United Kingdom Various: Nicholas Daniel (oboe), Catherine Milledge (piano). Dora Stoutzker Hall, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 10.10.2025. (GPu)
Britten – Six Metamorphoses after Ovid
Edmund Rubbra – Oboe Sonata in C major
Reena Esmail – Two Movements (‘Dirgh’ & ‘Kapalbhati’) from Pranayam
Adolphe Deslandres – Introduction and Polonaise
Nicholas Daniel is not only the UK’s finest oboist, but he is also – as this recital demonstrated – an exceptionally lucid and witty speaker, his comments on the pieces he played repeatedly proving to be a joy in themselves.
He playfully suggested to the audience that Britten’s suite for unaccompanied oboe carried ‘one of the most cumbersome titles in the history of music’. He prefaced each of the six pieces by a short account of the relevant narrative details in Ovid’s great poem, one of the most important classical influences on the visual arts, literature and music of Western culture. Britten’s Six Metamorphoses (1951) was the third and last of his contributions to the repertoire for the oboe, following Two Insect Pieces (1935) and Temporal Variations (1936). This musical response to Ovid is the best and most musically substantial of the three works, and the one that best employs the possibilities of the instrument.
Pan, half-goat and half-man was a sexual predator, usually said to have been fathered by Hermes on a nymph (possibly Dryope). Syrinx flees Pan until she is on the brink of a river; where she pleads for the assistance of the water nymphs; just in time, they transform her into a cluster of reeds, which Pan seizes. In breathing a kiss onto the reeds he produces a musical sound. Thus was born the pan pipes. Britten wasn’t, of course, the first twentieth-century composer to be fascinated by this story (cf. Debussy’s 1913 Syrinx 1918 and Carl Nielsen’s Pan and Syrinx), but this is the most succinct and successful musical narrative. In the final section Britten’s account is vivid and, though aurally mimetic at times, is never merely onomatopoeic. Elsewhere in the suite the quasi-cinematic pictures in Britten’s music, such as Phaeton’s turbulent ride across the heavens and its fatal conclusion by the intervention of an angry Helios, the glittering water of the fountain into which Arethusa is transformed, or, especially subtle, was the echoing sounds in the story of Narcissus, surely intended as a representation of the importance of Narcissus’s fascination with his own watery image. All passages such as these were delineated to perfection in this performance.
For Edward Rubbra’s Oboe Sonata (1958), Daniel was joined by Catherine Milledge, a fine young pianist who teaches at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Rubbra seems to me to be a seriously underrated composer. This Oboe Sonata was premiered in 1958 (the year of its composition), the oboist being Evelyn Rothwell (later Evelyn Barbirolli), with the composer at the piano. It is a concise piece; the first movement, in perfectly proportioned ternary form, is decidedly brief (a mere 142 bars). The essentially ‘romantic’ form was presented with great clarity by Daniel and Milledge, revelling in its many harmonic changes and progressions. The central slow movement carries the title ‘Elegy’ and, indeed, begins with a rather plaintive theme (heard first from the oboe and then on the piano). Again, there are some unexpected and sophisticated harmonic twists and turns in this movement, which were well handled by Daniel and Milledge. The closing movement contains a very rapid section, and a particularly engaging passage in which a lyrical theme in the oboe is set against rapidly ascending thirds in the piano. This is, in short, an inventive and imaginative work which, like its composer deserves to be better known. Nicholas Daniel’s introduction to the Edmund Rubbra Oboe Sonata speculated that the slow movement reflected Rubbra’s interest in Buddhist thought. Without being wilfully eccentric, Rubbra the composer went his own way. Along with Buddhism, Rubbra’s interests included Taoism and the work of Teilhard de Chardin (to whom his Symphony No.8 was dedicated). He seems never to have felt himself to be a disciple of any English composer, though he had a book published on Holst in 1947, with whom he had studied as a young man, and it is perhaps with Holst that his work has a particular affinity.
These two works, by Britten and Rubbra were, for me, the most rewarding in this concert programme. That is not to denigrate the other two works played – Reena Esmail’s ‘Two Movements from Pranayam’ and Adolphe Deslandres’s ‘Introduction and Allegro’. In the context created by Britten’s Six Metamorphoses and Rubbra’s Oboe Sonata both seemed rather slight, for different reasons. The work by Deslandres was written as a competition piece for the Paris Conservatoire. It is, for my taste at any rate, over-concerned to challenge the performer’s technique, rather than interested in larger musical qualities. Where Esmail’s Pranayam (2022) is concerned the fact that the original consists of five pieces, of which we heard only two, perhaps explains my feeling that it was a little lightweight. It was one of a number of works commissioned by the International Double Reed Society (of which Nicholas Daniel is a senior member) on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. When it was pointed out that in the half-century of its existence, the society had only ever commissioned works from white men, it was agreed that the anniversary should be marked by the commissioning of 50 works exclusively from women of colour.
Esmail (b.1983) is of Indian descent, but resident in Los Angeles. Her website contains a note on Pranayam, which explains that ‘Pranayam is a suite of short encounters with different types of active breath […] Each movement is based on a specific breath pattern commonly used in yoga practice … Dirgh is a three-part inhale, expanding the belly, diaphragm and chest in succession. Kapalbhati is the ‘skull-shining breath’, made up of short sharp exhales interspersed with moments of suspension’. While aware of some of this, it would have been far more rewarding to have heard all five sections of the suite; this would, I suspect, have made it clear that Pranayam is far from being a slight work.
Overall, however, this was an excellent concert, with much beautiful playing by Nicholas Daniel and some accomplished and well-judged contributions by Catherine Milledge in the works by Rubbra and Deslandres.
Glyn Pursglove