Chanteurs de Noël

The two piano pieces in the first half of the concert are seasonally close to the Christmas songs around them and geographically not too remote either. It is worth a diversion to St Petersburg to hear even a short piece by Lyapunov, whose vast snd highly acconmplished repertoire of piano music is neglected even in Russia – largely, one suspects, because of its formidable technical demands. From Fêtes de Noël, one of Lyapunov’s less demanding collections, Chanteurs de Noël echoes the bells, the voices and the joyful spirit of a popular Russian Christmas celebration. Looking forward to Christmas in much the same way as the traditional turkey, it seems, the spruce is represented in Granen, one of the tree studies that make up Sibelius’s Five Pieces Op.75, by a melancholy waltz.

The first entry of the saxophone clecisively, though only temporarily, changes the direction of the programme. Restoring the word “arabesque” to its original meaning, Ingvar Lidholm draws his linear design through a variety of exotic inflectios which most effectively contribute to sustaining the interest of curvaceous melody set round a contrastingly animated middle section. With his Variations on the Sussex Carol, the Swedish jazz composer Nils Lindberg returns to material (“On Christmas night all Christians sing”) featured also in his highly successful Christmas Cantata. In another jazz musician’s Christmas inspiration, Thad Jones spontaneously contrives to combine the blues idiom with the radiance associated with the words “A child is born.”

After awarding himself a seasonal indulgence – taking the two middle movements out of Prokofiev’s Flute or Violin Sonata in D, reversing their order and arranging them for saxophone – Anders Paulsson presents his last contribution, his own arrangement of the lovely Basque carol Gabriel’s Message (“The angel Gabriel from heaven came”), as an artful and timely transition to the Spanish songs at the end of the programme.