To try to say just what it is that makes English music sound English is, as with most investigations of "national character," to stroll on quicksand. Still, some elements seem relatively uncontroversial. A pastoral note echoes through England's music: "It's the landscape, stupid," as one writer puts it. So does a preference for straightforward utterance, including, at times, a kind of plain-spoken rapture. (Leave the embellishments to those precious continentals!) A tinge of nostalgia is often audible. And as Benjamin Britten said of Henry Purcell, there's a "peculiar genius" for expressing "the energy of English words."
Purcell and Britten were the chronological bookends of this week's nearly-all-English St. Paul Chamber Orchestra program, engagingly plotted and piloted by English oboist-turned-conductor Paul Goodwin. And if "English words" were lacking, energy was not. Opening the concert was a generous sampling of music from Purcell's "King Arthur" -- a 1691 "semi-opera," written with poet John Dryden -- that married grace with fire. The orchestra (not least its spiffy new timpani) sounded especially grand Thursday in the compact, bass-friendly precincts of Minneapolis' Temple Israel.
Textbook authors, those specialists in faint praise, describe William Boyce (1710-79) as the leading English composer between Purcell and Elgar. His Handel-like Symphony No. 5, though hardly a symphony in the familiar sense, is theatrical and ceremonial, its first movement more vivid than the dances that follow. Goodwin made the most of it.
Having touched down in the 18th century, the program sagely leapfrogged the 19th to focus on the middle decades of the 20th. Britten's late, little-heard "Suite on English Folk Tunes" (which, speaking of nostalgia, is subtitled "A Time There Was ...") was given a somber, arresting reading. In its shadowy final movement, the composer took a leaf from his friend Shostakovich; it's hard not to sense the approach of death in this music, made all the more haunting Thursday by Thomas Tempel's English horn solo.
The jury may still be out on Michael Tippett (1905-98), but his 1953 "Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli," to which Goodwin prefaced the Corelli concerto grosso it metabolizes, is a gem. Acutely aware of the work's baroque armature, the conductor captured its intense, idiosyncratic lyricism; the SPCO's strings swirled ecstatically.
Four movements of Edward Elgar's whimsical, wistful "Nursery" Suite (1931) made an irresistible finale; the Aubade, phrased with the subtle plasticity one hears in Elgar's own recordings, was a treat.
Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.
