Divertimento for chamber orchestra

Alan Rawsthorne was a much better composer than his reputation suggests even now, amid the publicity and the special efforts associated with the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The far more widespread and more intensive Tippett centenary celebrations earlier this year are just one example of how Rawsthorne has always been overshadowed by his contemporaries. Coming to composition fairly late, after abortive studies in dentistry and architecture, he was beginning to achieve prominence at much the same time as Tippett, also a late developer, and the precocious Benjamin Britten. In terms of reputation, William Walton, who was only three years older than Tippett and Rawsthorne, was a decade ahead of all three of them. While Walton, Tippett and Britten had the good fortune to outlive the tide of avant-garde criticism that washed through British musical life in the 1960s, Rawsthorne died when it was only just turning.

The Divertimento for chamber orchestra was written for Harry Blech and the London Mozart Players in 1962, right in the middle of the eighteen years he was to spend in the Essex countryside near Thaxted. A distinctive product of a particularly fruitful period in his career, it is beautifully written for an ensemble of flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings and at the same time perfectly proportioned to those small-scale orchestral forces. It begins modestly with little preamble and with a melody so unemphatically introduced on flute and strings that it seems almost too elusive to be the main theme of a rondo construction. But that (providing the composer’s Rondo heading is taken not too literally) is what it is. Although it is most effectively offset first by dark-tinged oscillating chords and later by a more dramatic melodic idea, that opening theme dominates much of the rest of the movement. It appears in all kinds of variants, motivates a finely engineered central climax, and gives way to a brief recall of the oscillating chords only just before the end.

The tenderly lyrical Lullaby is based on only one theme, the hesitant melody heard first on flute over a repeated pattern of gently dissonant string chords in the opening bars. It is spontaneously developed in the middle section, evolving into a tuneful waltz at one point, before the opening section is duly recalled. Similar in shape to the Lullaby but entirely different in character, the closing Jig enfolds a thoughtful episode for solo viola between vigorously rhythmic, brilliantly scored outer sections. The ending is accomplished with as little fuss as the opening of the work.

Gerald Larner ©2005