Bax
Elegiac Trio
Alwyn
Naïades
Crépuscule
Two Folk Tunes
Rawsthorne
Suite for Viola, Flute and Harp
Malcolm Lipkin
Trio for Flute, Viola and Harp
Paul Patterson
Canonic Lullaby
Paul Lewis
Divertimento
Aurora Trio
Emma Halnan Flute
Jordan Sian Viola
Heather Wright Harp
EM Records EMR CD069
Full price
The Review
The collection, taking its overall title from William Alwyn’s Crépuscule, covers exactly a century of composition for this rarefied group of instruments (sometimes minus the viola): from Arnold Bax’s very Ravelian Elegiac Trio from 1916 to Paul Patterson’s engaging Canonic Lullaby from 2016, which was premiered by Halnan and Wright in this version (flute replacing oboe).
As so often, the EM label has done the composers huge service because all the works except those by Bax, Rawsthorne and the first of the Alwyn set are first recordings.
The members of the Aurora trio champion the music with elegance and intelligent attention to detail without being fussy. Heather Wright’s harp tends to be the predominant sound, its resonance putting the flute and viola into supporting roles now and then, but the harp is very much the leading attraction in these works, so this is hardly a drawback.
Much of the music is amiable; this combination of instruments is hard to make sound harsh but Alan Rawsthorne’s suite from 1968 has a go at giving them some grit without being too aggressive. The same is true of Malcolm Lipkin’s 1982 trio, perhaps the most substantial work on the disc. Lipkin died in 2017 at the age of eighty-five and his music has been unfairly neglected, partly because in his twenties he failed to follow the serialist path while simultaneously being too musically strenuous to appeal to the easy-listening tonalists. His style has something in common with his near contemporary, Thea Musgrave, to my ears.
Paul Lewis was born a decade after Lipkin and his Divertimento is from a decade later too. Now in his late seventies, he writes delightful music, even if it seems extracted from the film and television themes at which he is so proficient. The Divertimento would go well with a little romance, perhaps in Deauville. Nothing wrong with that.
SM