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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
January 8, 2011
At first glance, the title of Eugene Dowling's CD, whose reissue was being celebrated on Saturday night, might give one pause: why The English Tuba?
One reason, as it transpires, might well be the fact that English composers, from the beginning of the Twentieth Century, were particularly inventive in their use of the orchestral tuba. And the reason for this was the great English brass band tradition, which produced considerable numbers of exceptional euphonium players.
Yet the tuba had to wait for its first (and, as many would still maintain, greatest) concerto until 1954 and the Golden Jubilee of the London Symphony Orchestra; it was for this event that the greatest living English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, then in his eighty-third year, was commissioned to write a concerto for Philip Catelinet, the orchestra's principal.
The result, born of considerable study of the instrument and its potentialities, is a glorious work, "nearer to the Bach form than to that of the Viennese School" to quote the composer.
Eugen Dowling and accompanist Charlotte Hale opened their recital with the concerto in a performance which combined the lyrical and the athletic in almost equal measure.
The opening movement shows off the instrument's lumbering agility, with some extremely tricky passages involving huge leaps and rapidfire notes as well as a couple of extremely low notes which just might, perhaps, have been inspired by the Queen Mary entering harbour. Dowling rose to the technical challenge with aplomb, almost making it seem easy.
The Romanza (a favourite title for Vaughan Williams) is RVW in his best folk-inspired mood and was given a gorgeously lyrical performance, before the gloriously jolly finale, in which, it has been said, the "tuba romps...like Falstaff among the fairies in Windsor Forest"; it certainly did here.
While Vaughan Williams's music is hardly what one might call pianistic Hale accompanied so stylishly as almost to make one forget the fact that the orchestra was absent.
Vaughan Williams's Studies in English Folk Song date from 1926 and were originally composed for cello and piano, although there are also versions for violin, viola, clarinet and bassoon.
And, of course, euphonium, which was the way Dowling played them on Saturday.
The first five studies are all slow in tempo and summoned forth from Dowling a palette of fine, sustained, lyrical tone colours and from Hale crystalline, delicate traceries of sound.
From the opening notes (unaccompanied) of the opening adagio, based on the melody "Lovely on the Water" (which I first encountered almost forty years ago on an LP by the English folk group Steeleye Span) I was entranced. I almost think I preferred it to the cello original.
The last piece in the first half was the Air and Variations movement from Handel's Harpsichord Suite No.5, HWV430, known as "The Harmonious Blacksmith".
An early music purist would have doubtless been incensed by this "lèse-majesté" (I can just imagine MiV's James Young saying "you do realise that Handel probably wouldn't even have expected it to be played on an instrument tuned to equal temperament?") but there seemed few, if any, of these present in the hall. For the rest of us, Dowling's unassuming, yet dazzling, virtuosity was sufficient; as was his elegant playing, as authentic as can be, considering that the music was composed over a century before the tuba was invented.
The second half opened with the final transcription of the evening, Elgar's Romance, Op.62. Originally for bassoon and orchestra, this short work was composed between two of Elgar's greatest masterpieces: the violin concerto and the second symphony.
Elgar authority Michael Kennedy has remarked of the work that it portrays the bassoon not, as is so often the case, as a comedian but rather as a poet and singer.
Playing a euphonium (the French tuba on which he had recorded the work having been destroyed in a fire some years ago) Dowling fulfilled both these roles perfectly, with a delectable tone and a marvellously idiomatic sense of true Elgarian rubato.
Sir Malcolm Arnold's Fantasy for Tuba dates from 1969 and is the eighth in a series of a dozen instrumental fantasies. It was the only unaccompanied work on the programme and turned out to be a brilliant exercise in monophonic composition. Dowling's playing was equally brilliant, with very well observed dynamics.
Gordon Jacob's Tuba Suite, from 1972, was originally written with orchestral accompaniment, but the piano version is the composer's own.
The work's eight short movements utilise dance forms and their titles are redolent of suites from the eighteenth century (hornpipe, saraband, bourée).
The music, which could easily have been composed half a century earlier, alternately beguiles and enlivens. I particularly enjoyed the work's opening, delicate right hand piano chords leading to a serene melody for the tuba; the bourrée, as close to spikiness as Jacob ever gets; the decidedly non-Chopinesque mazurka, with its amusingly abrupt end. All exceptionally well played.
In fact, upon reflection, I particularly enjoyed every minute of it.
In case I haven't made it sufficiently clear, pianist Hale was the perfect foil for Dowling's virtuosity and lyricism; one would never have imagined that they are not a regular duo.
In sum, this was a wonderful, expectation-confounding evening and a great way to start the musical year.
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