Boyce: 8 Symphonies - The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock

William Boyce
8 Symphonies
Trevor Pinnock, The English Concert
Archiv 419 631-2

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William Boyce's eight Symphonys (to follow his own spelling) are not symphonies in the modern sense but a collection, issued for concert use, of overtures he had composed over a period of nearly 20 years for theatre pieces and court odes. They represent English eighteenth-century music at its excellent and unpretentious best, notably in their formal unorthodoxy. There are brisk little binary allegros, French overtures (with a marked English, or Italian, accent), fugues that cheerfully stop being fugal then as like as not start again, middle movements with a curiously naïve, rural tunefulness (or airiness, as Boyce's contemporaries might have put it), and sturdy dance movements, often with happy touches of English eccentricity to their lines. And there are movements that can't readily be pigeon-holed, so individual are they. Sometimes you may be reminded of Handel, for example by the trumpets-and-drums opening movement of No. 5 in D, which hints at the Fire works Music; but this piece was written in 1739, nearly a decade earlier. Boyce is wholly himself.

The performances here, the first on record to use period instruments, are a delight—cleanly articulated, decisive in rhythm, just in tempo. The French overture-like movements that open Nos. 6 and 7 are crisp and brilliant; the more Italianate first movements, like those of Nos. 2 and 4, have a splendid swing. And the tone of gentle melancholy behind the fine, expansive D minor first movement of No. 8 is particularly well caught. (The finale here, a gavotte with two variations—one with a moving bass part, the other with violin triplets—does have Handelian echoes, especially of the Op. 3 No. 2 Concerto.) Three of the symphonies have middle movements marked Vivace, which often leads conductors into unsuitably quick tempos; but Pinnock obviously knows that, in eighteenth-century England, Vivace meant a speed not much above Andante, and for once these movements make proper sense: they are lively, to be sure, but not fast. But it was a mistake to play the repeats in the slow movement of No. I as flute solos (admirably though they are done)—there is no authority for this and the effect is foreign to orchestral music. At one or two points, for example the fugal music in the first movement of No. 3, more shapely bass playing would have given the music a firmer sense of direction.

This recording, however, comfortably surpasses any rivals in terms both of style and accomplishment; and the sound of the modest-sized band (strings 4.4.2.2.1) is brightly and truly reproduced.

S.S., Gramophone Magazine 1987