John Ireland's Unique Piano Style

To round out March, here's a post about a rather unusual British composer.  John Ireland developed along very different lines from some of the other British musicians I love, but his music is still both pleasant and thoughtful -- well worth anyone's time.  The key difference is that Ireland was greatly attracted to the music of the French Impressionist composers Debussy and Ravel, and therefore managed to create a kind of English equivalent of the style.  The closest English equivalent is probably in the Pastoral Symphony (# 3) by Vaughan Williams, which remained unique in its creator's output.

John Lenehan has recorded several discs of Ireland's piano output, central to his list of compositions, on the Naxos label, and I'm looking forward to sampling them.  The recording at hand is another one, featuring Ireland's music for piano and orchestra.  The key work is the Piano Concerto, followed by a symphonic poem for piano and orchestra entitled simply Legend.  Both works are rhapsodic in style, rather than following the kind of cogent structural thinking of the German symphonic tradition.  The Concerto is the more lively piece, while Legend is dark, brooding, and full of dramatic intensity.

The next major work is the First Rhapsody, a large-scale early piece which echoes the big piano sound and structure of Brahms and Liszt.  Then come a series of smaller characteristic pieces for piano, a genre which Ireland made his own.  The early composition entitled Pastoral suggests exactly the atmosphere which the name evokes.  A later piece, Indian Summer, breathes the same air.  A three-movement suite for piano entitled A Sea Idyll, and a collection of Three Dances round out this musical portrait of a unique composer.  All are played with exemplary care and insight by John Lenehan and the recorded sound is very truthful.  In the concertante works he is joined by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by John Wilson.

Every lover of good piano music should investigate this album, and then perhaps go on (as I am going on) to dig into some of Lenehan's other Ireland releases in this Naxos series.