Frank Bridge
(1879-1941) is one of those composers whom people may know better today as the
teacher of Benjamin Britten than as a leading exponent of the British pastoral
movement of the early twentieth century.
Be that as it may,
Bridge followed a career in Romanticism until the First World War changed his
disposition and outlook on music. From rich, flowing, descriptive tone poems
his music took a turn toward harsher, more dissonant, more modern paths, and
subsequently his popularity declined. Critics nowadays tend to praise his
later, more-mature works, but that may be a reaction against Romanticism
itself, which is only just beginning to make a comeback in contemporary
classical music. Like it or not, however, it is Bridge’s early work that
continues to sell and, I assume, to give people pleasure.
This Naxos disc brings together three of the composer’s
best-known tone poems, The Sea, Enter Spring, and Summer, and it adds a couple of brief Poems for Orchestra, based on short poems by Richard Jeffries, for
good measure.
While all of the music is delightful, the highlight of the
disc is The Sea, sounding for all the
world like Debussy’s La Mer. I
suppose you could say of the early Bridge that he was England’s answer to
France’s Debussy and Ravel, weaving intricate little tapestries of light and
color, musical portraits that impressionistically and expressionistically touch
the heart and soul. For instance, he divides The Sea into four movements--“Seascape,” “Sea-Foam,” “Moonlight,”
and “Storm”--all of them pretty much self-explanatory. If you like the descriptive qualities of La Mer, you’ll like The Sea, which Bridge wrote just a few
years after Debussy wrote La Mer, and
it must have influenced him.
Maestro James Judd
presents each of the pieces fluidly and meaningfully, never stopping to linger
too long for sentimental reasons yet never relegating the music to the
tired-warhorse bin, either. It’s a nice, forthright approach that captures most
of the beauty and charm of Bridge’s work.
There are two
“however’s,” though. The first “however” is that this Naxos release goes
head-to-head with the justly famous 1975 recording of much the same material by
Sir Charles Groves on EMI, which to my ears is more transparent sonically and
more idiomatic interpretively. Moreover, the EMI disc contains not only The Sea, Enter Spring, and Summer,
but the tone poems Cherry Ripe and Lament as well. The second “however”
concerns the counterarguments that the budget-priced Naxos disc is cheaper by a
couple of dollars than the mid-priced EMI disc, that the Naxos disc may be
easier to find, and that a lot people will prefer the slightly softer,
more-muted Naxos sound to the brighter, sharper-edged EMI sound.
In any case, a
person can’t go wrong with the Naxos disc. It’s beautiful music, and it’s
beautiful sound.
To hear a brief excerpt from this album, click here:
JJP
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