Richard Harvey and his ‘Reflections for Viola’, this began life as Reflection on a Changing Landscape which was premiered by Chase as part of the Exeter Festival in 1990. The four movements are Awakening, Shadowplay, Borderlands and Remembrance.¶

Awakening reminds one of Hovhaness such is its delicacy and plangency. Here it is treated with great delicacy and whispered care. Richard's writing is like everything else here, written in the resilient melodic tonal mainstream that lived on through the ascendancy of more sterile styles. It is in the English pastoral mainstream, notwithstanding the reference to Hovhaness, or at least it is in Awakening where it attains real emotional voltage and swell. Shadowplay is wispily eerie and derives from music Richard wrote for the Granada TV series on Len Deighton's Game, Set and Match. Similarly inspired is the desolate meditation of Borderlands drawn forth by Ian Holm as Deighton's spy Bernard Samson. It moves from slow evolution to Glass-like propulsion at the close.¶

The final Remembrance movement does elegy and beauty so well. It starts elegiac and bids adieu in celebration - joy in the life of Richard Gregson-Williams, and the music ends with a few more glistening strokes and is a lovely piece and furnishes well rounded satisfaction with which to end this treasurable disc. Chase is the dedicatee alongside Richard Gregson-Williams, the one-time director of the Exeter Festival.¶

Arnold Bax, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Theodore Holland, Richard Harvey
Performer: Roger Chase
Conductor: Stephen Bell, Richard Harvey
Orchestra/Ensemble: BBC Concert Orchestra
Release Date: 01/08/2013

Dutton Laboratories/Vocalion
Catalog #:7295

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