Recording of the Week, Orchestral Works by Dorothy Howell

It was back in 2019 that Dorothy Howell first flashed onto my radar, thanks to Rumon Gamba's second volume of British tone-poems on Chandos. About half an hour into the programme, I encountered a piece which stopped me in my tracks: with its imaginative orchestration and vivid musical story-telling, the Birmingham-born composer’s Lamia (based on Keats’s poem of the same name) cast such a potent spell that I hit Pause and set about trying to track down more of Howell’s orchestral music for future listening.

But five years ago, the cupboard was almost entirely bare. Barring a recording of the one-movement Piano Concerto from Danny Driver, the BBC Scottish Symphony and Rebecca Miller, the Howell discography was limited to a smattering of solo piano and chamber works – although the Birmingham City Council website (of all places) indicated that Howell had composed several more orchestral works after the premiere of Lamia at the 1919 Proms catapulted her into the limelight at just 21.

Happily, Howell’s life and work have come into sharper focus in the intervening years, partly thanks to the advocacy of writer Leah Broad (whose group biography Quartet interweaves her story with those of Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Doreen Carwithen) and partly due to the efforts of Miller herself, who was the driving force behind the world premiere recordings of four enormously attractive orchestral works (released on Signum today).

As preparation for recording the Piano Concerto, Miller visited Howell’s niece and nephew at the family home in Worcestershire where she was presented with several manuscripts which ‘just jumped off the page to her’ – and her enthusiasm for these brilliantly orchestrated, characterful pieces is writ large in every phrase.

First up is the deliciously quirky Humoresque, which began life as a piano piece: Howell performed it at her London debut as a pianist in 1919, and subsequently orchestrated it in the wake of Lamia’s success. Full of rhythmic vitality and off-beat instrumental colours (it opens with the piquant combination of bassoon and tambourine), it’s suffused with a Franco-Spanish flavour which rather put me in mind of Ibert or Chabrier and makes for a perfect curtain-raiser.

Spanish accents also abound in The Rock from 1928, the biggest surprise to me on the album: anticipating something craggy and brooding, I was greeted instead by a glittering, sunlit depiction of Gibraltar (which Howell had visited with her mother some years previously) complete with evocations of braying donkeys, the calls of street-traders plying their wares and the songs of goat-herders – all brilliantly portrayed by the BBC Concert Orchestra’s woodwinds and underpinned with Hispanic dance-rhythms which really swagger and swing under Miller’s direction.

The Three Divertissements which follow were to receive their premiere at the 1940 Proms, but didn’t see the light of day for another decade after the season was curtailed by the threat of bombing raids. Howell’s predilection for castanets and tambourines is again very much to the fore in the jaunty opening number, but it was the sombre central movement which lingered longest in my memory: this is perhaps the most introspective music on the album, with some gorgeous sepia colours from low woodwind and harp and just a hint of Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead coming through in meter and orchestration.

Lamia receives another welcome outing, with Miller’s acute ear for balance and some superb engineering revealing the wealth of detail which caught the ear of Henry Wood, who conducted the premiere and requested exclusive rights on the score for a year afterwards. The flutes which depict the snake-goddess at the opening intertwine to suitably sinuous effect, and the love-theme (initially introduced by the oboe) builds to an unabashedly erotic climax – heady stuff from a convent-schooled young woman in 1919 who was chaperoned by a relative throughout her studies in London.

The album closes with the 1921 ballet Koong Shee, inspired by a story depicted on willow-pattern china and tepidly received during Howell’s lifetime (partly because it was only ever presented as a concert-work). Again, Howell’s gift for painting vivid pictures in sound and crafting a compelling musical narrative is entirely compelling on its own terms – but let’s hope it finally gets a fully-staged outing soon...