Finzi - Cello Concerto; Grand Fantasia and Toccata, etc

The Guardian 80

Watkins/Lortie/BBC SO/Davis
(Chandos)

Gerald Finzi’s Cello Concerto was his last completed work, first performed in 1955, a year before his death. It is also by a long way his most substantial orchestral score – Paul Watkins’ performance lasts 37 minutes – and for a composer whose output was so closely entwined with words and their setting, it is a rare extended essay in abstract musical thought. But after Elgar’s concerto, which it occasionally echoes,it ranks as one of the finest of all British works for cello and orchestra, standing alongside Bridge’s Oration and Britten’s Cello Symphony.

When he started writing the concerto in 1951, Finzi already knew he did not have long to live, and the wistful land of lost content that never seems too far away in any of his music certainly pervades this work.