without succumbing to pastiche. It stands but little lower than the Elgar. If not one of the best concerti of all times and places, it’s certainly one of the very best produced in Modern Britain. For all the movement’s Tchaikovskian length, Alwyn keeps his architecture clear, with a strong first subject group and a lyrical second. The latter shows Alwyn’s great melodic gift, not often evident in the music he wrote up to this point. The passionate second movement takes off from Vaughan Williams’s pastoralism. We see here that although Alwyn hasn’t quite absorbed his influences, he does indeed live up to them. I suspect Vaughan Williams would have been proud to have acknowledged his descendent, had he ever heard the concerto.

The finale begins, not with fireworks, but with a warm, noble tune in the violin over a pizzicato bass. One goes through builds to various climaxes, only to fall back and begin again. The movement as a whole is notable for its lack of virtuoso flash, but in the last minute, Alwyn cannily begins to introduce it, just to prime the audience for thunderous applause. Nevertheless, the movement impresses more as a dialogue between soloist and orchestra than as display.

Alwyn’s Miss Julie, to the composer’s own strong libretto based on the Strindberg play, again is too good to ignore, although it has been. Alwyn’s knowledge of the main verismo operatic tradition, his interest in almost every musical strand of his time, and his superb dramatic sense, make this a member of a very small fraternity: a Great British Opera Not by Britten. There are memorable tunes, stunning set pieces, and again a sure dramatic sensibility that makes its points swiftly and economically. The two main influences are Puccini and, believe it or not, Berg, a composer Alwyn honored several times in his late music. Unlike both Britten and Tippett, one doesn’t get a dramatic distance through stylization. Like Puccini, Alwyn plunges in to the action fully committed, although unlike Puccini, he has a more sophisticated theater sensibility, necessary for Strindberg. The music is simply too good to lose, and the composer’s widow commissioned Philip Lane to extract an orchestral suite from the opera. He uses mainly three scenes: the party in the kitchen where Miss Juliemore....

Review By Ronald E. Grames ,Fanfare,September 2011

As many collectors will know, David Lloyd-Jones has been recording the orchestral works of Alwyn for Naxos, having completed the symphonies plus several concertos and shorter orchestral works. In general, Lloyd-Jones has been brisker and cooler, with somewhat less rhythmic abandon and tempo contrast. This approach often highlights the formal strength and expert construction of these works. That is certainly true in the concerto, where the tempos are faster, quite decidedly so in the central Allegretto e semplice movement. Here listeners may prefer Hickox and Mordkovitch, who weave a nocturnal rhapsody of unearthly beauty. Nevertheless, Lloyd-Jones and Lorraine McAslan, two-and-one-half minutes quicker at 9:30, are closer on average to an allegretto. The movement is wistful and reminiscent of a Tudor fantasia at this tempo, and the poise and artlessness of McAslan’s playing is touching in its own right.

There is little to choose in the opening Allegro ma non troppo. Both performances are powerful and responsive to the tunefulness, demonstrating Alwyn’s genius for sentiment without sentimentality. The last movement may find the earlier preference reversed. Complex and potentially episodic, it begins in a noble English style reminiscent of Elgar, but is soon coyly elusive, then clever and humorous, almost folkish. The usually peerless Hickox leaves a few less-than-seamless transitions in his quest for characterization, while Lloyd-Jones persuades us that the final movement, for all its fanfares and virtuosic flourishes, is structured all of a piece.

Soloist Lorraine McAslan was for two short years the first violinist of the Maggini String Quartet. Oddly, her biography in the booklet makes no mention of that fact. Her solo work in that ensemble’s recordings of Alwyn’s quartets (Fanfare 32:6) was one of the reasons for my enthusiasm for that release. I am pleased that while she appears to have turned her back on the quartet to return to a solo career, she has not done so to Alwyn. While not as warm in tone as Mordkovitch on Chandos, perhaps in part because she is recorded rather closely, she is every bit as effective at weaving Awlyn’s rhapsodic spells within Lloyd-Jones’s more objective framework.

I have left myself but little space to comment on the other two works, which is unfair. Philip Lane’s suite from Alwyn’s last opera, Miss Julie, commissioned by Alwyn’s second wife, Mary (aka composer Doreen Carwithen), capsulizes the decadence and hopelessness in the composer’s masterly adaptation of Strindberg’s play with selected music that is lively, sinister, and in the end harrowing. This is the only recording of the nearly 20-minute suite, though the superb complete recording of the opera is still available on Lyrita. Lloyd-Jones’s performance of the 1958 Fanfare for a Joyful Occasion for brass and percussion is marginally preferable to the only other, Hickox’s rather droll rendition, because he presents it with a lighter hand. Admittedly more....

Review By Paulino Toribio,Ritmo,September 2011

Nacido en Northmapton en 1905, estudio en la Royal School of Music de Londres y a la edad de veintiun anos fue profesor de composicion en la misma institucion. Escribio cerca de trescientas obras de todo tipo de genero musical, opera, ballet, musica de camara, instrumental, lieder, musica para peliculas, de las que llego a realizar unas doscientas, musica para radio y television, etc.

Alwyn’s Violin Concerto is a Cinderella among his larger works. Henry Wood wanted it performed in the 1943 Proms season, the BBC didn’t, and after a single private performance with Alwyn himself accompanying in a violin-and-piano arrangement, he never heard his Concerto again. Although this is its second recording, it still has not been publicly performed. Much of it certainly isn’t vintage Alwyn: as ever, the craftsmanship and technique are superbly sure, but compared to the haunting and beautiful central Alllegretto e semplice, the outer movements lack the composer’s characteristic sharp-focus individuality. Lorraine McAslan makes a convincing case for the work: fearsome weight of tone is not her style, but she has bravura and accuracy to spare and her musicianship’s brand of the thoughtful loveliness suits the slow movement beautifully.

Of the two other works, the Fanfare of 1964 is an unmemorable creation for brass and percussion. Much more interesting is Philip Lane’s selection of music from the August Strindberg-based opera Miss Julie, completed in 1976. The idiom here is sharply dramatic, with brilliantly focused contrasts of tone and mood, showcasing Alwyn’s Prokofiev-like virtuoso conjuring with waltz and polka dance-rhythms. David Lloyd-Jones and the RLPO respond in suitably vivid style.