Humphrey Searle: Concertante for piano, percussion and strings (1954)

The new Lyrita (SRCD 407) release of British piano concertos includes a good cross section of works written between 1920 and 1959. Most of these pieces are premiere recordings of music which have slipped out of the repertoire. They include John Addison’s Wellington Suite (1959), Arthur Benjamin’s Concertino for piano and orchestra (1927), Elizabeth Maconchy’s Concertino for piano and orchestra (1949), Edmund Rubbra’s Nature Song for orchestra, organ and piano, (1920) and Geoffrey Bush’s A Little Concerto on themes of Thomas Arne for piano and orchestra (1939). 

My big discovery here was Humphrey Searle’s Concertante for piano, percussion and strings (1954). This short, but remarkable, work is “entry level” for the composer’s mature, serial style.

In his memoirs, Quadrille with a Raven (Chapter 11), Searle recalled that “I had been experimenting with some of the methods of Boulez and Nono but was brought back to my normal style by a demand from [the German conductor Hermann] Scherchen to write a short piece for piano, strings and percussion, "twelve-note but simple", to be played by students at a Jeunesses Musicales Festival in Donaueschingen. I wrote a Concertante…”

In the CD Liner notes, Paul Conway writes that: “The Concertante is a short piece, conceived in one, unbroken movement, divided into several smaller sections. After a brief, but imposing introduction for strings, punctuated by timpani, the energetic main Allegro gets underway. Considerable expressive variety is demanded from the players, an extended passage for woozy glissandos near the end of the piece being perhaps the most ear catching of several string effects. The piano writing is equally heterogeneous, and Searle finds room at the heart of his tightly written score for a modestly conceived, but judiciously placed mini cadenza.”

Searle’s Concertante was premiered by the French Youth Orchestra and Hermann Scherchen at the Jeunesses Musicales Festival in Donaueschingen, Germany during 1954. I was unable to find a review of this performance.